It’s hard to put a number on exactly how much money I’ve lost in my life. I mean, it’s not like I’ve kept detailed records, nor have I kept any sort of running tally in my brain. My best estimate, as far as I can tell, is that it’s around $50K over the last 10 years or so, give or take a little, but who knows really? It could be more. And that’s just the net loss, that’s not even counting how many times I have won money, only to turn around and donate it back over next couple of sessions (or even in the same session.) That number is probably 2 or 3 times the original number, but again I’m just estimating. I know one thing for sure, for all of the ten’s of thousands of dollars I’ve deposited to the various online poker sites I have played on over the years, I have never once made a single withdrawal.
I’ve reached a point in my life where I simply can’t continue to spew money away like this. I sit here, a broken man. I am currently about $40k in debt (credit cards and personal loans) half of which I added in just the last couple of months as I went on a massive losing streak. I am the epitome of a compulsive gambler, a true degenerate. 3 Months ago, I had a plan (and was very much on track) to be debt free in 2 years or less. Now, I don’t even know if I make enough money to cover the minimum payments on everything I owe. What the **** is wrong with me?
After I made my last deposit on Global Poker (which was about the only site I had left to play on, as I had self-excluded with the declaration that I had a gambling problem on Ignition, America’s Cardroom, and BetOnline) I decided that this was it, my final deposit. I couldn’t go any deeper than this. It was make it or break it time. So I made that last deposit of $500 on Friday and by Saturday Noon, I was up to $2k and riding high (actually I hit a high of $2.4k, but gave a little back on the tables before I ended the session.) Then things started to go south. After dinner I found myself back down to $400, but was able to successfully run it back up to $1k by the time I went to sleep that evening. Sunday was more of the same. Up to $2k, back down to $600, end the night at $1k. C’mon man, get it together…..
Yeah well, I guess I don’t have to tell you what happened next do I? I had already scheduled that Monday off of work for unrelated reason, but my plans fell through. No matter, I wanted to keep playing poker anyway. I started playing early, and things started to go south early. The first mistake that I made was accidently joining a PLO table, instead of NLHE. I almost got up and left the table after the first hand was dealt, but there was only 1 other person sitting at the time and I find that I play my best PLO when I’m playing heads up (granted, PLO is really swingy. It’s dangerous as hell even with a proper bankroll, but it’s downright suicidal with just 2.5 buy ins. Still I played….) I was down to $400 before I even knew what hit me. I ended up nursing that $400 the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, then finally I found myself with my last $130 on a $1/2 table. I had $240 in my account when I sat down, bought in for $200, topped off twice and now had swung way down after my QQ ran into AA) and finally I get it all in pre-flop with 99 knowing I am behind but hoping for a miracle by the river, a miracle that never comes. I knew that I was donking it all off, but at this point, **** it. Who cares? What’s the point? I’m $40k in the whole, what’s $130 gonna do?
There was one silver lining to this story however. So a few weeks ago I decide to make an account on BlackChip Poker (which for those of you who aren’t familiar, it is another skin on the winning poker network. Basically it’s just another name for America’s cardroom. The player pools are the same, some just sign in with ACR, and some with BCP.) I had been trying to make a deposit on there for at least a week, but they wouldn’t take any of my credit cards. First it was because they were associated with my ACR account, and that these particular cards couldn’t be accepted. But eventually they say that they can no longer accept ANY credit card payments from me due to the reason for my other account being deactivated, but that I could deposit via crypto currency. (Great, so if you’re a degenerate gambler they can’t take your credit card, but dabbling in the highly volatile world of crypto currency was perfectly fine. Go figure.) I tried doing the Crypto run around for a couple of days, but I couldn’t find a site that would take credit cards (and my bank account is almost -$400 so that was a no go) So other than playing the occasional freeroll (like honestly, what the hell am I going to do with $2.5 if I actually ship one of these things?!?) I haven’t really done much on the site. Though I wanted to, as ACR was the closest thing to a pre-black Friday FullTilt I have found.
