My life as a compulsive gambler

[inishowen]

This will be long but somehow cathartic for me. It may be boring but every part will be absolutely true. After many hours of self reflection I have realized that my life, and its major events, have been greatly influenced by my addiction to gambling. I am 41 and a gambling addict.

I was born in Cambridge Mass to immigrant parents, neither of which went past the 6th grade. My Dad was a union construction worker, my Mom an untrained in-home nurse for the elderly and dying. Through my Mom, who had been caring for a wealthy woman in her final days, we were offered a huge discount by the woman's family on a nice home in an affluent suburb of Boston. I lived in this home from 10 years old until I went to college. My friends were the sons and daughters of successful white collar professionals wearing new clothes and were given cars when they reached driving age. I never had a car and from the 9th grade on would wear my hockey jerseys and colored tee shirts to school. I was a 3 sport athlete in high school and received a football scholarship to a div 1aa college in the northeast a couple of hundred miles from home. As a kid and thru HS I was totally consumed by athletics, Sunday mornings would be spent at the kitchen table reading the sports section of the Boston Globe, spending hours on the stats and averages of the baseball, football, basketball and hockey sections for no other reason than it interested me. While a freshman in college a friend from high school named TJ would call and ask my opinions on picking games on the football card. This is where my gambling career began. By the winter of my senior year I was the only bookmaker on campus. Most bets were for less than $50, all those I would handle, anything larger I would lay off to a Boston bookie through TJ. I finally got caught during the pro basketball season of my senior year by the head football coach. A football teammate who couldn't afford to pay his debt went to the coach and asked for money which led to my uncovering. I was put in front of a board, it was easy for them to find out the truth. The penalty in hindsight was minor and somehow ridiculous. I had to deliver the school mail to the various academic buildings, I wasn't allowed to participate in graduation and received my degree in the mail during the summer.

After graduation I was back in Boston and through a friend got a job at Fidelity Investments on the mutual fund desk answering questions from investors. Over the next five years I worked my way onto the Nasdaq trading desk at Fidelity. I traded for the various mutual funds, was totally immersed in the market and making good money. Most all of my money went back into the market, trading my own account. I started small but after a while was placing $30,000 day trades on what were known as "dead cat bounces". This is when a company comes out with bad news, the stock gets crushed and then recovers a little bit as the vultures come in to try to pick it up at a discount. The trick was to buy it at its lowest price in the morning and sell it at the close of the market hoping the bounce had come. My trading decreased my effectiveness at the job I was being paid to do and it wasn't long before I was called into a meeting and let go. During this time I was with a great girl who was always told that she looked like Meg Ryan. We were talking marriage, she knew nothing of my day trading and had to live thru many nights of silence when that days dead cat bounce never materialized. After I was let go the only job I could find was delivering beer for a huge distributor making very little money in comparison to my job at Fidelity. Through TJ I started placing sportsbook wagers to try to make more money. Betting a weeks pay a night on second tier west coast ncaa basketball games using credit card advances to cover losses. After a while, deeply in debt, my girlfriend found out and realized that she didn't want to be with me anymore. I moved out and spent the next week living in a hotel. Eventually I landed at a friends apartment and moved into the attic. There was no way I could make the nut on my credit card debt delivering beer so I went to work as a commisioned stock broker. I busted my ass opening accounts and generating commissions, most of which went to my debt. When I got the number under control a bit, I started to place sports bets once again. I had two books in my desk, one was my transaction register of client trades, the other was a similar book filled with a log of my sports bets. One day I was out sick, a client called in for me and my supervisor handled the call. He went thru my desk and picked the wrong book to look at. The next day I was at work I was called in and presented with the book. It was determined that there was no way I could have the clients best interest in my mind when recommending stock purchases when I needed the commission from the trade to pay off the loss on that weeks NFL games. I was fired.

