Vol. 44: Funeral, part I
About eight months ago two cops showed up at my door. I was working from home – I had started at a new job only a handful days earlier – and was in the process of interviewing someone via Facebook. This was a person who's both very well known and successful (and thus, I assume, also very busy), and I felt honored that he had promised me a few moments of his time.
When the doorbell first rang, I barely paid it any attention. There was no way I was going to pause the interview for the mailman or some guy selling carpets. But the person behind my door kept ringing the doorbell again and again, each time more and more impatiently, as if someone was about to die. It was only after the fourth or fifth ring when I realized that I live in an apartment block that you can't access without both having a key and knowing the security code. This wasn't just a random salesman. A bad feeling crept in; something was wrong. It was a familiar feeling.
I opened the door, and there they were. A male and a female officer, both around 35 years old. I couldn't tell which one of them was the senior officer. As far as I knew, I hadn't broken any laws lately, so this had to be bad news. They had that look on their faces. (How I could tell it was
the look -- I don't know. I had never had to deal with cops showing up at my door before, but as soon as I saw the 35-year old officers dressed in dark blue uniforms, I knew that the look on their faces must be
the look.)
”I'm afraid we have bad news,” the male officer said.
I nodded, perhaps a little too nonchalantly. I had already concluded that they must have bad news before the officer opened his mouth, so I had already partially processed in my brain what they were about to say. I could hear the sounds of the Facebook chat window in the background; the person I was interviewing must have said something, and was now likely expecting me to say something back. This was made even more likely by the fact that it was me who was interviewing him, and not the other way around.
”I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, but your father was found dead last night,” the female officer said softly.
Sound of another Facebook message behind my back.
”Around 2 A.M. or so,” the male officer added.
I didn't know what to say. This didn't exactly come as a surprise – if anything, my father still being alive after decades of trying to drink himself to death had been a small surprise every day.
For some reason, the only response I could muster up was ”thank you”.
The officers looked at me, understandably surprised by my strange choice of words.
”I mean, thank you for making the effort to tell the news in person. I really appreciate it.”
I invited the officers to come in. They accepted the offer, and gave me the rough specifics of what had happened. They said that they had been unable to rule out the possibility that my father might have fallen victim to a crime, but that they thought it was unlikely. They were going to perform an autopsy, and were expecting to learn about what had happened based on its results. Between these little tidbits about cutting my father's dead body open the officers asked me if I was alright more than once, and I said yes every time. They also asked whether I needed to talk to somebody, and I said that I was fine.
I only had one question to the officers: Had they informed my mother yet? They said that they hadn't, and weren't going to. Informing my father's ex-wife about his death would be up to me, as I was my father's closest living relative.
As the cops were about to leave, the female officer suddenly stopped mid-sentence.
”Wait,” she said, and looked at the male officer. I think the report said he actually died at 4 A.M.”
”I'm pretty sure it was 2 A.M.,” the male officer responded dismissively.
”No, but... think about it. Their shift only started at 3 A.M., right? How could've they been at the scene at 2 A.M. Already?”
The setting where my father took his last breath wasn't just a room, apparently. It was a ”scene”.
The officers argued about this in front of me for a little while. I found it really funny for some reason. Was it supposed to matter to me whether he died at 2 A.M. or 4 A.M.? I would've been asleep either way. Perhaps it would've mattered a week earlier, when I still was technically a poker professional, and was playing my last ever session of Sunday MTTs. A week earlier the difference between 2 A.M. And 4 A.M. would have been the difference between being glued to my screen clicking buttons in my underwear, and lying in my bed sleepless – just like after every Sunday grind for the last decade. Either way, I would have been awake, and there's a chance I might perhaps have sensed something at that exact moment. I'd sensed things like that before, or at least that's what I choose to believe. But since it happened a week later, it didn't make any difference whatsoever whether he died at 2 A.M. or 4 A.M. Either way, I was fast asleep, and I'm pretty sure that I didn't see any dreams about my father.
”Could you call us tomorrow?” the male officer asked. The report is actually on my desk at the office, and I'd be happy to give you more details tomorrow morning.
The word sounded funny. Details. Was I supposed to want to know the details of my father's death, given that I'd known barely any details about his life for the past 25 years? There are many things I would like to know about his life, but I suspected that the officers wouldn't have answers to any of those questions. And neither would anyone else.