Finally, yesterday I get an e-mail from BCP saying they have credited my account with $5, just because. Hey I have money! So I log in, and of course I promptly lose it at a $5 HU PLO table. No big deal, but this get’s me to thinking though, and I remember that sometime after I closed my ACR account I received an e-mail saying I was the victim of cheating (in the form of collusion if I remember correctly) and $90ish dollars was credited to my account. I had tried to reply to that e-mail, but to no avail. Because it came from the Winning Poker network, and not ACR proper, after I lost that initial e-mail (must have deleted it by accident) I didn’t know how to get back in touch with them, and several attempts to e-mail various address that I thought help all came up short. Since my account was closed anyway, I didn’t really worry about it. I just chalked it up to yet another loss and didn’t really think about it again. But, since BCP credited my account with this money, I thought, hey maybe they could put that other money from my ACR account onto this account (I didn’t even know if that was possible, but what the hell, it’s worth a short right?) So I e-mailed them back and asked them about the earlier e-mail regarding the ACR refund (knowing damn well this could be BCP suicide. If they realized I had self-excluded due to gambling addiction, they may just cancel this account too, which is what happened on Bovado/ignition. I self-excluded on Ignition, but when Bovada reopened alongside Ignition, I still couldn’t log into that account because it got flagged for my declaration of a gambling problem on the sister site) but lo and behold, less than 2 hours after sending my initial e-mail, with very little back and forth, I had $93.50 in my BCP account!
Score! So now I have some money to play on. Of course my first plan was to just take it all to a .50c/$1 NLHE table and try and double it up as quickly as I could so I could then head over to the $1/$2 table and try to double it up there…. But then I get to thinking. This is it. I mean this is really it. I have no more money to play on, and won’t have any for god knows how long. I am broke. In fact I am as broke as broke can be. I am Mike McDermitt driving Kinish’s truck broke. If I’m ever going to make anything happen, now is the time. Now clearly, without a bankroll in place I am incapable of staying in the game for any real length of time. Hell, I don’t even know if I am good enough to stay in the game even with a bankroll, but you know what. I am going to find out. What’s the worst that can happen, I go broke? Hell I have been broke thousands of times before (in fact, about 50 thousand times….) so, for the first time in my life I’m actually going to practice proper Bankroll Management and see if I can move up the stakes. I’m going to grind as many tables of .02c/.05c as I can, as often as I can, and once I hit 20 buy-in’s for the next level, I will move up. If at any time I get down to 10 buy-ins for my current level, I will move down. Simple as that.
Truth be told, I didn’t get off to a great start last night. I finished up -$10.53 on the session (I was playing 12 tables at the height of it.) Some of it was bad luck, some was bad play, but overall it was what it was. I got it all in on the flop with a set of 8’s against a flush draw and gut-shot Broadway draw, Broadway go there on the river. I ran QQ into KK getting it all in either on the turn or the river, I don’t remember which. You could call that a cooler, but really I knew I needed to fold them dirty bitches, but I just couldn’t get way from the hand. Lost some pretty large pots (half my stack with AQ on a Q high board to AA, lost another very large pot with AJ on an J high board to QQ. I mean, all of these could have been avoided, but they were fairly standard. Here is the thing though. To lose 2 buy ins before would have been devastating, maybe even catastrophic. That easily would have been most of, if not all of my bankroll. Now,2 buy-ins down and I am not even sweating it, I still have 16 buy-ins for my current level. As it stands, my bankroll is sitting $82.97. I am going to continue multi-tabling $5NL.
I have to wonder, could this really be the start of my poker journey? I mean, Doug Polk started off like this didn’t he? (Granted he hadn’t lost nearly as much money as I have, but who the hell has?) Is it really possible, could it really happen for me like it did him and so many others? I don’t know. Logic would dictate that if I was going to be a winning poker player, It would have happened by now, right? I don’t know, maybe/maybe not. Maybe by practicing proper BRM I will be able to stay in the game long enough to actually work on improving my game, fix my leaks, and finally have that breakthrough that has felt like it was just around the corner, but has eluded me for the better part of the last 10 years.
My plan is to give you guys updates along the way, while also flashing back and fleshing out some of the backstory, as I left out a ton of things I wanted to say (my first attempt at this post came out looking more like a memoir than a blog post) but mostly I just wanted to get a lot of this **** off my chest. No one really knows the full extent of my gambling problems. Sure, lots of people know pieces of it, but I have never told anybody the full story. Hell, the closest GA meeting is something like an hour and some change away (with traffic) which if it wasn’t for that commute, I probably would have carried my fat ass over to one of those damn things just to finally be able to spill my guts to perhaps the only people on the planet that would understand what it is that I am going through. Still though, ll don’t think I would have ever given up on poker. Not fully anyway. This game is in my blood….
So buckle up. Worst case scenario, I go broke (what else is new?) but you get some good stories out of the deal. Best case? I progress up the ranks until I have a $10k bankroll and I am crushing $2/$5 on a regular basis. That has always been the dream, going all the way back to 2009. A $10k bankroll, and making a solid living playing poker. It’s sad that it has taken me 10 years and $50k to get to this point, but here I am. Maybe, just maybe, I can turn this thing around and give you guys an upswing story for the ages…..
