Story Time

I woke up abrubtly this morning. I have been doing that the past few mornings for some reason. After 7 hours or so of sleeping my body will just wake up and I can't go back to sleep. For my blog entry today, I decided that I wanted to share a story with you that hopefully you will find interesting.

Let me start off by saying that this story is incredibly personal to me and something that I'm not proud of in any way, shape or form. Not many people know about this actually, but I am making a choice to make this public in some respects because I am fully determined to never let it happen again.

As many of you know, I am not a compulsive gambler at all. I don't really like to play table games like craps, roulette or anything of the sort. I'll play the occasional couple hours of blackjack while in Vegas, but it's never anything more than $300-$400 or so and I never play online.

We'll start about a year ago, when I was playing 5/10 and 10/20 NL (mostly 5/10) on Party Poker everynight for my living and had been for awhile. I had been doing very well in the games and was averaging a couple buyins per session. During this time I struggled with what I would call a moderate form of alcohol addiction. I was drinking probably 6 nights per week on average and I wasn't having just 1 or 2 drinks, I was downing 2 bottles of wine and a few beers, or an assortment of liquor and beer. It got to the point where I wouldn't play unless I was a bit drunk. At this point in time I actually thought the alcohol improved my game, so being convinced of the fact I would only play drunk. This continued for months on end and had my family very concerned about me. It got to the point where if I was awake, there was a good chance I was either drinking or planning on drinking in the near future.

Fast forward to December, about 8-10 months or so after my alcohol addiction had become something I came to accept and live with. I started playing more tournaments and went on an insane rush. In 3 weeks time, I finished 3rd in a UBOC event, won the 100r on stars nearly twice (finished 2nd once), won the 50r twice, won a $100 freezeout on stars, won a $100 freezeout on UB, won the 100r on UB, and had a myriad of final tables and great finishes in some very tough events. In less than a month's time I was up almost $80,000, by far my best poker month ever. It was at this time I decided it was time to move up in stakes and play 25/50 full time with my newfound riches. Unfortunately, I was still drinking 6-7 nights per week and this would not change. I did alright when I first started out. The games were definitely a bit different than I was used to, but I was determined to beat these games as badly as I was beating the 5/10 games I was accustomed to. I was up and down at first, but after a week or so was up a little bit and feeling good about the situation being careful to not play any of the bigger name players at those stakes just yet.

December 30th, 2006 turned out to be a day that I will never forget. It was the night of a big UFC event. I bought a huge bottle of Absolut for myself and had already decided that I was just going to take the night off and enjoy myself with my wife and watch the fights. I started drinking about an hour or two before the fights started and was already a bit drunk when they began. Just to pass time during the smaller events, I fired up Stars and was one tabling 5/10, more to just give me something to do. After 4 hours of drinking or so, I found myself multitabling the 25/50 cash games. I was drinking vodka and red bull and as the night wore on it turned into a lot less red bull and a lot more vodka. I don't remember exactly how the night went and honestly don't remember who was even fighting that night. But what I do remember is that I lost $30,000 that night, by far my biggest losing day in poker. I woke up the next day beside myself and couldn't believe what had happened. I checked the bottle of Absolut and it was almost gone. I had singlehandedly drank the whole bottle by myself in 8 hours time.

At this point I vowed to never drink while playing again, but it was too late. I had been building terrible habits for the past year and even though every part of me wanted to stop drinking, I simply couldn't play without it. Instead of being smart and dropping down limits to get my losses back, I kept playing any high stakes game I could find and continued chasing my losses. I also continued drinking when I played. I would love to tell you that I battled back and won back my money and then some crushing all opposition in my path, but unfortunately this is real life and the players I was up against were a different caliber than I was used to. It was going to be tough to beat these guys when I was sober and in my right mind, let alone sitting there hammered and spewing EV all over the place. By the end of January I was down nearly $80,000, which was basically all of my tournament wins from the month before. Those tourneys were not easy and I put in a lot of hard work to get those scores. Looking back at the past 2 months it was amazing my change in attitude. In December, I was probably the most confident poker player on the face of the planet. I was quite certain I could play anyone and win and I think during that month I wouldn't have been far off. Everything was clicking for me. I was playing excellent poker and had supreme confidence in my game. At the end of January I was a different person. I went from feeling on top of the world to sinking into a state of depression that would last for a long time.

For the next couple months, I tried to get back into tournaments and my usual stakes cash games, but I could never shake the memory of that one month period no matter how hard I tried. It was in the back of my mind at all times and it affected my play to the point where I was scared money at any table I was at. Couple this with the fact that Neteller, where I had many thousands of dollars, had just shut down to US customers and I didn't know if I would ever see that money again. Whenever I played, all I could think about was somehow getting myself out of this 100K+ hole I felt I was in. I was just playing to gamble and wasn't playing any sort of good poker at all. I even continued to drink to just numb the depression and pain I felt every time I was sober.

During my lowest point, my wife and I had pretty much given up on the marriage and I had been planning on moving out at some point in the near future. Looking back on those times, I was doing a lot of blame-shifting as to the real problems that I had and was blaming her for everything. Your mind works in weird ways when you have a huge problem and want to rationalize it to yourself. I kept telling myself everything was fine, but when I look back at myself during that time I cannot believe that I was blaming anyone else for my own problems. It was blatantly obvious that I was the one who was causing most of the stress in our marriage and I regret that very much. My addiction to alcohol almost led to me losing first and foremost my family and very distantly second, my job, friends and mental health.

It took a long time, but today I feel like I am a new person. I have kicked my addiction to alcohol with the help of my family and don't drink even close to what I used to. 98% of my play is done without the use of alcohol and my primary goal is to get that number to 100%. The only time I drink and play is when I play live 1/2 with my friends. Although I am not addicted to alcohol anymore, I am not foolish enough to think that it couldn't happen again and have taken steps to assure that it won't. In my fridge right now I have 3 beers total and I never keep liquor in the house. If I am planning on drinking on a certain night, I buy just what I think I'll need. Part of my problem before was that I would "stock up" on my alcohol, and once I started drinking I usually could go on as long as I wanted with an endless supply of booze on hand. If I had a friend over today, we would run out of booze in 15 minutes. That's the way I want it. I don't want to go back to that lifestyle. I don't want to wake up in the morning feeling that anything I do that day is meaningless and I certainly don't want to put my wife, my son and my soon to be 2nd son in a position where their father is a raging alcoholic.

Part of the reason I wrote this is because I really haven't talked much about it since it happened and honestly, it feels good to get this all written down. I also want to keep myself accountable so that this never happens again. I don't think I was ever to the point where I was what you would consider a severe form of alcoholism, but I was definitely leaning in that direction with no sign of slowing.

Today, I feel like I have a new direction, both in life and in poker and it's good to have momentum in the right direction for a change. I am grinding lower limits now and have very good results so far and am overall a better player than I ever was before. It's not going to be easy, but I am committed to improving not only my play at the tables, but also my overall lifestyle. I am confident that with hard work I can achieve whatever goals I have set for myself. Right now, my goals are to just play good poker, with little thought for the money, which was my sole focus for so long. I hope you enjoyed this post and found it interesting. For those of you suffering from any form of alcohol addiction, I really urge you to get ahold of it before it's too late. You may not blow through a lot of money like me, but it will deteriorate your overall lifestyle and your relationships to those close to you at the very least. Good luck at the tables.