Place a bet: Is he a nerd or a felon?

Tom Goldman and I are in Aruba when he swoops in for the kill. Or maybe it's Costa Rica. I lose track, it happens so fast.

On a green pixilated table, a blinking icon pushes in all its chips. Bets the farm, so to speak. In this game of pot-limit, Omaha Hi-Lo, it's a bet of about $35. "You dog, you shouldn't have done that," Goldman says cheerfully. With a click, he matches the bet, driving the total on the table to about $100.

Almost instantaneously, the screen flashes and all the money moves into Goldman's account. A second later, the bet-the-farm guy bleeps from the screen, as if vaporized.

Where did he go?

"Who knows," Goldman shrugs. "Is he in a huge mansion somewhere, playing cards for kicks? Or is he a broke guy sitting in a van down by some river?"

We look at each other. My mind reels. We actually are in Goldman's sparse bedroom, in a town house in one of those cul-de-sac developments on the hills north of Issaquah.

And we are committing a felony.

Goldman, 26, is a professional online-poker player. He has a day job — business analyst at a Bellevue health-care company. By night, he does something illegal — he heads to casinos in places such as Cyprus and the Isle of Man to gamble against tens of thousands of people from around the globe.

He's good at it. Last year he netted $45,000. He does it in a dizzying display of patient, mathematical multitasking.

The other night, he simultaneously used two screens to play poker at nine tables in four separate casinos. He considered the probability distributions for nine hands of cards at a time, placed bets and managed nine accounts, all while talking to me and surfing the Web.

He played 250 hands in 90 minutes — 10 times the rate of play when you go to a cardroom in person. He's like the Wal-Mart of gamblers — high volume, low margin, steady success.

"I'm the video-game generation," he said. "I'm good at focusing on bursts of information for a split second, then moving on. It's like a series of brain teasers to me.

"That's the thing about online gambling. We're mostly math nerds who'd otherwise be playing video games."

I dropped in on Goldman's digital-gambling life because the state doesn't see him as a harmless nerd.

A law passed last year says what he's doing is a Class C felony — a crime on the order of possessing child pornography or fleeing police or robbing a grave.

To Goldman, having his name in the paper is an act of civil disobedience. He's practically daring the state to catch him if it can.

"I want to challenge the law," he said. "I'm a regular guy. I work a 9-to-5 job. I go to Mass every weekend. And, yes, I gamble online. This makes me a felon?"

Goldman got straight A's at Interlake High School in Bellevue. In 2003 he graduated with a double major in statistics and math from the University of Washington.

He's been gambling online for three years. He pays taxes on his winnings. He tithes 10 percent to charity and to St. Louise Catholic Church in Bellevue.

He even confessed to a priest there — and got back a surprising response, he says.

"Is it morally OK, ethically OK to take money from weaker players?" Goldman asked the priest. "Because that's what I'm doing — I'm actively looking for tables where I know I can win."

The priest said it's OK as long as Goldman is testing himself against peers who have the same opportunities to improve as he does. But it's immoral to exploit the vulnerable, such as gambling addicts or drunks.

The trouble out on the wild, wild Web is: Who can tell? It's as anonymous as it is borderless. Goldman has met skilled poker players from Ohio to Australia. Yet he's also run into gamblers who aren't people at all, but card-playing software bots, sort of amateur versions of IBM's Deep Blue.

Right now the talk of the casinos is the U.S. government, which continues to try, in vain, to put a digital anti-gambling wall around America. Even as lotteries and other types of homegrown gambling flourish.

Chris Strow, a Republican state legislator from Whidbey Island, said the criminalization of people who are joining a game from their homes is an "amazing intrusion on personal liberty."

Strow introduced a bill this year to roll back the criminal penalties, but the state Gambling Commission opposed it and it went nowhere.

As it is, the digital underground is thriving. The other night there were 141,000 players in the casinos we visited.

At one casino you can roll your mouse over their icons and see where they're from. Places such as Powell River, B.C.; Auburn, Ga.; Bettendorf, Iowa.

And Issaquah. When I left Goldman to walk to my car, it was nearing midnight. It was so quiet I could hear frogs croaking. That telltale blue glow radiated from many of the identical town homes.

What were people doing in there? Where in the world were they going? And what, if anything, should be done about it?

The mind reels.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.