The next job I got was delivering packages for UPS. Still living in the attic, I started hanging out again with my friend TJ from high school with the football cards. Our only mutual interest was wagering on games. He had never gotten a job and relied solely on gambling for his money. Thinking back I remember many nights staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning waiting for the end of a Lakers or Canucks game. It was the norm for the phone to ring at 4am with TJ on the other end in a state of euphoria or utter dismay. He was in deep already before he went on a colossal losing streak. The end came on a Super Bowl Sunday. He had $48,000 riding on the game and lost. This was before internet sports books when bets were placed over the phone with a runner for the mob. The runner never had your telephone number or even knew your real name. It was the honor system. Payments and collections were made on Monday nights thru a bartender at a local dive. You'd arrive and either hand or be handed an envelope settling the account for the previous week. We went to this bar every Monday night, except the Monday after the Super Bowl. My friend was in complete panic, he owed $96,000 to the mob and didn't have $98 to pay it. His father finally got the story out of him and the following Monday night his father went to the bar and got the number of the bookie off the bartender. He called and spoke to Jumbo, the head bookie for the Angiullo mob family of the North End in Boston and explained the situation. It turned out that the runner we were calling in our bets to had only laid off $8000 of my buddies losses to Jumbo, meaning he had ate the other $88,000 for himself. Jumbo was pissed at the runner and thru TJ's father it was agreed that Jumbo would take care of the runner as long as my buddy came up with the $8000 owed to Jumbo. The father agreed and a meeting was scheduled for the following night on the beach in Scituate called Egypt Beach. With his fathers eight grand in cash, my buddy, myself and another friend arrived at the beach. We were met by the runner and 2 of his friends. Nothing was said, the money was handed over. The runners friends then grabbed onto me and my other friend while the runner beat the hell out of TJ. He knocked out two of his teeth and broke his ribs all the time calling him a piece of [censored]. Months later TJ and I went back to the bar, just for beers and shot the [censored] with the bartender. Thru the conversation we learned that the runnher hadn't been heard from and that the bartender had heard that the runner had "moved to Maine" which was a euphemism for who knows what.

I stopped sports gambling after this eventually landing another job as a Nasdaq trader for a boutique investment company in Boston. I started the job broke, after a couple of years I was once again making good money and restricting my trades to investments rather than day trades. I met a nice girl, fell in love, discussed marriage and a family, life was good. On a company comp trip for top clients to Florida I was playing golf with 3 older clients when the topic of "best investment you ever made in your life" came up. The conclusion turned out to be real estate. For the next several months I studied the Boston real estate market and finally made the leap by buying an apartment building with near 100% financing. I was still living in an attic, had never bought a car, but I now owned an apartment building. The positive cash flow from this one building was significant. On top of my job I had more disposable income now than ever. I started a part time job for myself in the study of the local real estate market and became an expert in my own mind. Over the next couple of years I bought three more buildings, leveraging the equity in one as the down payment on another. Without even getting out of bed in the morning I was grossing $330,000 a year in rental income, my net worth was in excess of $3 million, and I was 35 years old. Tons of free cash flow. The firm I was with expanded the trade desks responsibilities into trading the firms own money. Meaning the after tax profit of the firm was was put at risk in the market, trading decisions were made by the individual traders and bonuses were paid to reflect your standing as a profit center. A by product of this new responsibility was that each trader could now piggyback the firms trades as long as the firms order was placed first. This is how I started trading OEX options. OEX options are the crack cocaine of the investing world. You buy an option on whether the market as a whole will go up or down. These options are highly volatile and if you hold them too long they will expire. 85% expire worthless. I started small but like drinking alcohol the need for more and more soon took over. For a while I was hot, earning enough money to buy a couple of more investment properties, a two family in the affluent town I grew up in and a couple of 3 families in surrounding towns. I was living with my girlfriend in one of my single family houses. I was literally on top of the world. The internet bubble in the stock market was in full swing, I was legally diverting all of my free cash flow from real estate into my trading account. Then the internet bubble burst, which I missed completely. In March of '99 I had just about $300,000 in a trading account and a real estate portfolio that had grown to a little over $4 million in market value. Two months later, on a Friday option expiration day at 4:00pm I sat at my trading desk and looked at an account that showed equity of $14,000. After getting blind drunk for the next 48 hours I saw my younger brother on that Sunday. I hadn't seen him in months and he knew something was wrong. After breaking down and telling him the whole story it became clear to me that I couldn't handle being a trader anymore. The pain and sleepless nights, terrible diet, inability to communicate with my girl during losing streaks, all of it was correctable by simply quitting. I had never quit anything in my life but on the following Monday, at the end of the day, I went and told my boss that I had had enough. He called in the owner of the firm and it was then that I found out that all of my personal trading had been a topic of discussion at management meetings and that it was ok for me to quit and that I should get help. I packed my desk and left, in my mind I had just run into another run of bad luck and I guess I was in denial that I had a problem because I never went for any help. The next couple of months were tough. The $14000 went pretty quick. Vacancies came up in my apartments. Due to the highly leveraged standing of my real estate I was running in the red. I needed cash quick. I contacted my attorney who put me in touch with a hard money lender. Hard money lenders are wealthy individuals who loan or invest money to people who own something worth having. I sold 33% of my real estate portfolio to a hard money guy for $50,000. I had to sell the single family I was living in with my girlfriend, among other properties, and rented a basement apartment for $600 which was all I could afford. She stayed with me thru it all. My days were spent managing apartments that I no longer completely owned. One night my girl and I were sitting on the couch watching tv when the twang of the guitar lick that signifies the beginning of an episode of the 2003 WSOP came on ESPN. Something clicked in me during that hour. Chris Moneymaker, Sammy Farha, big money.......playing cards!!!!!! Dan Harrington had on a www.888.com hat, I went to that web page and within 24 hours I had progressed from the play money games to depositing $500 via credit card. $1/2 was huge for me at the time. The next couple of months I played more and more, read the Theory of Poker several times as well as other Sklansky books. I started playing during the day instead of taking care of my real estate responsibilities. I ran my bankroll up to $28,000 at Pacific with $1000 in comp dollars. I was playing days on end, playing til 5am then sleeping all day, not showering for days. Staying in Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday, any nights, never ever taking my girl out for anything. Rushing home from any where to play. Then my girl finally stood up for herself and gave me the ultimatum, poker or her. I knew in my heart it was her and my heart overtook my desire to continue playing so I contacted Pacific to cash out. I was horrified at the experience. It seemed because the amount was what it was that they didn't want to cash me out. They kept holding it up for one reason or another. Finally after faxing everything they asked for to Gibraltar they released the money, two months after I requested it. After the Pacific experience I secretly opened an account at Party. My girlfriend thought I had a sleeping disorder because I would stay up most of the night. Unbeknownst to her I was on Party multi-tabling. To hide my playing I even consented to her wish to seek professional help for sleep disorders. They gave me Ambien which is a sleeping pill that puts you to sleep for exactly 8 hours. Perfect, I could play all night and sleep all day. I did nothing...nothing...productive in 2004 except play poker. I started making the two hour drive to Foxwoods 2, 3, 4 times a week, making it back by 6pm when she got home. Weekends away with the boys were actually spent at Foxwoods, sleeping in the back of the $500 van I bought for just that reason. She finally wised up. The last thing I heard from her is that she was sick of being a "poker widow".

