Survival Writing Poker, a short memoir series

The Tin Years

Anniversaries sneak up on you, or in this case, even slip by. At some point earlier this year, around May, ten years had passed since I wrote a resignation letter and changed my life forever: I became a “professional” poker player. It’s not the right word, but it’s the word and the person and the role whom my readers and the poker community expect, denigrate and revere all at once.

For me, this period is tied up with personal pains that I accept will never leave me and which I struggle against daily. Already an estranged person, the mistakes I would make in my personal life in 2014 would trigger personal catastrophe. I would lose my home, my friends, my future, even my tenuous sense of well-being, so carefully if misguidedly crafted. I had bet, in a sense, wrongly and on everything.

Yet the poker was never the problem. In fact, poker was a great part of the answer, especially had I been able to see it through properly. Poker was freedom, poker was the leaving behind of cowardice and employment and compromise. In fact, by 2015-16 I had more money than I ever had in my life, more than it seemed I knew what to do with. I planned on moving to Los Angeles, that revered city of true American life, the one Pynchon devoted his life to understanding and many poker players commit to enjoying. I would play on the streams and continue my ascent to poker. I would pay court to hero Limon, make fun of villain JJ, and do the live poker life right. What a happy turnabout.

That is, if I could have found the answers to my personal problems. Instead of bright lights, big city, I was soon wracked by the darkness of a near medical depression. There had been hints of it, odd feelings I could not explain but knew were not good. Then, it happened. I spent whole days on the floor, literally incapacitated by a physical despair, prompted but not completely on account of profound personal loss, a loss I am not allowed to really explain, bound by my word. Days turned into weeks and then months. I ran out of drugs and simply smoked into a stumbling oblivion, anxious and to be put briefly together only by coffee and bourbon. When I went to L.A. now for the RCP meetup and the LATB stream, it was an act of will to get on and then stay on the bus, never mind to sit in the game. I was ill and shaking; to have escaped scrutiny and to have won gracefully was a miracle.

And then, to keep winning enough to live. My expenses had become outrageous, as I no longer cooked for myself but went out for every meal, from breakfast to midnight ballast for the drinks that had started at noon. I got out of my head by working as a tournament reporter every now and then. Since it was unbearable to talk to people but my job was talking to people, I smoked constantly, on every break, at every moment I could steal away, sucking down cartons as if on private exhaust pipes. I dreamed of smoking four or five cigarettes at a time, so that I would not have to feel oxygen or the outer world. I stank and slept and oxidized into a new person and a new body I do not recognize to this day, an impossible one that is good for little and fits nowhere and doesn’t do any of the wonderful things I had taught it to do. I abandoned everything except, somehow, poker.

Maybe this was because poker was good to me even in these times, even as my skills at the table suffered and declined, because I also coached. I didn’t ask to be a coach, they had come to me. They were right, however, and soon it became part of my life, even my identity. It’s less so these days, as the interest in theory dies in favor of the interest in data and modelling, but the years of fairly intense poker ed were the highlights of a difficult time where only death seemed natural and consoling. I learned to look forward to teaching and grasped how some people truly need their jobs; that vocation can be the difference, to paraphrase old Henry Fool.

There is a lot to say about these ten years, this tin anniversary – this is the first of a few episodes, I think. Tin for flexibility, tin for strength. Not impervious, and easily cut, but resistant.

A strange ten years of survival, writing, and poker. Not a bad title hidden in there: Survival Writing Poker.

Survival Writing Poker: Being Wrong