Can Work Ethics Save Us From Poker Addiction?

A recent beautiful piece by Lee Davy got many of us thinking again about the hush-hush subject of addiction. And if you’re reading this article on RankingHero, chances are you wouldn’t pass most of the basic self-assessment addiction tests available on the web.

Simply because it takes so much time to get better at poker and there are only three slots where you can get this time – work, family/social life, and your sleep. Take away 3 hours a day from any of them and they will obviously suffer, as will the general health and quality of your life. (No wonder all those young kids are taking online poker by storm - they have about 20 hours to spare for poker since they have no jobs, no family, their social life is on the Internet anyway and they need less sleep :)

Overall, there seems to be a high level of awareness among poker players (committed amateurs and aspiring pros) about the lurking dangers of addiction; rather than ask ourselves IF we are susceptible or already addicted, we KNOW we are at risk and are concerned with how to cope with it and keep it from getting out of hand.

And as in so many other respects, we look to the pros for models to follow. To quote Michael Craig, author of “The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King”:

“These guys may play poker 10 hours a day, but that leaves 14 hours in which they need to do something interesting. If they are home watching TV, they bet sports. If they are driving through the rain, they bet on how long it will take a raindrop to reach the bottom of the car’s window. They want to have gambling in every aspect of their lives.”

Yet they do manage to keep it out of poker and if some occasionally slip down a self-destructive path - as in the case of @Erick Lindgren  - the addiction is likely to lie elsewhere - sports or horse betting, even extreme prop betting.

In the 1970s Robert L. Custer was the first to introduce the concept of ‘pathological gambling’. He identified 6 types of gamblers, with the following definition of ‘professional gamblers’:

Professional gamblers make their living by gambling and thus consider it a profession. They are skilled in the games they choose to play and are able to control both the amount of money and time spent gambling. Thus, professional gamblers are not addicted to gambling. They patiently wait for the best bet and then try to win as much as they can.

So what about us, ordinary amateurs who find ourselves on the edge of the pitfall?.. Based on my own humble experience with problem gambling and online poker, I’d say we must cling to skill and ignore chance. And we must use the skill argument not as a form of self-delusion, but of self-defence. If we can’t treat it as a profession, we can at the very least regard poker as a second job or work assignment; we can:

• resist the rush of adrenaline and anticipation with a probability firewall;
• fight tilt with objective hand history analysis;
• forget about luck and losses and think in terms of variance and bankroll management;
• before playing, force ourselves to first read a chapter of one of the dozens of poker books we’ve got waiting on the kindle;
• never give in to simple happiness over winning a tough hand – call it satisfaction with a job well done;
• and from time to time, buy a lottery ticket or a few spins on a slot machine – just to fool our brain and give it some of the gambling excitement it craves.

We will still be annoyed by the ring of the telephone and we will still be depriving friends and family of our time and attention but at least we are more likely to remain on the safe side of the addiction abyss without giving up our absolutely maddening, nerve-racking, infuriating and exhilarating game - poker.