MONTREAL (CUP) – Two years ago, 16-year-old Adam Maler and 20 friends made their hardcore hockey-watching habit even more interesting: they started a pool in which each participant bet $20 on a dream team of players they draft over the Internet. At the end of the season, the person whose team had scored the most points won the pot.

Maler said he joins the yearly pool for entertainment as much as for the potential gain.

“It’s not just because I can win nearly $400. I also do it for fun and for bragging rights,” he admitted.

Maler and his friends represent a growing number of minors who gamble through online casinos and sports-betting sites, both for fun and for money.

But McGill Educational and Counseling Psychology professors Jeffrey Derevensky and Rina Gupta are not sure these games are such innocent pastimes.

Derevensky and Gupta have been researching youth gambling for 11 years, and are currently working on a study that will examine youth Internet gambling and attempt to create a profile of online gamblers.

Derevensky and Gupta plan to interview 2,500 Montreal-area teens, as well as 1,000 adults. They will question their subjects through Web sites they have set up to establish how online gambling habits in teens develop into serious addictions in university-aged adults.

Some studies have suggested that 18- to 25-year-olds have a higher rate of online gambling problems.

“Now if that’s true, those problems had to come from somewhere,” said Derevensky.

In past studies, it has been found that 55 per cent of youth aged 10 to 17 participate in real gambling. Of those, 13 per cent have a gambling addiction-twice the rate of adult gamblers.

Derevensky and Gupta have found that, contrary to popular opinion, money is not the only explanation for youth gambling.

“The three predominant reasons all adolescents report gambling are for the excitement it brings, for enjoyment and to win money,” said a September press release on the study.

While the professors haven’t yet determined how many young people gamble over the Internet for money, Derevensky said they had a fairly good idea of how many minors gamble for fun, using virtual money.

“It becomes more serious when they start to use real money,” he said.

Maler admitted that gambling for cash is more of a thrill.

“Gambling is more exciting when I know I could win money,” Maler said.

Gupta worries that it is becoming too easy for youth to gamble for money online.

“One of our big concerns is that you may no longer need a credit card. If a kid finds a way to circumvent that, and poses as someone else by using an online bank account instead, that’s where real problems can arise,” she said.

Like most students interviewed by The Daily, Jonathan Hiltz, a science student, does not think online gambling is an issue.

“Well, I don’t do it, and I don’t know anyone who does. I don’t think it’s a big problem,” he said.

But another student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, disagreed.

“Gambling is not something most people would admit to doing.”

The few statistics available on Internet gambling show that the convenience and anonymity of virtual casinos are enticing to some adults between 18 and 25.

A study conducted by Anca Ialomiteanu and Edward M. Adlaf of U of T’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, found that 4.4 per cent of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 gambled online in 2000.

But because Internet gambling is a relatively new phenomenon, researchers do not yet know how many gamblers are playing excessively. One thing that is certain is that the numbers are on the rise, according to Monique Cote, a counsellor with a provincial help line for online gambling.

“Over the past eight years, the number of calls we received from troubled internet gamblers has doubled,” she said.

Online gambling is illegal in Canada under the Criminal Code. But that doesn’t stop Canadians from playing at more than 2,000 foreign-based gambling Web sites.

“The Internet in general is something legislators need to look at regulating,” said Gupta. “But yes, definitely, we want to make sure legislators protect kids from gambling on the Internet.”

Gupta and Derevensky expect to release their study’s preliminary results by May 2004.