The Sickness

There is something about a big score that allows you to indulge in a very destructive fantasy - that you have enough money to start taking sizable risks without fear of catastrophe. The fantasy of living consequence free is a particularly insidious delusion that has destroyed many. At some point in the slide down you really can't afford to lose any more, but you keep gambling anyway. After all, you are still way ahead, or somewhat ahead, or slightly ahead of where you were before your big score, so it's all good right? It's all gravy. Found money.

But when you hit the point where you have lost all your winnings you feel like an absolute shit-bag. You feel sick that you were given the gift of the big score and then flushed it all away. So what do you do? You try to win it back. You go chasing. Self-loathing and gambling losses feed each other, keeping you in a spiral that is stronger and stronger.

I write all this as a way of explaining my one-month silence from the blog. A month ago I wrote of scoring over 12k online. What I have been putting off writing for several weeks now is the follow up post telling of how I lost 4k in just over a week playing at higher levels than I had any right to attempt and getting my ass handed to me on a silver platter. During this downward spiral the voice of reason was pretty much bound and gagged in some padded cell of my brain, while Mr.Excitement and the Adrenalin Gang threw a party in my cerebral cortex.

I reached a point where I knew that if I didn't stop, then the trip to New York my wife and I had decided on would be in jeopardy. But how could I admit to losing 4k in a week? Better to win it back and pretend this little bad run never happened, right?

Somehow I found the strength to quit, probably because I knew I simply couldn't live with myself if I lost any more. It wasn't easy. It was very, very, very hard.

In late 2008 my father lost a half million dollars, about 80% of his life savings, in about three weeks. He did it the same way I did - he lost some and tried to win it back. He went chasing. The casino he played was the Toronto Stock Exchange. As his stocks started losing money he increased his positions, reasoning they would bounce back. This is called "Value Averaging"and is widely held to be a sound investment strategy, except when the stock doesn't bounce back...and in late 2008 no stock bounced back. It wasn't a downward spiral - it was a nosedive. My father took the financial loss very personally - he couldn't stop thinking of how much good that $500,000 would have done for his kids and grand kids. He couldn't stop feeling like failure. I tried to make him understand that I loved him not his bank-account but I had a hard time making him feel better.

After I lost my $4,000, I felt I understood my dad a little better. I can see how much harder it was for him to forgive himself than for others to forgive him.

So here, now, I'm coming clean. I lost 4k playing like a donkey.

I cleaned out my online account - with enough left of my big score so that we can take that trip to NYC. I took a week off from poker.

Since then I've done well at poker. But that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is that you, gentle reader, are going to do things in your life you may feel you can't forgive your self for. You feel like you should punish yourself. I wish I could be a voice in your head telling you to stop.

People love you, even if you don't love yourself sometimes.