Poker prodigy: Jason Strasser plays the odds from his dorm room

Jon Gardiner

Jason Strasser knows what you're thinking. Here's a kid who has made a name for himself in the world of online poker, betting and winning and turning a one-time hobby into a steady source of income. Surely he must be oily or addicted or, at the very least, living in squalor while tapping away unblinking at his computer in the dark, alone.

Well, his dorm room isn't a picture of orderliness, but the other stereotypes don't apply to junior Strasser, a biomedical and electrical-engineering major with an easy smile, a quick wit, and a brilliant analytical mind. "If you tell someone you like to play bridge, that's okay, but as soon as you tell them you play poker, they immediately think you're a gambler," says Strasser, a lanky guy who shows up for a 3:00 p.m. interview shortly after waking up for the day. (He doesn't have classes on Thursdays, and, lest you think he was betting hands until dawn, he assures us he got to bed at the reasonable-for-a-college-student time of 2:00 a.m.)

"I can't blame them," he continues. "Some of the shadiest people in the world play poker. But I tell people to keep an open mind. I treat this as just another game I play. I like that you can apply mathematical and logical concepts to poker to improve your chances and understanding of the game, but you've also got the added element of luck. That's what keeps it interesting for me." Amid online poker players with names like Greasy Tony, theguzzler, and horribilis, Strasser's online names are relatively tame: strassa2 and Shavlick (an intentionally misspelled, self-deprecating reference to a column Strasser wrote last fall for the Duke Chronicle criticizing basketball player Shavlik Randolph that generated massive amounts of hate mail from Blue Devil loyalists).

Strasser, the only son of journalists Joyce Barnathan and Steven Strasser (his sister is a first-year student at Oberlin College), was born in New York but grew up in Hong Kong, where his mother and father were on the staffs of Newsweek and Business Week, respectively. The family moved back to New York when Strasser was in the ninth grade. In high school he played on the basketball and baseball teams and chose Duke over Johns Hopkins and Cornell universities because of the curriculum and faculty at the Pratt School of Engineering.

In his first year at Duke, he happened to meet a few classmates on his hall who dabbled in online poker. Strasser and a friend, Brandon Wise, also a junior, both put in $50 "just to mess around" in a $20 buy-in tournament. Strasser scored 1,000, and, while Wise decided to stop there, Strasser was hooked and funneled his $500 winnings right back into more bets (one memorable evening, he recalls, was winning $17,000 in a PartyPoker.com Monday night tournament).

He now plays a few hours every day--not as often during midterms and exams--and a bit more during school breaks and slower academic stretches. He's also begun traveling to national and international poker tournaments where he rubs elbows with professional players thirty and forty years his senior. To date, Strasser has earned six figures in winnings, including $13,500 at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas in January (he came in 40th). He's currently ranked 167th in the world.

On a warm spring day, Strasser hunkers down in his Wannamaker dorm room, which is decorated with movie and music posters and strewn with clothes, books, and half-empty Snapple bottles. The loft he and his roommate built ended up being too close to the ceiling, so their mattresses are arranged haphazardly on the floor. A guppy-filled aquarium bubbles away in the corner.

Strasser logs on to PartyPoker.com and puts his name on a waiting list to enter several No Limit Hold 'Em games already in progress; players come and go continuously, 24/7. He says he targets those games with the fewest players, "because that way I get to make more decisions. That's the hardest thing about playing live poker. You have to wait so long between hands."

Within minutes, Strasser has entered two games and then two more, so that he's playing four real-time games at once. The action is nonstop. On the screen, generic figures are seated around virtual poker tables, their online names designating the respective logged-on players. Each player is dealt two cards and places bets according to the strength of those cards.