I promised to call the officers the next morning. I closed my door behind the officers, and went back to finishing the interview. My mother would still be at work, anyway, and there was no way to contact her for another couple of hours. Might as well do my job, I concluded. The interview ended up going on for almost two more hours.
***
The next day I called the number the officers had given me. The female officer was the one who picked up the phone, and she was very apologetic about the whole time of death episode. My father's time of death had been 4 A.M., she confirmed, and she said that she was extremely puzzled about why they had originally misreported it as being 2 A.M.
I said that it didn't matter.
We then discussed things such as organizing the upcoming funeral and my father's financial situation. The officer asked me if my father had had any assets, and I said that I didn't know for certain, but that I'd be shocked if he wasn't as broke as one can possibly be when he died. The officer then gave me the contact information of a church that my father apparently was a part of. This took me by a small surprise – my father belonged to a church? – but it wasn't until the officer's last question when I really found myself taken aback.
”Have you spoken to your sister yet?”
”I don't have a sister.”
”Our records show that you do, she lives in Tampere.” (A city 200km north from where I live)
”I really, really don't think I have a sister.”
”Hold on, I have two different reports here... I might have mixed something up. Can I call you back later?”
***
Come to think of it, I guess the timing of my father's death (regardless of if it was 2 A.M. or 4 A.M.) was kind of fitting, as I'd spent a lot of time thinking about death lately. I'd listened to Sun Kil Moon's
Benji – an album where someone dies in nearly every song – for weeks on repeat. The past few weeks had marked the last breaths of my terminally ill 10-year poker career, the last couple of years of which had been pure suffering. I'd been stagnant, unhappy, and unable to fix many things about my life that needed fixing. While none of my problems were directly caused by poker, in hindsight many of them could've been avoided had I been able to rip off the bandage sooner and just quit the game that was no longer making me happy. But I couldn't, and ended up wasting hundreds and hundreds of days of my life like a dog chasing cars, running after things that I was never going to reach.
The closer I got to the finish line, the more memories from the years gone by playing cards for a living started making their way into my consciousness. Memories of my greatest triumphs, my deepest lows, all the people I met, the girlfriends I'd loved and sometimes hurt, the moments of unbounded happiness I got to experience. Entire autumns spent under the blankets listening to jj, traveling around the world, playing poker in front of TV cameras. The shame I felt after having ****ed up so bad in front of the entire poker community that I barely had the courage to leave my apartment. Busting Esfandiari in a 8,500-euro tournament on EuroSport, the same Esfandiari who'd asked me to rate his girlfriend years before at the Bahamas. Waking up in jail after getting drugged unconscious by a hater. Isai Scheiberg delivering a 30-minute monologue in front of my eyes about how he founded PokerStars. Helping Jeans89 negotiate his first sponsorship deal. The countless interviews and strategy articles I wrote, the strategy videos I produced, the books that I wrote. Breaking down in a toilet booth of a casino shortly after winning the biggest poker tournament of my career. Appearing having gained 30 pounds in my first and last CardPlayer cover after showing up for the photoshoot hungover. I relived every important moment of my career – which happens to coincide with more or less my entire adult life to date – on each night before falling asleep, and made peace with myself and my career. It was a good run. It was time to let go.
For the last few days of my career – I was officially quitting on the last day of Febrauary, 2018 – I felt great, even enthusiastic. The pain and embarrassment of not being able to compete at a high level anymore was entirely gone and replaced by childlike joy of jumping into the unknown. I didn't yet know what I was going to do next, but all of a sudden I found myself ecstatic about all the opportunities waiting around the corner. I came to realize that even though it didn't end the way I'd envisioned, I had every reason to be proud of what I'd achieved. And more importantly, I was pretty sure that whatever I ended up choosing as my next career, it couldn't be harder than playing poker for a living.
When I closed my eyes for the final sprint, trying to meditate before my last Sunday session ever, I saw the faces of friends and colleagues that had passed away over the years. Some of them I had never even met in real life, but I still remember exactly where I was when I heard about the passing of each and every one of them. Waking up in Cannes to the news about ”Dana Gordon” having passed away, and helplessly reaching out to people who knew him at the Hotel Martinez lobby trying to make sense of it all. Reading the sad thread about ”HotKarlMC” at home. I was halfway through eating a bowl of pasta when I started reading that post. I never found the energy to either finish the bowl or wash the dishes. I just threw the entire bowl away with half a portion of penne arrabiata in it. I remember what I was doing when I first heard that Johannes had gone missing in Ljubljana. I didn't even know Johannes – I had only played with him once or twice, but he seemed like a good soul – but I had that bad feeling from the very first second. I tried to do what little I could to help out in the search operation, hoping for a happy ending to that story. The happy ending never came.
