How I Won a Million Dollars Playing Poker and it Ruined My Life

Oh no. My friends want to play cards again. What is this new game they keep wanting to play all the time? I hate cards. I hate all new games. Mostly because I can’t figure out instructions and rules.

Can’t we just drink and hang out like we used to?

These were my thoughts before I finally threw in $20 so I wouldn’t have to sit there and watch again.

I have no idea what these cards mean. People are trying to explain the rules to me, but I have no idea what they are talking about. I just keep putting chips in the the middle when it’s my turn.

The strategy worked. Beginners luck no doubt, but I had 100$ and a new hobby.

I was hooked for good when I won the next few times we played. Pretty soon those friends didn’t want to play with me anymore, but I found new games.

I still didn’t really know what I was doing, but my patient outer demeanor mixed with my inner angst and aggression seemed to be effective in this game.

I found the local underground game and had similar luck there. I was so confused about what I was doing that nobody else knew what I was doing either.

I finally found something I like and seem to have some natural talent for. Plus, a little bit of extra money brought our monthly negative budget into the positive.

I started consuming all things poker. Studying, watching videos, reading blogs or articles that I thought I could learn from. I bought a giant box of used poker books on eBay.

One night at the underground game, I had doubled up my 200$. It was around midnight and felt like going home at a reasonable hour with a win secured.

One more round and I’ll cash out.

2 two masked gunmen burst through the door screaming, with guns waving wildly.

“Put your wallets and phones on the table!”

I felt like I was watching a TV show.

The guy who runs the game was also playing. His name was Harold and the gunmen knew that he was the one to shake down for the house money.

They escaped the scene with over 10k. I was proud that I put the rest of my cash in my sock instead of on the table when they had barged in.

But I got greedy and stuck around hoping to get my $400 back. Bad move. The cops came and wouldn’t let me leave until the scene until 5am. And nobody would be getting a refund.

Harold reopened the game at a different location a few weeks later in a sketchier location. But I had two new kids and it didn’t seem like a good scene for a new father and husband.

Plus the online poker scene was booming and I wanted to see if I could expand upon my initial poker success.

I was terrible at first. Online poker is a different game than the ones I was used to against live humans.

But I was cautious and only played for pennies until I knew I could move up to another level.

I lost small amounts over the the next couple of years, but I normally won the weekly “church” game as we called it. I didn’t go to church but the rest of them did, and I didn’t mind taking money from the clergy. This more than made up for my online experiments.

I didn’t have the same natural talent for online poker. It was more like a video game and required a different set of skills.

But eventually I learned and found a game that suited my style. I started receiving monthly checks in the mail.

Normally $1500–2500 per month consistently. But that was me playing all day from the moment I got up, until late into the evening on my laptop in bed.

My username was SarahPalin. I chose that name because I wanted the other players to hate me. And it worked. They hated me and I hated them.

The buy in for the tournaments I played was 33$, and I would play four to six tables at a time.

My wife didn’t mind the addiction because it was the difference between being in debt or having extra money for vacations and college.

Every day, all day, thousands of hands per day. But it wasn’t fun or glorious in any way. It was tense, exhausting and draining.

I would take a break in the evening to play with the kids. But even then all I could think about was how some guy got lucky against me, or what my newest and latest strategy would be.

But if you’re going to win a lot at poker, you have to lose a lot too. It’s playing thousands of games for just a tiny edge.

And every loss is pain. Every big hand, every lost tournament. You can try to get used to it, but the human brain is not meant to take the constant beating over and over that only online poker can deliver.

When you lose a hand in poker, you either did something wrong, got unlucky or got tricked. The mind doesn’t like any of these options.

And most of the time you can’t figure out which reason it was anyway. That starts to fuck with your brain after a while.

It’s not like a live game where everyone pretends to be friends. The online poker scene is a seedy and hateful group. And there’s no pretending to like each other.

I was just as hateful as the rest of them. I would try not to tell people how stupid their move was that just cost me another buy-in. On the surface I knew that their bad play was the reason I had the odds to win in the first place. But it was difficult to hold in the anger when I lost because they made a dumb move.

The site I played on was a mix of young white guys, gambling addicts and Russians. Everyone is trying to take each other’s money. Everyone hates each other.

The Russian’s chat box was different from the American’s, so we had to keep our hate for them bottled up.

I hated one Russian with a passion. He also played all day every day. He wasn’t very good, but had a reckless style that put me at risk when I didn’t need to be.

But I could never tell him him how much I hated him. I wished I could find out where he lived so I could go to Russia and kill him. But I would just have to take out my frustrations in the chat box directed towards one of the gambling addicts or obnoxious white guys.

I would go through the motions of being a good dad and a decent husband, but 24 hours a day my head was filled with anxiety and poker scenarios playing out in my head over and over.

Brief, unfulfilled relief would come when I hit a winning streak, but during every losing streak I could feel the life being sucked out of me. I would feel physically sick if a losing streak would last more than a couple of days.

Deeper down at the soul level I could sense that even the winning was not good. Long term all I was doing was taking money from people who had problems much bigger than I did.

But I could still justify it in my head. The easiest way was to just not think about it at a deeper level. But my soul knew the truth, and that was the pain that I didn’t understand at the time.

The money and the addiction kept me in it, but I had a deep down sense that my soul wanted to do something positive in the world. Not just make enough money to survive until it’s time to die.

Late one night I walked into the bathroom after a three day losing streak. I looked in the mirror and my skin was gray. My eyes looked dark and lifeless.

I’m dying, I whispered out loud to myself.

I’m 40 and I’m already dying. What am I going to do?

I knew that my professional skills were now outdated since I wasted ten years putting all my energy into this game. And I didn’t really want to get another job. I wasn’t meant to work for the man.

But I had no ideas. I hadn’t had a new idea since before I started playing poker. The only thing I could think about was poker.

Being broke again has got to be better than this? I wondered as I crawled in bed for six more hours of poker dreams.

My tedious record keeping showed that over a ten year span I won over a million dollars. But it also shows a loss column of $900,100 for a net gain of $90,000.

When I factored that into an hourly number, it came out to around $3.00 per hour over ten years.

I stumbled on and off poker for a while after that. Trying to set time limits or other strategies that would last a couple days until I would have a losing session and have to continue playing so it wouldn’t be on my mind anymore.

I was finally able to shut it down for good.

A friend from the underground game texted me recently. “Harold’s dead” is all he wrote, with a link to a local news article about a poker game robbery gone wrong.

After the last time we got robbed, Harold had bought a gun to “protect himself” in case his game got robbed again.

It did get robbed again and the extra gun in the mix escalated the robbery into a murder.

I didn’t think I would be sad when I heard the news. He was more of a poker friend than a real friend. There’s a difference.

But Harold was such a nice guy. He would do anything for anyone. He was a terrible poker player, but he made enough money from running his underground game to pay for his addiction…and ultimately his death.

But I did feel sad. Some of the old pain came back. I thought of him, and all the other white guys I had played with, and the Russians. I thought of all the gambling addicts who’s money had fueled my own addiction.

But mostly I thought about the ten years wasted and the energy I sucked from the universe for 3$ an hour.

Dave Alexander is the founder of Lazy Leash and Bushy Box.