I love poker, but I have a gambling problem (Long).

[Johnny123]

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Go buy World of Warcraft. Cheap, easy addiction.

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Lol! Thanks for the tip. But I really do need to spend less time in front of my computer.

[Johnny123]

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in a similiar thread others suggest finding extra cirricular activities..join a running club, join a gym, go for a walk every single day, start reading a book (NON POKER BOOK!), drag a friend out to a movie...find other things to do other than poker and other forms of gambling.

the beauty of gambling is that it gives you a high and that is so addictive. if gambling is your only source of a high or happiness, it's time to find other things that make you happy or feel energized.

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Great reply, you are perfectly right. I need to find other things to do. I will try to get a second-job and I will try to come up with things to do to get those "highs" without betting two days salary on one hand of blackjack. Being bored is a terrible reason to gamble.

Usually the crazy tilts occur when either a) I am bored or b) I have had an unusual winning streak, more or less feel that I can't lose and forget all I know about variance and EV until i hit a big loss.

[Johnny123]

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Interesting post. You seem to make smart decisions in that you look for +EV opportunities but cannot stop until you have lost a significant amount of money.

While you may need to stop gambling altogether until you learn control, you should follow the restraints you give upon yourself.

Don't think twice about it. Get up and walk out of the room and go grocery shopping or to the gym. Don't even pause. Say if you clear your bonus, just stop immediately, not even taking a single extra hand. Don't even bend your own rule one bit, and you'll hopefully learn the correct feeling of walking away while ahead.

Good luck with your problems.

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You are right - I know a lot about EV and such, I know how to take advantage of +EV opportunites, but my problem is that I sometimes cannot quit when I know quitting is the correct EV move.

Here are some constraints that I will follow from now on:

1. Stop immediatly after clearing a bonus when bonuswhoring. Take a break, go away from the computer. Then go back and cash it out, knowing that it would be -EV to keep playing. If I'm banned for bonus abusing, so be it, no big deal.

2. Never engage in any form of gambling just to relieve bordedom.

3. Immediatly leave a poker table I'm I feel that I'm not playing my best and/or I'm taking the worst of it.

(And, as I said, take two days off from poker and a week off from all other gambling right now.)

I hope I can do this. If not, I realize that I might need to stop gambling.

[Derek in NYC]

1. Quit casino games.
2. Play poker on a dedicated bankroll, and stay within adequate risk limits
3. Set aside 1 day a week for study (books, Pokertracker, 2+2 catchup, whatever)
4. Set poker goals and work to achieve them
5. Limit your play by hand count

This is what I do. #4 is particularly helpful. My goal is to spend the entire year playing 5/10SH and demonstrate a 2.5 BB/100 win rate over 100k hands before moving up. My live play goal is to move exclusively to 10/20 and stop screwing around at lower limit games. I find these goals challenging, and it helps to keep my poker more disciplined.

[Johnny123]

Good advice. But I'm not sure I understood #5. Do you mean that I should stop playing after having played a certain number of hands? If so, why?

I will definitely do 2-4. Tomorrow will be my study day of this week. (Today I will try to do as little as possible related to gambling, except for reading and posting in this thread.) I will seriously consider no. 1. I'll give myself a last chance next week. If I ever find myself betting more than $10 on one single hand, or keep playing after having cleared the bonus, I'll quit blackjack period.

I will also have to deal with my lack of self-discipline in general (yes, in general, not just related to gambling). I ordered some book on the subject that seems good. And I will seriously consider going back to therapy to work on my lack of self-discipline and any other emotional problems I might have, that causes me to take foolish risks.

[Derek in NYC]

[ QUOTE ]
Good advice. But I'm not sure I understood #5. Do you mean that I should stop playing after having played a certain number of hands? If so, why?

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Your problem seems to be that you set unrealistic win expectations, and also that you find it psychologically difficult to stop if you are losing (and indeed, that you take risk maximizing strategies such as doubling the stakes to "make up" for when you are losing).

I can sympathize. When I am running hot, it is very exciting to me, and when I am stuck, I tend to play too long in order to try to get back to even. (I do not, however, step up in limits.) This is fairly common behavior, I think, and most players feel this way to some extent.

Theoretically, if you were perfectly emotionally controlled, you should make the decision about when to leave/stay based exclusively on table conditions (e.g., presence of donators, current table image, whether you are on your A-game, whether you are tired, who is the sucker, etc.)

If you are incapable of taking the theoretically correct course of action, you need to set artificial limits such as 500 hands a day, 4 hours of play, one buy-in, etc. External limits will minimize both your upswings and downswings, but hopefully they will prevent you from steaming away your bankroll in 1 session. Since emotions cool down over time, this strategy should lower your variance.

I found Improve Your Poker and Inside the Poker Mind to contain some helpful thoughts on self-control. I generally found Psychology of Poker to be less helpful as a book, but that is because I tend to play a tight-aggressive game, and engage in pretty constant self-criticism.

External risk limits exist all the time in the real world and serve as effective countermeasures when emotional/irrational factors are driving behavior. For example, the stock exchanges have circuit breakers that will trigger and stop trading after a certain amount of movement. This will slow a market crash, and allow market participants to digest information, analzye, and hopefully make trading decisions based on a rational process rather than an emotional need. Yes, markets are efficient in the long term, but in the short term, they are not. So external risk limits help keep markets from overreacting.

[Johnny123]

Ok, I see your point. Mainly, I was referring to blackjack when I talked about raising the stakes in an attempt to get back to even (or even to get back to the previous peak).

But occasionally I do similar things in poker. Like, say, I enter a $4/$8 game (not really above my bankroll, but higher than I usually play, and somewhat above my "psychological bankroll") because it seems soft. Then I have a bad run, which frustrates me much more than a bad run at $1/$2 since it's more money. Then the weak players leave and are replaced by good ones. And then of course I should leave. But far too often, I don't.

I think that as long as I do not play above $2/$4 I can probably make good decisions about when to play most of the time without artificial limits. Maybe I will try a stop-loss limit for a while, to avoid the risk that I lose too much and don't leave when I should. But on the other hand, I would like to avoid thinking about short-term results as much as possible, for example by using Tiltblocker. So I'm not sure what's best here.

I think that my problems with emotional control in poker is quite common and not really "pathological". It's when I play high speed casino games like blackjack or video poker that I get... well... addicted to the action. Not every time, though. Sometimes I can resist the temptation to make big bets and sometimes not. When I think about it away from the game, I know I do not want to take those risks. So I'll try never to do it again, and if I do, I'll quit casinowhoring.

[USGrant]

It's not what you want to hear, but you have a gambling problem, so you should seek help from people who are experts in treating gambling problems. If you don't like GA and 12 Step programs, there are cognitive behavioral pscyhologists that can help with addiction, as well as other therapy approaches. Maybe down the road you can take up poker, but if you are now lonely, at serious financial risk, depressed and tilting like Pisa architecture, the advice will always the same: quit playing, everything.

But if you don't want to get help, at least do yourself a favor and never play a casino game again.

[TripleH68]

[ QUOTE ]
gambling - gives you a high and that is so addictive. if gambling is your only source of a high or happiness, it's time to find other things that make you happy or feel energized.

[/ QUOTE ]

[hurlyburly]

You should stop gaming altogether. Clear your mind and rest. Alcoholics can't just "stick to beer", dude. You are underestimating the problem you are facing.