Fast forward to today. I am still living in a basement apartment. No girl, my friends have all pursued a normal life and as a result I have none. I play 4000 hands a week on various sites. Through the softening of the rental market in Boston my once thriving business now costs me $3000 of my own money a month to continue. The value of my holdings thru sales and market value has dwindled to $1.8 million of which I only own 67%. I don't even visit my properties anymore. I can't work, my stock trading license has long since expired and physically I'm a wreck from sitting at a poker table for the last 22 months.

I guess I need a reason for writing this, and I don't have one. I know I need help, help to have a normal life and maybe, just maybe, this is the first step.

[yellowjack]

You gotta get a balance in life. Join a co-ed softball league to start.

[KaneKungFu123]

pretty sick stuff.

stop gambling.

I can't believe you've never heard of Gambler's Anonymous. Look in the phone book.

[img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[reddred]

Wow...thats some story. Look, you have to realize that there is more to life than chasing the gambling rush. You stated with your first girlfriend(before the gambling rush took over), "life was good"......whether you realized that at the time or in hindsight, I don't know. Friends, family and nurturing those relationships is the real joy in life......chasing the dragon, so to speak, is like scratching poison ivy......it only makes the itch stronger and makes you scratch harder. Get yourself together man. Take a break from poker and start working out, eating right and getting some sleep. Get the hell out of the house....go catch a beer and link with some friends. You mentioned most of yop ur old friends are pursuing normal lives.....well, thats what you aspire(I hope) to do. Re-acquanting yourself with these folks could be a positive influence on you. You've proven in the past that when you've had to, you can get a decent job and rebound financially....there's nothing holding you back except your own apathy. Get out of that basement apartment....must be depressing. Couldn't you sell of your part in the business and be sitting on a nice chunk of change? Of course, GA goes without saying. They can provide you with the resources you need to get your life together....and you might be surprised to find folks with more tragic consequences than your own. Hang in there man, and realize what your life is really worth. Best of luck.

[SNOWBALL138]

I stopped reading this when I realized that lakers games don't go until "3 or 4 in the morning" even if you subtract 3 hours for east coast time. This post is fictitious. Nice try. Loser.

[reddred]

honestly, who would go thru the trouble of writing that long ass post, and make up all those details and series of events....to what end? hardly anyones even replied to it.....

[Alex/Mugaaz]

[ QUOTE ]
I stopped reading this when I realized that lakers games don't go until "3 or 4 in the morning" even if you subtract 3 hours for east coast time. This post is fictitious. Nice try. Loser.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think this is real either.

[orange]

[ QUOTE ]
honestly, who would go thru the trouble of writing that long ass post, and make up all those details and series of events....to what end? hardly anyones even replied to it.....

[/ QUOTE ]

Well written/good read though [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Subfallen]

This post is ridiculously fake. Even I could write a better fake compulsive gambler story. You know how I'd start? I'd start by making a list of all the gambling/trading/poker stereotypes that I'm NOT going to artificially work into the story.