Alcohol … the Early Years - Part I

I have so much to say about the horrible combination of poker and alcohol that I could probably write a whole book about it. Well, I'm not going to do that, but I am going to try to condense much of what I want to say in this three-part column.

First, I'll need to take you way back to my earliest days of both poker and alcohol. I started playing poker at about the age of 16, but I was already a veteran drinker by that time, having had my first drinking experience at the age of 13. I was a pretty typical teenager in lots of ways. I wanted to be a rebel, and be bad and/or cool. Drinking was my way of "fitting in" with my peers.

Most of my friends smoked cigarettes, and by high school, most of them also smoked pot. I hated cigarettes, and was deathly afraid of drugs. Believe it or not, I never once smoked a joint, although I was a cigarette smoker for about three days. Luckily, my big, scary brother caught me smoking at the mall one day and threatened to break my neck if he ever caught me smoking again. I didn't really believe he was going to break my neck, but I wasn't going to take any chances. I loved my brother, but I was also deathly afraid of him when he got mad. He was already 6 feet 3 inches tall and 200 pounds by the time he was 16 years old.

So, anyway, drinking alcohol became a part of my life at a relatively early age. Actually, I was exposed to alcohol at an even earlier age, as both of my parents were social drinkers. They were not violent alcoholics, by any means; they just enjoyed alcohol with dinner and even more so at parties and get-togethers. I was never really subject to the dark side of alcohol, at least not as a teenager.

As you may have read in a past column, "Bettin' Benny vs. Slow Playin' Seto," my poker career started in home games with friends at rotating locations. I was 16 at the time and had no fake ID. The other players in the home game were all at least 19 (the legal drinking age in Canada), so having access to beer wasn't very difficult for me. All of the players in the game were friends, so the poker game was more of a poker game/party. A few of them smoked pot while our favorite singer Bob Marley's CD played on in the background.

We usually played for about six hours a night, almost three nights a week. I don't think I ever played a sober session of poker until I was about 18 years old. Playing poker without beer just didn't seem to be as much fun to me at the time.

The home game finally dried up a few years later, but by that time I was able to find a game at a private club called Check N' Raise. There was no alcohol permitted at this club, so I was finally forced to play "sober poker." As it turned out, I realized that I didn't need to drink to have a good time playing poker.

As the years went by, I learned that drinking and playing were a bad mix. By the time I was playing $10-$20 five days a week, eight hours a day for a living, I was no longer drinking and playing – except, of course, on "party day," when everybody drank and had fun (read my past column entitled "Party Day" for a full explanation).

I was into reading about poker, and trying to improve my game as well as my level of concentration while playing. I set strict rules for myself while I was playing. I would not have even one beer. One beer just wasn't going to work, as I was already aware of my tendencies: One beer would lead to two, two to three, and so on.

Sure, I could get away with drinking all night in my shorthanded $1-$5 home game, but the $10-$20 game I played in was pretty tough at times. One or two beers didn't have much of a negative effect on my game, but after 10 beers, it became rather difficult to let go of the 9 4 from first position in an 11-handed limit hold'em game!

In yet another past column, "Play Hours, Not Results," I told you that the seven or eight young pros working the $10-$20 game all quit at 8 p.m. After 8 p.m., we'd either go to a nightclub, go bowling, play pool, visit an adult establishment, or go back to a friend's house to hang out and play a card game called mille, which is very similar to canasta. In every one of these endeavors, alcohol was always present. I was no longer "drinkin' and gambling"; I was now gambling first and drinking later.

That basically covers everything up until I was about 21 years old and made my first trip to Las Vegas. As a teenager, I saw very little wrong with all of the drinking I was doing. I was young and having fun, and doing everything I wanted to do. I played poker when I wanted to, and had a beer when I wanted to. I had no bosses, no appointments … no responsibilities.

In Part II, I'll share with you my experiences with alcohol and pot-limit hold'em. Eventually, this three-part column will come together and there will finally be a moral to this whole story. Be patient, I'll get to it.

To read some of the past columns mentioned herein, go to www.fullcontactpoker.com.