HS/College or new grads: How big is poker among young people?

[hanster]

ED,
This seems like a business questionnaire; do i smell something new coming [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]
Anyways, I hang out with a lot of poker players at UCLA. It's a big phenomenon, actually. There is no fading from what i am seeing, if not growing. There was some "freeroll" earlier this year (They said free tournament + prizes) and about 300 people showed up. A friend of mine decided to start a series of poker events, naming it Westwoood-SOP, or W-SOP, three years ago. The very first event we held then had 40 people (mostly strangers) showed up. This quarter the first event had 80 people, which was fairly large just by word of mouth on facebook. I think the percentage of people that know how to play poker is somewhere in the 80%.

a) UCLA is a fairly big campus (40k people+) and I have networked/met/know-the-face with only a small portion (probably somewhere around 1000 at most). Out of that sample, I would say ~15% play more than once a week in live/online. I know about 10 people that play all the time.
b) For the rest of the questions, I'm going to focus strictly on people that I know for sure about their results. (Because people like to brag/embellish their winnings.) Almost everyone that plays poker that I know are regularly winning/losing over $100 per sesh. $1g is somewhere 1/8th of the number of $100. $10g is almost unheard of except for one or two players. But if you count the people that go to Commerce or Morongo or Chumash once a month, it's fairly common to be up a grand or down a grand per session.
c) I know three people last year that made 100k from poker in the year 2006 and couple others that were really close to it. (The ones I know for sure. I've heard more but cannot confirm)
d) It's very interesting to see how friends have acted when they heard about how much their friend is making. Most of the successful people that I know don't talk about their winnings much outside of the poker circle; I'd like to think they're laying low and away from danger but that's just me thinking. There is this guy that always posts about how great of a session he's had and he seems to enjoy the attention he gets.
e) Yea the party crowd plays poker but sucks at it. (I suck at poker but i know when people are really bad). Athletes LOVE poker (and as you know sports is a big thing at UCLA.) I remember the first year some big black guy came in with his posse and is on the football team and we were kind of starstruck. A lot of Track athletes like to play poker as well.

Hopefully my input helps whatever you're looking for. If you want more details that I cannot disclose in public please feel free to PM me. I have a fairly good knowledge in terms of games on this campus. The state of poker? A serious friend just told me that the state of poker is dead. But for the casual players, i think it's still going to go on for a long time.

PS: UCLABen, I don't think you're hanging with the right poker crowd at UCLA.