Reality Check at the World Series of Poker

A few weeks ago, I was sweating a friend in a high-stakes poker game in Los Angeles. He'll remain nameless here, because I'm going to go into details he shared off the record.

He told me he was in the middle of the worst poker losing streak of what I knew to be a pretty impressive career, getting hammered in side game after side game, and had set a personal best (worst?) for the most money lost in a week just before I arrived.

I knew enough about this fellow's life to know that he had been going through some extremely difficult personal times, none of which had anything to do with poker. Various family members had ailments and illnesses, and he had been deeply troubled by them.

I asked him why he was out playing poker if he was running so bad, and if he thought the personal troubles were adding to his poker troubles.

"I'm playing for a few reasons," he said. "First, over the long run, I've been a strong winning player, so I can't assume a short-term streak changes that. Second, and maybe more important, the rest of my life is in such a shambles right now that poker gives me an escape, a chance to focus on something other than my family troubles. The only problem is, I've been getting my butt kicked at the poker tables, and that hasn't been much fun, so it hasn't been much of an escape."

Winning poker requires not merely skill, but also extraordinary emotional control and an extremely clear mind, so looking at my friend's situation from the outside, it wasn't that strange to hear that he was losing, and that this losing wasn't doing much to provide him with a happy "escape" from his more serious difficulties.

Many people (fortunately, not this friend) turn to drugs to escape their very real and very painful personal difficulties, and the sad and difficult part of this trap is that the drugs, or the alcohol, usually work, for a while. You do forget your troubles … for a while. Eventually, the drugs or alcohol wear off, and the troubles remain, leaving the individual with two choices: dealing with the source of the problem, or ingesting more drugs and alcohol, which, of course, just postpone the original problems and often add new problems of their own.

This month, one of the greatest poker players who ever lived, Stu Ungar, is being inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. Stu won three world championships despite problems with drugs and alcohol that robbed him of much of the middle of his short life, and eventually ended it.

In between listening to my friend talk about how the worst poker losing streak of his life was coinciding with the worst personal troubles of his life, and the time when I will be seeing Stu Ungar posthumously inducted into poker's Hall of Fame, I ran into some pretty severe personal troubles of my own. My sister developed pneumonia and peritonitis, and four days later, my stepfather died. I got the news about my stepfather about three hours before I was set to play in the opening event of the 2001 World Series of Poker, the $2,000 limit hold'em tournament.

I lasted only about three hours in this tournament, and while getting two pairs of pocket rockets cracked and having a pair of kings go down in flames during this brief span didn't help, I'm now quite convinced that the emotional disorientation of all this bad family news played a role in my disappointing finish.

I left the Series shortly thereafter to attend the funeral, and didn't return for a few days. I take a lot of pride in my poker writing – I know my writing is better than my playing – and I have been able to tell that my first couple of WSOP stories, while acceptable, don't reach the standards I set for myself. My heart just isn't in it, at least not yet, and if my heart isn't in it for my true love and vocation, writing, I can only assume that my poker playing will be worse, so I'm not going to play any side games or enter any tournaments until and unless I feel like I'm back on an acceptably level emotional keel.

A great many recreational poker players engage in their games because they offer a nice escape from other areas of their lives with which they are less than happy. If you're one of those players who keeps records, I urge you to add a column to your mathematical records, indicating what you considered your emotional state to be before arriving at your session.

My best guess, based on what I observed in the high-stakes game, what I see in my own writing, and what everyone says about The Great Stu Ungar, is that when your emotions aren't screwed on straight, your poker game won't be, either. If you want to dodge the sessions where you're most likely to go on tilt and lose a big number, try to find something else to do on poker nights when you just don't quite have your act together. Watch Rounders if you must work poker into your evening. Just don't play. Your escape from your troubles will probably only lead to more troubles.

Andrew N.S. Glazer, the author of Casino Gambling the Smart Way, writes a weekly gambling column for the Detroit Free Press, and is the online poker guide for www.poker.casino.com.