A poker player is something that I never expected to be. As an intelligent and logical person, I always thought that gambling, whether bingo or slot machines or lottery tickets, was a stupid waste of money. As a caring person, I have seen what addictions do to people (my job for 12 years involved workng with addicts). Although I never really thought about poker that much, if asked I probably would have considered poker, as a subset of gambling, to be just as dangerous as any other addiction.
To make a long story short, I couldn't manage to keep any kind of job or career going, and school was always a struggle as well. I eventually found out, at age 40, that I had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), as well as an IQ of 144-154, depending on the test. My theory is that my intelligence and my ADD masked each other for a very long time. How else can I explain loving school, working hard at it (or at least trying to) and having a high school GPA of 2.6? I have also attended 3 colleges, with only two associate (community college) degrees to show for it.
So, I've spent several years cleaning up the messes I've made, including losing my driver's license because I never took care of some minor traffic tickets, and the whole thing snowballed into a very big and expensive mess.
Fast forward to 2007-2008. I was a college senior trying to finally finish my BA, and everything completely fell apart. Once again I had trouble with my college courses. My living situation (I had a second residence, with roommates, for school) fell apart. After finally getting my license back and getting a car, my brakes failed, I sailed across a state highway, and I was hit on the driver's-side door at 60 miles per hour.
While I was recuperating at home (main residence with my wife and cats) I couldn't do much, but I could sit in front of a computer and play online poker. I had dabbled a little bit with poker after watching the pros play on TV, and I immediately realized that it was a skill game, not gambling (more on that, including legal definitions, in a future post).
To make a long story short, I'm actually pretty good at it. On 1/1/2009, I became a full-time poker player.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It will be interesting to see if your fellow poker players post stories about how they got started. Is there a typical or stereotypical Poker mentality?
ReplyDelete