Quote:
Originally Posted by PFUNK
1. How did this director come into contact with you?
2. Did you announce publicly that you were doing this and he found you?
3. Did you all know each other before hand?
4. How and when did you decide to do this journey and how did this convert into a documentary with you in it?
5. Basically curious about all the chain of events that lead up to this....
1. He was referred to me by somebody else, tracked down my e-mail address, and called me while I was on the road near Santa Fe, NM.
2. I never made a public announcement or sent out a press release or anything like that. I started in Seattle, WA, and went through Portland, OR. The director lives in Portland area, so when he decided to make a documentary about poker, he started looking for sources. One thing led to another, and he came across me. Good timing, I guess.
3. No, we had never met or knew about each other before February, 2011.
4. I decided to walk across America in June 2010. I left in October 2010. This was after my second college suspension in April 2010, at which point I quit gambling. (The first suspension was in March 2006.) I wanted to do something good for myself, and hopefully for someone else too. The school I was at accepted me back for fall 2010, but I decided to take a break to make sure I had my head on straight, and to gain some confidence regarding my commitment to staying away from gambling. I thought a walk would be a great exercise in slowing things down -- taking things one step at a time, if you will. As it turned out, it was. I finished the walk in June 2011 and finished school in May 2012. I guess it didn't really "convert" into a documentary, but my path merged with the director's path. I think our meeting was really lucky, considering how hard it is to find somebody who wants to be public with his gambling problems.
My story, in short, is that I spent 6 years of my life doing not much besides gambling or thinking about gambling (mostly poker). After two college suspensions because of gambling-related crimes, I figured out that I couldn't gamble and and also live a normal life. I decided to drop the gambling.
EDIT: just to be clear, I'm not proud of the things I did that got me into trouble, but I'm a better person today because of it. I'm not against poker and gambling, but I wouldn't want even my worst enemy to go through something as bad (or worse) than what I did. The best thing for me to do, in this case, is to share my story, and the documentary was a good opportunity for that.