Poker Articles

I have been meaning to write an article for several months, going way back to the time in which Duff Mcguire quit the game due to the issues brought on by his gambling obsession. This article isn’t so much about poker as it is how to live your life (from one man’s perspective), with poker being a part of it and not the dominating all mighty center around which everything else revolves.
 
What you need to know about me when you read this is that I have always been a competition freak.  Since childhood, I have been off the scale, off the charts, hyper competitive about everything I did in life.  In addition, I have always found that I may have an obsessive nature about whatever is interesting me at the time (NOT OCD, but certainly some of those qualities).

When I was 11 yrs old, I was playing tennis 2-3 hours a day and was ranked as high as #7 in the state of New Jersey for 12 and under boys. I then found sports cards as a hobby, and to many of you who know my background, the rest was history. I still played tennis, including NCAAs, but it took a backseat to financial interests.

When I was 20, I started a company that went public, took off nationally, and pretty much dominated my life for the next 11 years. In that time, I got married and had 2 daughters, but for the longest time everything took a backseat to work, including my wedding and my honeymoon---though I  certainly feel I have always been a great dad and spent a LOT of time with my kids.

Well, in late ‘97, I quit that publicly held company to start my own business, which went exceedingly well; but when things slowed down, I got bored, as I needed something to constantly occupy my attention. I started daytrading (an obsession, by the way, that is very similar to playing 4-8 tables at a time). For the 1st time in my life, I woke up at 7 a.m. because I had to get in on pre-market trading where all the action took place. This occupied me for about a year, until the crash in 2001 of course.

My tax returns that year showed in excess of $25 million in trades and a loss in excess of $1million (in a sense, it was my ‘big game’---and I did miserably. (To those of you who have in the past equated trading stocks to gambling or playing poker, there are indeed LOTS of similarities.) Luckily, I was able to sustain those losses, and I wised up and gave my money to a money manager. Nowadays, only on rare occasions do I buy or sell a stock on my own.
 
It was time for a new obsession, and this time it was triathlons. This was great because it was something you can train for all the time, AND it was a competition at the same time---BONUS! In a 2 ½ year period, I competed in over 30 triathlons, completed 3 marathons, and 4 cycling competitions in excess of 150 miles. I had also started training for Ironman Florida, which would take place in Nov 2005 (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and then a full 26.2 mile run). Was I psychotic or obsessed, or did I have a death wish?

WELL, in Jan 2005, right before I started training, I went to Vegas and played in my 1st ever poker tournament. I cashed my 1st time playing, and I guess I was hooked from there. From Feb 2005 until Aug 2006, poker constantly grew and became an increasingly important part of my life. 

For a while, I tried to do everything. As an example, I won my 1st ever WSOP Main event seat on poker stars in March of 2005, and I was riding my stationary bike in the living room at the time. I kept up the expectation of being able to play poker 3+ hours a day while leading a semi-normal life, all the while training for an ironman competition.

Finally in July, something gave, and I’ll share it with everyone for the 1st time ever. I was in 2 tourneys (at that time I only played 1-2 at a time), and the bigger one went on break. I didn’t want to miss a hand in the 2nd one, and I had to go to the bathroom, so I ran at full speed to the bathroom, so as not to miss a hand. I was in my SOCKS, I turned, slipped, and slammed my knee into the ground at full running speed. I cant describe  how severe the pain was, but I felt it wasn’t broken, so I grabbed ice, put it on my left knee, and went back to my tournaments. I found out the next day I had burst my bursa sack in my left knee, and it would be a several month healing process (there goes Ironman Florida 2005).
 
Well, that incident should have been a wake up call to me, but instead, not being able to train was like an open invitation to simply play more poker. At that time, my relationship with my wife (now ex-wife) was basically non-existent, and when I came back from the WSOP that year, we decided to get divorced.

Now comes the crazy obsessive part. For a 9 month period, I basically just woke up, played poker all day, played poker all night, and went to bed at 5-6 a.m., only to wake up and start the pattern all over again the next day. It did wonders for my ranking and my online revenue. I entered the P5 rankings for the 1st time in November or December 2005. It was a steady climb up from there. Outside of poker, though, I basically had no life. Except when I was with my kids, I played poker, and, to be honest, when I wasn’t playing poker, I was thinking about poker.
       
Finally, around late May or early June 2006, I came out of my poker “funk” for a better word. I started to get headaches after several hours of playing (something I never did before). I started to dread playing. I was thinking of it as something I was forced to do instead of something I chose to do. It was no longer fun or an outlet, it was my life. At that moment in time, according to one rankings site, I was rated the #1 tournament player on Paradise Poker.

I made the decision that after the 2006 WSOP, I was going to change my life. I was going to exercise again, enjoy life outside of poker, try to meet someone special, and build my old sports business up again. At the end of the 2006 WSOP, I had reached the highest ranking on P5s I would ever achieve (28th).  It might sound amazing to some, but I did exactly what I set my mind to do once the WSOP ended!
   
It started gradually in August. I stopped playing on Friday nights and Saturdays and went out at least 2 nights per week. During the day, I started training again and spent a lot more time with my kids. Then, in the middle of August I met a special girl. We hit it off great and have been together ever since. I actually wanted to be with her more then I wanted to be in an online tournament (a big deal to me at the time).

Since August, as many of you have noticed, the amount of time I spend in online tourneys has gone down drastically, to the point where there have been stretches of 4-10 days where I won't be in a single tourney. A funny thing happened to me during this process. I actually started enjoying the tourneys I played again, and I looked forward to playing in them. I also feel I have become a better, more focused player both live and online when my entire week has not been spent playing poker for 90+ hours. In addition, I think I take bad beats in stride now and not as if the poker gods are out to get me (I don’t think I have been to the bad beat forum in 5  months....sorry guys!).

I wish I can explain what simply clicked in me, but I am glad it happened. I am enjoying life more, enjoying my time with my kids more, and enjoying poker more. The message I guess I have for everyone who wants to receive one is that you can enjoy poker, you can make money playing poker, and you can even be very successful, but it doesn’t have to take over your life.  I joke with my girlfriend that she ruined my online poker career: "when I met you I was ranked 28th, and now I have dropped out of the top 200!" To be honest, though, right now I wouldn’t have it any other way.