One of the downsides to being a staff member is that the extra functions I have come at the cost of the size of the formatting box, so if my paragraphs aren't properly spaced you should blame Patrick. Anyway, I stuck a personal favorite of mine up the earlier today, so I decided that it would be good karma to also stick up my least favorite thing that I have ever written.
I'd just like to make clear that this isn't me simply fishing for a compliment, I've had more than enough positive reviews of this piece already. I originally submitted it as a piece of course work for my degree, and got a first which was all good. Unfortunately, writing this had quite a profound psychological impact upon me. Put simply... I hate everything about this piece. I hate the lack of narrative voice. I hate the style. I have how semi-colon happy I appear to be. Just about the only thing I like about this writing is the ti
tle.
Anyway, pumping this out had quite a negative effect on my writing and has, I feel, hindered me over the past year. (Emotionless Gelgarin gets quite different when it comes to his writing) As a result, I've decided to try and get this monkey off my back by doing a rewrite, and in order to have a point of comparison, I'm sticking the original (with a few grammatical changes and naughty words removed) up here for people to digest. I might put a rewritten version up in a few weeks.
Playing With Matches.
When you’re a kid your folks always tell you not to play with matches.
Don’t touch them or you’ll burn the house down, roast your family alive and give yourself third degree burns. People never realise that a match doesn’t have to be struck for it to ruin your life.
It was Jack who picked the first box up; you’re not really supposed to be able to buy them till your eighteen, but local shops never used to give a damn about that, so we could always grab a box if we wanted them. Anyway I remember us all gathering back at his place, dolling the little sticks out between us, and sitting down for our first ever game of poker. That’s how it began.
If you’ve never played before then words can’t express what it’s like. The excitement as the first round of cards get dealt out, the tension as you wait to see what lands on the table, the thrill of a bluff, the satisfaction of a win. Man; sex, drugs and rock and roll can’t even compare.
Before we’d even played a dozen hands I was in love. The intoxicating allure of the game had drawn me in and I wanted nothing more than for those cards to keep on hitting the table; desired nothing more than to keep playing the game. Oh; and did I mention that I was a god at it! I swept all the matches inside of ten minutes; dealt them out to the guys again only to win them all back once more. The game came as natural to be me breathing, and just like breathing, I didn’t want to stop.
At this point you’re probably throwing the words “gambling addict” around in your head, which is unfair and untrue. An addict needs something, and can’t do without it. I was never addicted to poker. I could put my cards down and stop playing at any time. I simply chose not to do so because I loved the game. Pretty soon my friends got tired of playing, something which was probably sped up by my consistent victories, and I was forced to look slightly further a field for a game.
I took to playing down at my local pub, another thing I probably shouldn’t have been able to do but that nobody cared much about. The old guys there were a bit wary of me to begin with, but I managed to win their acceptance (along with the contents of their wallets) fairly quickly. Match sticks were no longer acceptable as stakes now that I was playing with the big boys, and I took to wagering my weekly allowance. Pretty soon though, all I was ever spending was my winnings, the cards still kept falling my way, and I won far more hands than I lost. It was a couple of years later, after a particularly large win one Thursday afternoon (I’d bunked off collage that day to come play) that it struck me that this didn’t have to be just a hobby. I’d been reading on the net about various cards tournaments taking place around the country, and I reckoned I was easily good enough to clean up at a few of the smaller events.
Around this time I pretty much dropped out of college. I decided that earning some real money took precedent over the junk I was being taught every week. I’d spend my days doing whatever work I could find around town to build up a stake, and the evenings keeping an eye on the tournament scene, and planning my entry onto the circuit.
It took a couple of months for me to find a local competition which I could afford the buy in for. Eventually I found one taking place in a small roadside casino, just a couple of hours drive away on the state border, which seemed like a good starting point. I didn’t have a car at this time, so I had to bus up there and come back the following day; costing me about as much as entry to the tournament, but I felt it was worth it. Man was I right.
The first thing that shook me was just how many people had shown up. This was quite an isolated gig, playing for comparatively low stakes, and I hadn’t expected there to be that big a turn out, but the presence of over two hundred players proved that my expectations had been more than a tad inaccurate. I’ll confess that at this time I was scared out of my mind. Thus far I’d only ever played with small crowds of friendly guys who I already knew, and the fun had always been in the game, not the cash. A lot of the guys I was seeing now looked like professionals, people who were already living my dream; with far more experience that I could hope to have. I probably would have quit and walked out but for the fact that I was booked into the hotel for the night, and seeing as how I had no place else to go, I decided to play and hope for the best.
I got it. The first few rounds were easy enough. I’d been assuming a lot of the guys were pros simply because they were wearing suits, but half the guys on my table didn’t have a clue what they were doing. I was able to build up a strong lead early on. By the half way point I was soaring. This was better than any little friendly game I’d played before. The knowledge of the stakes, of what I was risking and what I stood to gain, pushed the excitement level through the roof, and I road through to the final table on a sea of lucky draws and euphoria. In the end I didn’t win; but I came in fifth; well in the money and returned home six grand richer than when I’d left; even with my celebration in the hotel bar factored in to the equation.
