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Features All Features Two Friends, Fifty-Two Cards, and a Hell of a Lot of Money
Features All Features Two Friends, Fifty-Two Cards, and a Hell of a Lot of Money | Two Friends, Fifty-Two Cards, and a Hell of a Lot of Money |
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| Written by Anonymous | |||||
| Monday, 05 May 2008 | |||||
The Rise and Fall of an Internet Gambler A martini glass of milk. Art direction by Dylan Greif. Photograph by Kara Brodgesell, with Gabriella Herman. The next week, every thing went to hell. My luck dried up, but I kept playing, hoping to make it all back. I spent nearly ten hours a day on the poker website. I gambled all night, stopped in the morning to dash off a final paper, napped, then gambled some more. I would lose a thousand dollars in an hour, win five hundred the next, then lose seven hundred. By the end of the semester I had blown all but a thousand dollars of my winnings. Gambling has always been a part of college life. In the frat house or on the quad, a roll of the dice is a statement of independence, an assertion of adulthood. Until recently the stakes were necessarily limited. To win or lose a thousand dollars in a night, a student would have to travel to Atlantic City or Vegas. Now, online poker rooms have made high stakes games a click of the mouse away. For a generation of students, a few hundred bucks of Bar Mitzvah money deposited into an online casino account can have life-changing ramifications. I discovered poker in the summer of 2003, around the time the Texas Hold ’Em craze was starting to heat up. It started over the last spring break in high school, which I spent in the smoky casino of a beach resort in the Dominican Republic. When I returned home, I found that many of my friends had also skipped out on the beach scenes at their respective destinations for cheesy slot machines and blackjack. A group of us started to mess around with cards a bit, meeting to play blackjack hands for a dollar on Sunday nights and getting together in the hallways for quick games between classes. Our switch to poker roughly coincided with the airing of the World Series of Poker later that summer. Although the annual event has been televised since 1973, ESPN reinvented their coverage of the event that year, transforming a low-budget late-night program into a heavily produced series that followed players from early tables all the way to the finals. My friends and I watched the tournament religiously, along with the poker movie Rounders. All summer long we would meet at someone’s house on Friday night at nine and play until three in the morning. Saturday we would meet early in the afternoon and play until the early morning. I seldom saw my female friends. A month or so into our binge, we began to devote ourselves exclusively to Texas hold ’em, the version of poker played at the main event of the World Series. Each player has two of their own cards to use with five communal cards to make the best possible five card hand. Because so many of the cards are shared and exposed, it is much easier to make an educated guess as to what your opponent has. This is different from five-card draw, another popular variation, where the only clue you have as to what an opponent holds is the number of cards he draws. And unlike seven-card stud, you don’t have to try to keep track of which cards were folded. By the end of the summer I had started to developed a taste for the game. As I packed for my first semester of college I bought books about poker strategy and began to read articles on poker websites. Meanwhile, one of my friends from the summer game made an important discovery. This friend, we’ll call him Andrew, had logged on to PartyPoker.com, a large online poker site, and found that he was already well prepared for online competition. He told me the money was easy, and that I should get an account. I still remember the first time I played online. I deposited $50 into a PartyPoker account through PayPal and jumped into a small game. Between the generally weak play at the low limit tables and a bit of good luck, I made $200 that first day. I played online often my freshman year, sometimes staying in to gamble while friends went out on weekends. By the end of the year I was up about $800.  Art direction by Dylan Greif. Photograph by Kara Brodgesell, with Gabriella Herman. Andrew was playing at stakes far above what was appropriate to his bankroll. While in the long run a good poker player will make money, luck can ruin you in the short term. Every guide to poker strategy will tell you that you absolutely must have a bankroll that fits the stakes you play, or else a bad run of luck could wipe you out. Strategy guides recommend that a hold ‘em player have a bankroll of three hundred times the largest bet allowed. Andrew was often playing games for which he should have had a bankroll of $48,000. Though he had won close to that at one point, he had spent much of it, and was not saving enough to weather a bad run. He saw huge swings, winning or losing thousands of dollars in a single session. Eventually a really bad run came, and soon Andrew was $20,000 in debt. He told his parents, who loaned him the money. He quit playing poker. Andrew’s case is