False. this is a non story. All we said is lets not LOL at addicts.
I don’t see how the response wasn’t “Good point, we didn’t think about that”.
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Lol
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You’re vastly overestimating how many people here are that good at poker.
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Tough to diagnose someone at a poker table. You don’t know their life, as they say. Would say that there was a lot more substance abuse I profited from. Cocaine and alcohol specifically.
The saddest gambling addiction I’ve seen is people running through disability benefits than credit card debt on scratch off tickets over a few years.
I’ve had a few people ask for their money back after I stacked them at a poker table, but never saw them again. I once saw someone say they couldn’t afford to rebuild in a super sad tone. Never saw them again.
During Covid here all in person lotteries were closed for a while. The casino has been shut down for a year. Retail sales of tickets was shut down over Xmas. Machines anywhere else were shut down. Wonder what that did for problem gamblers.
Wait… did you guys not know?
Gambling is like any addictive behavior. A large % of the money being lost gambling is being lost by a tiny fraction of the gamblers. It’s just like booze, drugs, you name it.
Even if you didn’t personally win the money off some gambling addict realistically the game you’re playing in is possible only because there’s some awful fish losing 15 bb/100 or more with borrowed money with the delusional belief that their luck is going to turn. Even if you’re very good, play high stakes, and primarily farm regfish where do you think those crappy regs are winning the money they lose to you?
Look I’m not saying this to be judgemental, I absolutely gambled for a living too, but there’s absolutely no doubt about this. This is just yet another example of ‘everything you can possibly do is problematic’ to some degree or another. I happen to think poker is low-medium problematic because the kinds of people who have addictive personalities like that are going to figure out how to ruin their lives somehow. Compared to say eating meat, which most of us also do, it’s pretty minor.
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Of course, but I’ve been playing for over 10 years and in a smaller market. There aren’t too many casuals. Everyone is a reg of some sort most days. In 2021, it’s rare to find some new kid or 50 year old dude at the table.
I told the story in discord of a friend in Vegas running up 2k to 150k two summers ago and it lasting two days.
Bored, in most poker games though that guy is super rich. In my local PLO game it was a passive 80 year old real estate multi millionaire. Online it was Laliberte. It’s obviously not a great feeling when they’re some poor sap.
Plus there are different degrees of addicts. I know functional alcoholics that have not lost everything but literally need to drink just to get through their day.
Just because you didn’t see someone hit rock bottom at a table doesn’t mean you didn’t play with an addict.
I bet a high percentage of regulars in peoples games are addicts to some degree.
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That’s it BS… That’s all I asked at the start was to give a recovering addict a little benefit when he reached out and said “I can’t do that, can we change it” and it was changed and he got his Jag free of a bet, easily and simply fixed.
We were never talking about actual active problem gamblers or whats best or worse for them.
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Would you classify the retired dude who plays from 12-5 every day with $200 and a vpip of 10 an addict? Because that’s the largest segment of the poker population.
I dont think there is a wrong answer here, but as has been hinted at, the addicts aren’t the “action junkies” generally. Those guys go broke quickly.
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The fact you are asking this tells me you don’t know what an addict is. I’m not saying that to be a jerk but that is not really the criteria I would use to diagnose an addict.
And I’m not a doctor capable of making that sort of diagnose anyways.
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Why make statements like “you’d bet a high % of people are” if you aren’t willing to classify the literal most obvious type of player that makes up the biggest part of the population? You’ve been weirdly aggressive itt, why?
Obviously not every omc is the same. Everyone has different lives and experiences. But people have already painted a wide brush, seems weird to stop now.
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Everyone defines it differently, but in my opinion, there is no such thing as a gambling problem. There is only really a “losing problem”. For example, if Bill Gates did the above, it may be an addiction, but it’s not a problem. On the other hand if the dude is barely getting by on his meager SS check, then it makes them a problem addict.
I should slightly amend the “I didn’t see much problem gambling at the table” line. Winnipeg used to have two poker rooms (and plenty of home games) while I’d travel to tournaments across NA. There was one room on the mostly white burbs, and one in the North end of the city, where the asian/indigenous population might have been the majority. The latter casino was ~20 minutes further and you saw a ton of depressing stuff there, but that poker room closed ~6 years ago.
But even if that addiction doesn’t lead to Gates going broke what if it led to him not spending enough time with his wife and kids and neglecting other areas of his life?
This thread is kind of a dumpster fire and I will take credit for that.
Addiction in general is something I am interested in because it has impacted my life in negative ways.
I would prefer to talk about it outside of it being related to a covid story.
The best book I have read on the subject is by my boy Gabor Mate if anyone is interested in the subject.
I’m checking out now, cheers everyone.
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Well, in Gates’ specific case, it would have been an upgrade over what he actually did with his free time.
Obviously, I’m kidding, but I get where you’re coming from. That actually used to be me. I used to love playing LHE. I played a lot and was a winner but never for that much (at best I was about $30/hr, but live, so lol sample size, I know). But the money was insignificant. I’d have been better off spending more time with family and friends or just pursuing other hobbies. I did have a lot of time back then, but it was a suboptimal use of time.
However, I pretty much quit cold turkey just before my first kid was born. Now I only play if I’m out of town and there is a casino available that spreads mid-high stakes LHE (so approximately never). So, I guess I wasn’t really an addict. But it was a problem.
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Sure, it happens, when I 1st entered the Poker world it was mostly problem people with addiction issues who ran amoke with the regs of the casino, I know but it was wild until 1 shot himself, a week before that they blew a few hundred grand.
The new generation in the Poker world is extremely different to the old, think TJ Cloutier? V yourself.
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You can PM me anytime to talk/chat or just blow off steam in the future Yadi.
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Saying you haven’t seen gambling addicts at a poker table is insane to me if you’ve played a lot of live poker. I will say i’ve seen literally hundreds of clearly gambling addicts that hurt their lives severely during my ~15 years of playing live.
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