Bless me, for I have sinned--or have I?

I. Nelson Rose is one of the most consistently interesting and informative columnists on the Poker Player Newspaper roster. In the current (September 1, 2008) issue, he takes a break from his usual subject matter of legal questions, and turns instead to the question of how to measure problem gambling in a person who makes a living playing poker, or is at least a serious amateur. The standard Gamblers Anonymous questionnaire doesn't work well for such people. So Mr. Rose concocted his own set of 15 questions, acknowledging that they are not scientifically validated.

I thought it might amuse my readers to peek in on my answers as I bare my sole to Mr. Rose, who is now my confesssor. (Confessor is a strange word, in that it can refer to either the person confessing or the person hearing the confession, and context is not always sufficient to tell which is intended. I meant the latter.) I trust that PPN will not seriously object to my reprinting the questions, since Mr. Rose's columns show up online for free a couple of weeks after publication. (See here for his archives.)

1. Do you play for stakes that you know are too high?

Never. The closest I've come is experimenting with the next step up, to see if it's profitable to play higher. But that's not stakes that I know are too high--it's trying to ascertain whether they are too high. I think that's a major, substantive difference, and not just quibbling over words.

2. Do you sometimes feel you can't quit because you are behind?

Strangely, no. I realize that this is an extremely common problem, but it's not one that I share. I hate leaving the casino when I'm behind as much as anybody, but I'm pretty realistic about recognizing that I'm not playing well, or the table doesn't have enough soft spots to make earning easy, or the poker gods are just determined to beat me every which way on a given day. If I ever lose more than what I had intended as my limit, it's because I stop and take stock of whether this is actually a game I can beat and have so far just been unusually unlucky. If I can honestly assess that that is so, I'll keep playing for one or two additional buy-ins, but if the bad streak continues, I don't feel any of the compulsion to stay until I have broken even again, which so many others have described as their downfall. Yeah, I hate leaving, but at such a moment I realize that the only alternatives are leaving down X dollars, or leaving later down X + X dollars, because the trend is not reversing itself.

3. Do you sometimes feel you can't quit because you are ahead?

No. On the contrary, I may leave money on the table more than I should because I so enjoy the feeling of walking away winner.

4. When you lose, is it often because of bad beats?

Yes. But I'm not sure what Mr. Rose is getting at with this question. It may be that it's an honesty question, probing to see whether one will confess to bad play. I'll certainly confess to bad play. In fact, when I have a losing session, after I get home I try to make a rough quantitative assessment of how much of the losing was because of getting unlucky and how much was because I played below my capability. That then allows me to start thinking about what I'm going to do differently the next day, so that I don't end up with two consecutive bad days. It feels like turning a negative into a positive that way.

Sometimes the assessment goes one way, sometimes the other. When I lose it is certainly not always because of bad beats, but it is indeed often. But it is universally recognized that that is the lot of the better players. The more consistently you get your money in as a favorite (presumably because of having more skill and experience than one's opponents), the greater the percentage of losses that will be because of bad beats. Somebody playing perfectly, as if he knew his opponents' hole cards, would lose only because of bad beats. So I really don't understand how this question and one's answer to it fit into Mr. Rose's apparent goal of measuring problematic behavior in a serious poker player.

5. Do you often get angry at other players at the table for such things as slowing down the game?

No. Never, actually. Annoyed? Definitely. Angry? Never. I'm a pretty cool-headed guy. I honestly can't remember the last time I was genuinely in a rage about something. Oh wait--yes I can. It was when I was out of town and learned that my ex-wife (we were going through a divorce at the time, but it had been quite amicable up until that bit of nastiness) had taken the opportunity to change the locks on the house, so that when I got back home I would have to start living out of a motel while that all got straightened out. Yeah, I was pretty ticked off about that. That was early 2006. That's the last time I was genuinely angry about anything, I think.

6. Have you gone on tilt more than once?

Well, yeah. But I can't imagine that there is anybody who has played several thousand hours of poker who could honestly answer this "no." In fact, I wonder if this is just meant as an honesty test--if you answer "no," then you're probably not being realistic about any of your other answers, either.

7. When you are losing, do you increase your bets to try to get even?

No.

8. Do you often stay in too many hands?

I suppose it sort of depends on how you define "often." But under most parameters that I would consider reasonable, the answer would be no. I think if I did, I couldn't be a long-term winner.

9. Do you drink a lot, sometimes going on binges?

None at all. I think the last time I had even a taste of an alcoholic beverage was about five years ago, at my best friend's 50th birthday party, when I tasted whiskey for the first time. One sip was plenty to confirm my suspicion that I would hate it. I am so boring.

10. Do you sometimes forget important social obligations, because you are playing?

No. I have so few social obligations that they're very easy to remember. I also tend to keep track of time reasonably well while I'm playing, because if I note that a couple of hours have passed without significantly increasing my chip stack, I consider that reason to leave, or at least change tables, because stagnation doesn't pay the bills. So I essentially never experience the phenomenon of being shocked to discover how late it has become. I do sometimes turn down last-minute social offers because I feel a need to keep playing, but that's because I treat it as I would any job, and work comes before play.

11. Have you misled or lied to your family, friends or at work about how much poker you play?

No. I really have no need or incentive to do so.

12. Are you increasingly using the ATM?

LOL. Good thing I didn't come upon this questionnaire in the first half of the month, in the middle of my horrible losing streak! Fortunately, the answer is no--at least as far as withdrawals go. I do use it for deposits, but I'm guessing that's not what the question is getting at.

13. Have you lied to get money to play poker?

Nope.

14. Do you feel bad about things you have done because of poker?

On a few occasions, I have had a bad day of poker and, as a result, felt crummy and unsocial, and cancelled a date or other planned activity with somebody, because I just wanted to sit home and mope and feel sorry for myself. But again, I don't think that's really the sort of thing the question is getting at. I've never been so upset because of losing that I get drunk, or get into a car accident, or hit somebody, or blow a wad of cash trying to win back my losses playing craps, or anything even remotely like that, and I assume that it's that sort of thing that Mr. Rose is intending to ask about.

15. Are you more interested in poker than sex?

I guess I'd have to say yes. But is that really a bad thing for somebody in my situation? Consider the alternative. If I spent six to eight hours a day engaging in, thinking about, reading about, and writing about sex, well, that might get me out of answering "yes" to this question, but then I'd have to turn to the Sexaholics Anonymous questionnaire and answer "yes" to all of their questions! And since that wouldn't generate any income for me, and would inevitably cause all sorts of other life problems, surely that would be a far worse situation to be in. Therefore, if a "yes" answer is a problem here, it's one I'm willing to live with.


So my score is 3 yes, 12 no, and all of the yes answers are, I think, not truly indicative of a problem. Mr. Rose doesn't provide any sort of scoring mechanism or interpretive answers, so I'm just having to guess at what he's thinking.