I remember an overcast morning at the Isle Of Man after four days of intense player meetings at the PokerStars headquarters. Lou Reed had died on the day I got there, and something felt off the whole time I spent on the island. I'd received countless direct threats from the high stakes players whose cheating ways I was about to expose to PokerStars, and something about the whole island made me feel uneasy. I barricaded my door with the heavy wooden desk in my room every night before going to sleep, but it just made me more restless. With the only exit blocked, I had nowhere to escape.
I was already at the airport on my way home, having survived the island, arguing with a clerk about whether I had a booking for the only flight out of the island that morning or not. She was right, I didn't – PokerStars had accidentally messed up my booking. As soon as I heard my phone ringing and saw that it was my mom – we almost never talk on the phone, and she certainly wouldn't just randomly call me at 10 in the morning knowing that I'm about to board a flight – I knew that something must be terribly wrong. My grandfather had passed away unexpectedly, my mother told me. I was unable to come up with a response that would've sounded shocked even to someone a few thousand kilometres away, because before I knew, I already knew. I'd had that same feeling when I was about to answer another call from my mom four and a half years earlier. That time I was supposed to fly to Las Vegas to play in some WSOP events, catching the tail end of the series. I was still in Helsinki, about to start packing, and before I even picked up the phone, I already knew. Grandma had passed away.
(It should be mentioned that PokerStars went to great lengths to rectify the booking situation and to get me out of the Isle Of Man as fast as they could, and booked me on the next possible flight home.)
***
Poker is a strange profession. We spend nearly our entire careers by ourselves. Alone in our homes, trying to win at a game where most everyone loses. The co-workers that we have are also our competitors, and as much as we might like some of them, we are also trying to take their money, and vice versa. Yet none of us could do it alone. It's a big, cruel world at the tables, and the more you isolate yourself from things outside poker, the lonelier it gets. But doing exactly that – building invisible walls between ourselves and our loved ones to focus all of our mental energy on the game – is what's needed to reach the top. I've had long stretches of time where I've led a somewhat healthy, balanced life – long-term girlfriend, lots of friends, lots of hobbies, only playing poker 40 hours a week or so. I'm not sure if I ever won anything meaningful during those stretches. It was only when I dedicated myself to the game and sacrificed my social life to the poker gods when I got results. The best month of my online career – $100,000 in profit, two Sunday major titles, second place in a TCOOP and a triple crown – I didn't meet a soul for weeks. I played every single day for a month straight, including the Christmas holidays. I got my Triple Crown wins on the 24th, 25th, and the 26th. That's dedication. But that's also killing yourself, or at least hurting your spirit. And the older you get, the more and more this kind of dedication takes its toll on you.
At 31 years old, I no longer have gas left in the tank as a poker player. It's been running low for a long time, possibly for years. My career didn't suffer a sudden 4 A.M. (nor a 2 A.M.) death. It happened slowly over a longer period of time, like cancer slowly eating you up from the inside. I had more than enough time to prepare. And now that it's all over, all I feel is peace.
It was a good run.
It really was.
***
It's been 7 years, and it turns out that I still haven't delivered a resolution to this story. My apologies, it turns out that it's still a work in progress.
PS. Since this volume ended up a little bit morbid, I thought I'd end it on a lighter note: Checking out the list of the current biggest winners from HSDB is an endless source of comedy for me. EEE27, one of the biggest PLO crushers in the world – that's “E” from this thread aka the guy who I got mugged with in Algarve, who I lived with in Thailand, and all around one of my oldest poker friends. Oh and, have you guys heard of this guy called LLinusLLove? A few years ago when I was living in Malta I ran into this pale blonde NL50 noob who looked approximately 17 years old. He was a cool kid though, so we hung out quite a lot. The only thing about him that annoyed me was how he kept going on and on about some dumb new poker software that he thought would change the world. I thought he was being stupid, or at least naive. “Its teaches you to play game theory optimal poker, it's going to change everything, you should study it too!” I ignored him and laughed at the thought of someone finally being able to crack NL50 because of some GTO software. That program was Piosolver and Linus was probably one of the first people to use it. As always, it turns out that the joke's on me