Prs to be making me less broke? Financial Follies

[Anacardo]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't mean to kick you when you are down, and I know nothing about you personally, but u consider ureself a genuis, and after 2.5 years of being pro you went broke playing 50NL with no savings or backup plan?

Care to share how it happened?

[/ QUOTE ]

Sure, I guess.

Looking backward, busto comes down to these important factors.

1) The global antipoker conspiracy

So there was this bill and it made things a lot tougher. I'd dicked around and been knocked backwards time and again, but I finally had it squared away & was on the fast track to ballerdom when the bill passed. I moved across the country to get access to B&M play, spent enormous amounts of money in the process and dabbled in doctors & drugs for my well-documented personal problems. I hardly played all winter. When I got set up in LA I was a small fry again, and had to learn a new game - I was primarily a limit player until this year - on the fly. Didn't work out so well.

2) The whole lunacy thing

I have a lot more experience now than I did in 2005, but I maintain that before December of that year I had the psychological makeup of a much better player than I do now. My inner life and peace of mind have pretty much gone to pieces since then, and I've never recovered my sharpness, intuitive clarity, emotional control or stamina. This has also led to a lot of indirect expenses - I never would have moved to Atlanta the first time, or spend thousands out of pocket on therapy and drugs, or spent so much on travel & etc. if my personal live hadn't gone the way it has.

3) I'm kind of a screwup

I'm kind of lazy and lack character. Some of this can be attributed to 2), but for the longest time I genuinely thought that 10K hands a week was a lot. I could have played half again or even twice the number of hands I played in my professional career and avoided this whole problem.

I've never had 'six months' savings' or whatever the advised limit is. I took my entire income from poker starting at .5/1 FR limit. Moving up was a very laborious process at first. As for a backup plan - how many people really have their lives expertly contingency-planned, like it was the Normandy landing or something? I got into poker because I didn't see any other halfway decent options. I'm not sure I do now.