Gil Spencer: Poker prodigy from Marple is only 18

Jordan Berkowitz, high school dropout, spendthrift and online-poker addict, is every mother’s nightmare.

Well, not every mother’s nightmare. Not his own mother’s.

Jordan admits the 100 hours a week he spends playing Texas hold ’em online does, at times, drive his mom a little nuts. Occasionally, Pagona Berkowitz will yell at her 18-year-old son to get some help.

"You’re an addict," she’ll say. "You should be going to Gambler’s Anonymous."

But then Jordan will win another tournament, like he did last Friday, and Pagona’s attitude will soften.

Forty grand -- $40,000! -- will do that to some parents. It would do it to this one.

Not so much because of the money, but because of what it represents.

Excellence.

Simply put, Jordan Berkowitz is a poker prodigy. He’s the LeBron James of the online Texas hold ’em world.

At 17, this dropout from Marple Newtown High School finished seventh in the 2004 World Championship of Online Poker. An incredible feat when you consider he was competing against hundreds of the best players on the planet, and he’d only been playing the game for 18 months.

It cost him $2,500 to buy into the WCOOP. For placing seventh, he won $72,000. Or, as Jordan puts it, "only $72,000." He believes he should have done better. That’s how the great ones think.

I met Jordan for the first time last week. I read about him in a magazine called Sync. It said he was "America’s Greatest Online Poker Player" and that he lived in Media. (Berkowitz lives in Marple Township.)

Imagine that!

I called his house. No answer. I drove over to see if he was home, and he was. He lives near Paxon Hollow Golf Course. I woke him out of a sound sleep by ringing his doorbell for about two minutes. It was 1:30 in the afternoon.

He said he’d gotten to bed at 5 a.m. after "working" for 60 straight hours.

"How’d you do?" I asked.

"Good," he replied.

He was a little groggy, standing there in a T-shirt and shorts, but very polite. We agreed to talk later. Much later, it turned out.

After a week of trying to get him to call me back, I stopped back at his house again Monday. I caught him before he’d had a chance to go to sleep. He invited me in, apologizing for the mess. His mom, a painting contractor, was in the process of having the house repainted. We sat down in the family room.

He explained that he didn’t drop out of high school "strictly to play poker" but that he had "pretty bad insomnia" and was bored with school.

His parents sent him to a regimented boarding school, hoping to get him back on track. But that didn’t work either. He hated it.

What he liked was a card game called Magic the Gathering. He was good at that, too -- good enough to travel the world, playing in tournaments at the age of 13.

"I was already missing school for Magic tournaments," Jordan explained.

It was playing Magic that he met Huey Jensen, another first-class card player out of Maryland, five years Jordan’s senior. It was Jensen who turned Jordan onto online poker and showed him the ropes.

What made poker more interesting than Magic?

"It’s more lucrative," says Jordan.

But there is a learning curve. It cost Jordan every cent he’d saved from his Magic winnings ($20,000 and then some) to learn to win at poker online. The "then some" came from his mother, who provided the credit card and was the beard for his play. After all, it isn’t technically legal for 16-year-olds to gamble thousands of dollars online in the United States.

Today, though, Jordan is finally legal, having turned 18 in January. He’s still in the process of putting all his playing accounts in his own name.

Jordan’s father, Jay Berkowitz, is a businessman from Havertown. Jordan talks about his dad with great affection.

"We’re best friends," he says. "We have a lot in common. He’s ambitious, street-smart. No college. He went into business with his brothers -- a paper-converting business -- and sold it (for millions.) He retired at 40.

"He’s awesome. He supports everything I do."

Having grown up in a well-off and well-traveled family, Jordan says he never had much regard for a dollar. Poker has made that worse.

He had amassed more than $200,000 last year before a recent losing skid took a bite out of that figure.

"I like to spend money on nice things," he says, "frivolous things."

Like the $40,000 black Infinity sedan he leased even before he got his driver’s license.

"Now I’m looking for something much more expensive."

He admits to being somewhat jaded.

"My perception of money is gone. It’s really far off. Different. It’s sort of corrupted me. No one my age (outside of a child actor) has earned as much as I have."

It’s a hoot to watch him do it.

More about that Friday.

Gil Spencer’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail gspencer@delcotimes.com.
©The Daily Times 2005