Nearly every visitor to Las Vegas shares the dream of one day returning to the Strip with enough cash to sit down at the high-stakes tables with movie stars, Saudi royalty and international financiers. Few realize that that dream is reality for several Stanford undergraduates who play for big money online — sometimes losing or winning tens of thousands of dollars in a single day.

Texas Hold ‘em exploded as a national sensation in 2003, the year that ESPN first broadcast the World Series of Poker. By now, countless teens and college students have been drawn into the game by the proliferation of Internet gambling sites — there are now 2,400 of them — and the allure of easy money. On just a single site, PartyPoker.com, betters wagered an average of $1,454 a second last year, according to an article last month in The New York Times. Internet poker tournaments now boast over 300,000 participants, up from just 150,000 in 2001.

Most of these players are amateurs, fresh from reading game handbooks and hoping to get lucky, or just looking for a new sport to get hooked on. But a few, including several Stanford students, have turned the game into a lucrative part-time career.

Ken Kao, a freshman living in Paloma, began playing low-stakes tables his junior year of high school but only recently grew serious about the game. Now, after working his way up to higher stakes, he says he can earn $500 an hour playing eight or more online games simultaneously. He recently used some of his winnings to pay off $20,000 in school loans, and then indulged himself with a 48-inch flat-screen TV for his dorm room.

“You get really desensitized to money,” he said. “This is gonna sound really bad, but when you’re online you see these bets that are $300 — you can’t really think of it as $300. I think, ‘Oh, brownie points.’ When I took a break in January and then came back I was re-sensitized and I thought, ‘Whoa this is a lot of money.’”

How much money? Kao estimates that his biggest single-day loss was $30,000. His biggest single-day win, however, was nearly twice that amount.

Kao is one of many young amateurs that discovered the sport in the wake of Chris Moneymaker’s unexpected win at the 2003 World Series of Poker. The 27-year-old Moneymaker walked away from that game with $2.5 million and the reverence of legions of would-be poker pros.

Nima, a sophomore that asked not to be identified by his last name to prevent his family from learning about his gambling, treats online poker with the seriousness of a priest. He reads the available handbooks and articles and visits an online discussion forum to get feedback on his strategy from other players.

“It’s a game for the long run,” he said. “As long as the person plays his game constantly and always focuses and plays his best — and studying, studying, studying.”

Nima tapped into his winnings four months ago to purchase a new 2006 Infiniti G35. But his tastes, for the most part, are not extravagant. Most of his spending is on DVDs and gadgets, and the rest goes toward savings. Like Kao, he views the money with a certain amount of indifference.

“At some point when you step back you realize I’m sitting at a table with $30,000, and that is a shock to you,” he said.

Both Nima and Kao were also stunned by the taxes they have to pay on their winnings. Professional poker players have to register with the IRS as self-employed business operators, meaning their tax burden tends to be heavier than that of an average citizen. Kao estimates that 35 to 40 percent of his winnings go to Uncle Sam.

But the hefty taxes do not keep them from dreaming big. Nima plans to earn several hundred dollars an hour playing poker full-time this summer. He hopes to put a down payment on a house in Palo Alto this fall.

Kao has a simpler plan.

“I want to have a million dollars by the end of college,” he said.