That’s when I really started to fly. I put my winnings to good use, staking myself in as many tournaments as I could find inside of Nebraska. I played in five events over the next couple of months; got to the final table in all but one of them, and earned myself more money in a season that I could’ve made in a year doing regular work. My folks didn’t like what I was doing, kept demanding I give the game up and try and get back into collage, but by now I’d raised enough to support myself, and was basically able to move out and start truly living the dream.
From that point on I basically toured the country like a nomad; going wherever the games where. Putting myself up in a cheap BnB, staying for the competition then moving on to my next destination. I played in card houses, in the back rooms of bookies, Indian casinos and anywhere else I could; always playing for higher and higher stakes. But the end of my first year on the road I had substituted the BnBs for proper hotels and discarded the bus service for airlines, confident that no matter where I went or what I did, the cards would fall in my favour.
It was in a classy little joint in Atlantic City that I met Sara. She was a Nevada girl who’d travelled up for the tournament with her father, a proper old school cowboy who I later discovered I’d actually knocked off the final table, and happened to be hanging out in the same hotel bar that I was holding a private and very well earned victory celebration. Anyway; what actually went down that night is still a bit foggy on account of the free flowing Champaign, but to cut a long story short me and her really hit it off, and somehow I ended up committing myself to travelling back to Carson City with her the following day. Now, don’t get me wrong; Sara was an amazing girl and I was completely taken with her; but, truth be told, the prospect of moving to Nevada held another temptation for me. The Vegas Strip and its twenty-four seven, no limit poker tables.
Las Vegas is something that most players only dream of. Vegas is to poker what the Superbowl is to football. If you’re there then it means you’re the best in the world, and the stakes played for are higher than anywhere else on earth. It’s not an uncommon sight to see people wagering millions of dollars on a single hand, then shrugging off the loss like it meant nothing more than losing a quarter down the drain. The Vegas strip is extremely expensive to live on, so if you live there then you’ve got to keep playing, and more importantly, got to keep winning. One dry period can have you out of there in an instant, and the guys I’d met on the circuit who’d been there spent all their time trying to win enough to go back. In short, the Vegas Strip is high stakes heaven.
Initially I didn’t try to live there; instead I’d fly up there to play for a few weeks every now and then, and spent the rest of my time in Carson City with Sara. I learned that she was very much the same as I was; disenfranchised with the dull nine to five life and craving of the thrill and adventure that I found on the poker circuit, and a year into our relationship we agreed to sell her house and move up to Vegas for good. The following six months were the greatest of my life. We toured to Vegas scene, changing hotel whenever we got bored, doing whatever took our fancy, living like royalty on my winnings, and man alive if I didn’t keep on winning. It was three months before we started planning our marriage; Las Vegas weddings are synonymous with a pair of drunks getting hitched by an Elvis impersonator, which wasn’t really our style, but fortunately the city does offer the real deal along with that.
It was shortly before we were planning to tie the knot that I suffered my first minor setback. We’d already decided that once we were married we would move back up to Carson City to be closer to her family, and I’d only hit the casinos if we needed money. Anyway, with just a few weeks left on the strip I wanted a big win to see us off… and things didn’t quite go according to plan. I won’t dwell on how ridiculously unlucky I was that night, but I ended up losing over one-million dollars during the course of an evening. One-million dollars which, given our extravagant lifestyle and the amount I’d spent on our upcoming wedding, I didn’t actually have.
At the time I didn’t consider this to be much of a problem; I dropped the wedding ring I was going to give Sara into a pawn shop intending to take the money from its sale, double it to pay off my debt and then buy the ring back with what was left, but unfortunately my years of winning seemed to have built up a lot of bad Karma, and no matter what I tried the cards simply refused to fall in my favour. What made this worse was that, after months of an extravagant lifestyle paid for by my winnings, Sara suddenly seemed to lose faith in my ability to play, and kept demanding that I just borrow money from her father to pay off my debt, and then leave the circuit.
Well there was no way I was going to start our new life together knee deep in debt to her old man, and things got quite heated between the two of us as her lack of faith in me became more and more obvious. In the end I decided to borrow the money from the independent lenders who operate on the circuit, planning to pay off the original debt; then use the leftover cash to get back on the tables and get myself back in the green. Unluckily for me, my fellow players, like sharks in the water, seemed to sense my desperation and proceeded to chip away at my stock until I was forced to borrow more money just to keep myself in the game. At this point, now that I wasn’t able to buy a bottle of Champaign every evening, Sara decided that it would be helpful for her to piss off back to Carson, telling me to join her once I’d sorted myself out, apparently not realising that quitting the circuit wasn’t an option any more, since I owed too much money to the wrong people.
I stayed up on the circuit, moving into the cheapest nastiest hotel I could find, pawning what remained of my assets (suits, watches, jewellery) trying desperately to get back on my feet. Sara phoned several times trying once again to convince me to let her dad bail me out, but I wasn’t having any of it; and repeatedly refused to leave Vegas until I’d won my money back. Then, clearly not having understood me over the phone, she decided to come back to the strip having got her father to wire the money over, to demand that I use it to pay off my debts or it was over between us. That sure as hell led to another fight, which I won’t go into, but it basically ended with me throwing her out of my hotel room and her declaring that we were through and catching the next train out of the city.
Which leaves me here; sat in a hotel room even the cockroaches have abandoned, not a penny to my name, spiralling debt with a ruined relationship.
Where did I go wrong?
Normal User
Normal User