extreme, but not unheard of. Glenn was a friend who lived on my floor freshman year. I introduced him to online poker. Like me, he had played with friends in high school, but never seriously. Once he started playing online, he quickly developed a full-blown addiction. He would play all night and sleep through his classes in the day. His social and academic life was impacted. He eventually lost $5,000, a debt he paid with Bar Mitzvah money. Near the end of freshman year, Glenn got extremely sick and was hospitalized. He still believes that if not for the stress and general neglect for his health that resulted from his poker addiction, he would not have gotten sick. After spending most of my online poker winnings over the summer, I resumed playing online when I went back to school sophomore year. I played consistent poker during the course of the semester, and as exams approached I had built the money in my PartyPoker account back up to $800. I had also begun to play in a weekly game on campus with a $200 buy-in. I was among a group of regulars, many of whom played online. I was in the middle of the group, winning from the weaker players who often would come a few times before deciding never to come again, but losing to the truly good players. One of the best players at that game was John. Though his strategy was not by-the-book, he had great instincts, and many times made me fold a better hand or, alternatively, put a lot of money in the pot before he took it. John is one of the few unqualified successes I have encountered among college poker players. He specializes in online games of pot-limit Omaha, another poker variation. He says he is currently up $750,000, and plans to play professionally after he graduates this spring. He wants to make enough money to retire his parents and buy a nice house on the beach. While I enjoyed my weekly game, I was jealous of Andrew, who at that time was still making tens of thousands of dollars. I knew I was a good player, and thought that with a bigger bankroll I would be able to make the kind of money he was making. So, when my winning streak started, I saw it as an opportunity to begin playing at another level. I would use the winnings to bankroll bigger bets at bigger tables, and soon be playing at the same level as Andrew. In the meantime, I told my parents and some friends about my luck. I promised to take my father out to an expensive sushi dinner for Hanukkah, and to take Andrew out to dinner to pay him back for all the times he had treated me over the summer. Of course, by the time I got home for break, I didn’t have nearly enough money to be blowing $300 on dinner for two. I did it anyway, telling myself I had just had a bad week and that I would make it all back when I started playing at the beginning of the next semester. I didn’t acknowledge that my massive run was mostly just good luck. I didn’t acknowledge the sloppiness of my game. I hadn't been taking notes on the players I went up against against, and I generally ignored a hand once I had folded, web-surfing instead of watching how my opponents were playing. I too easily let my anger at some bad luck make me play badly, and I played at stakes way above what I should have given my bankroll. Back on campus, I continued to play both online and in the live game, though I only had about $400 total between my PartyPoker account and my bank account. My streak of bad luck online continued and my PartyPoker account dwindled down to only $20. One afternoon, I lost about $200 in the live game. Finally broke, I borrowed a hundred from another player so I could keep playing, even though I had no way to pay him back. I built this up to around $250 before disaster struck. I got into a large pot with one of the looser players in the game. I had a good hand, and on each round I kept betting more and he kept calling. Finally, I went all in. He called. The pot was $600. We both turned over our cards. I had the better hand. Then came the final card. I lost. I was broke again, and now I owed one of the players $100. I went back to my dorm room and played online with my last $20. Luckily, I had a good night and got up to around $200, and was able to pay back the other player. That was when I gave up on the idea of making my fortune playing poker. I was faced with the fact that I was not as good a player as I thought. More than that, I realized I was not even enjoying playing anymore. That last little bit in my account lasted me a while, but I never had another good run, and never made it above $200. By the middle of junior year it was all gone. I have not played online since. I still played in the campus game, but my passion for poker itself had waned. After a while I stopped having fun at the live game as well, and I have not played at all in about a year. If friends were playing I might play, but I know my days of winning and losing thousands of dollars in an evening are over. Recently, Andrew and I reminisced about our high stakes days. “What I found most attractive about poker was that at any given time I couldn't guess the amount of money I would have to the nearest five thousand dollars at the end of the week,” he told me. “It made every day seem meaningful and life-changing.”
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