1. Did you ever lose time from work or school due to gambling? Yes.
2. Has gambling ever made your home life unhappy? Yes.
3. Did gambling affect your reputation? Yes.
4. Have you ever felt remorse after gambling? Yes.
5. Did you ever gamble to get money with which to pay debts or otherwise solve financial difficulties? No, but I used money on gambling that should have been used to pay bills.
6. Did gambling cause a decrease in your ambition or efficiency? Yes, at least eficiency at work.
7. After losing did you feel you must return as soon as possible and win back your losses? Yes. That is the reason for reloading several times per day. See my gambling pattern here.
   
8. After a win did you have a strong urge to return and win more? Yes. I seldom managed to leave the table with a big win. I continued and then lost all.
9. Did you often gamble until your last dollar was gone? Yes.
10. Did you ever borrow to finance your gambling? Yes, a couple times from my friend “Troy” (poker buddy), but I actually managed to win some money and pay him back very quickly.
11. Have you ever sold anything to finance gambling? No.
12. Were you reluctant to use “gambling money” for normal expenditures? Yes.
13. Did gambling make you careless of the welfare of yourself or your family? Yes.
14. Did you ever gamble longer than you had planned? Yes. Several times through the entire night.
15. Have you ever gambled to escape worry, trouble, boredom or loneliness? No.
16. Have you ever committed, or considered committing, an illegal act to finance gambling? No.
17. Did gambling cause you to have difficulty in sleeping? Yes, I remember one time I was so frustrated after loosing that I couldn’t fall asleep. I had to stand up and return to the online poker table to try to win back my losses.
18. Do arguments, disappointments or frustrations create within you an urge to gamble? No.
19. Did you ever have an urge to celebrate any good fortune by a few hours of gambling? No.
20. Have you ever considered self destruction or suicide as a result of your gambling? No.

Most compulsive gamblers will answer yes to at least seven of these questions. I answered yes to 13 of them.

I realize that my gambling the last 12 months has been far from healthy, and that I need to take a break, and also fix my personal economy – which has suffered hard this year. 

Just to characterize how it is possible to spend a lot of money on poker, I will illustrate how even reasonably “small” amounts add up. Here is what I spent August 2008 on poker (USD):

 Sum total for August: 1093 USD

Sunday the 30th of November 2008 is an important date. The woman renting out the apartment my wife and I live in called my wife’s cellular. Reason being: She had not reached me for 1 week via e-mail or cellular. I had stayed out of reach.

It was quite a shock, because I had told my wife that the rent in November was paid (we pay 1 month in advance the 15th of every month). Now she got to know the truth. The last rent was 2 weeks overdue, and we were given 2 days to pay, otherwise the contract would be resigned. I had to come clean and tell my wife everything. How I had wasted most of my money playing poker the last months, and that I had not open a bill in months.

It was indeed very embarrassing, but also a big relief. I had obviously been quite stressed out for several months already for the situation I had put myself in. Still I had not put myself to confront the truth. Instead I had continued playing poker and ignoring envelopes in the postbox. I just took them to my work place and stored them there.

I have had periods earlier in my life where I have gone a while without opening envelopes. But never as long as this. And never in combination with gambling. So now I am in a deeper economic crisis than ever. Also I have more debt than ever. And I have a wife now (married July this year). We can call her “Karen” in this blog.

Luckily “Karen” is a very economical woman, coming from Latin-America she is used to thinking smart and making money last longer. I met her while she worked as Au Pair in my country. After 2 years she had to return to her country July 2007. I visited her December 2007, then she returned to my country April 2008. 

It was very hurtful for “Karen” that I had to admit to her 5 months into our marriage that I had lied about my personal economy, and put us both in a challenging situation. We have not have openness about my economy, but now she has been granted full access to my Internet bank and we are now working together on dealing with the situation. 

The first couple of days I was sure she was going to leave me, and travel back to Latin-America. Luckily she seems intent to stay  and give me a chance to prove to her that I can change my behavior.

In the period of February 2004-December 2007 I earned my living through my own business, working as a consultant. This year I have not taken care of my business, partly because I got a steady job and did not have the economical need.  And partly due to my general negligence of opening post in my mailbox and taking care of my economy.

Even though I have gotten a steady job, I still have not closed down my consultancy business in a proper manner, and now I have tax debt and unpaid bills in my business to take care of in addition to saving my personal economy.

October 2007: 746 USD

November 2007: 608 USD

December 2007:

January 2008:

February 2008:

March 2008:

April 2008:

May 2008:

June 2008: 1450 USD

July 2008: 2323 USD

August 2008: 1093 USD

September 2008: 2565 USD

October 2008: 1183 USD

November 2008: 866 USD

SUM TOTAL: 9651 USD (for the months I so far have calculated above)

My gambling has primarily been done on Partypoker and Pokerstars. Today I tried to go back in my transaction history. Both of them were problematic to recall the complete deposit history.

I also discovered that my Internet bank did not keep records for more than 6 months back, so I need to contact my bank tomorrow and get my bank statements for the period December 07-May 08.

Amongst other online activities, I noticed he was playing poker. I knew absolutely nothing about the game, but I was intrigued. I had him explain me the basics of the game – Texas Hold Em poker. Then he helped me set up my own account at a poker site called Partypoker. He also deposited 25 usd on my account as “start capital”. It was the start of what was to become my biggest monthly cost in my personal economy.

The result after first month of poker gambling
The 8th of November I summarized in Excel what I had spent on poker since my first deposit the 15th of October. In this period I had deposited and lost 1354 USD. But not without some winnings along the way.

Psychologically my few winnings in between my loosing gave me the motivation to continue, and the false belief that this was a game that I was close to mastering. So even after making this excel overview, I continued playing poker, and it would go another 2-3 months before I would come back to my Excel sheet for another overview of my spending.

Now that I look at the numbers those first few weeks I am kind of surprised on how much I spent on poker those first weeks after learning the game. My gambling accelerated quite fast.

Details about my spending on poker the rest of 2007 will be filled out in this blog as soon as I backtrack my bank statements. I will also cover my poker playing in 2008 up until present time.

6th of December 2008: Crisis in my economy
Today is Saturday 6th of December 2008. So more than one year has passed now. I have not played poker for about a week and a half, because I don’t have money and because my wife discovered I did not pay the rent of our appartment for November. In short: At the present time my economy is in a crisis. Not only because of poker, but of course poker has a lot to do with my status quo.

One week ago I had to tell my wife about my economy and my poker gambling, which led to a promise not to continue gambling online.

My wife wants me to go to a psychologist to treat my gambling addiction. I believe I have the power to change my own behaviour, so I am not very motivated on doing that. But I did agree to her holding my Internet bank calculator and my only credit card. So at least she can trust me not to gamble any more in the near future while I am repairing my personal economy.

My plan is now to take a break from the poker table and focus on repairing my personal economy and writing about it on this blog.

If you want to make a contribution to this blog and me in my desperate financial situation, you can give a donation via this donation page (DigitalCharity.com).

This blog will be a mix of personal news from my economic life, as well as try to give general advice on personal economic issues.

It was not the financial crisis who ruined me, but my own mistakes. The causes to my problems are a combination of not opening and paying any bills since April-May 2008, and online gambling (Poker). I will share more details in comming blog posts.

I will be anonomous for obvious reasons, but my blog posts will be quite honest, and I hope others in my situation will get inspiration from my blog. In this moment, I don’t have a complete overview of all my debts. As a reader, you will get a chance to follow me on my road to economic recovery.

If you want to make a contribution to this blog and me in my desperate financial situation, you can give a donation via this donation page (DigitalCharity.com).

So ! Welcome to this blog, which will be updated on a daily basis.