How can someone allow themselves to lose $1600 in one night? Of course I am just a poor woman playing low stakes and I would and could never keep that kind of $$ in a poker site. It shocks me as to how much $$ is in a poker site. I guess that is why all of the pros are on the major sites, more money for them to get their hands on.
You say this like a person has control. They don't
allow themselves to lose, when on tilt there is little to no control on emotions so it is not a matter of allowing themselves anything. This is why it is so important to stop playing when on tilt. You must be very new to this if having $1600 on a poker site shocks you. Just how much money do you think online pro's make in a year? $1600 is nothing for pro's and non pro's alike. I think you could keep that can of money on a site, if you were to consistently win large amounts of money playing
online poker (right now as a newer person to this it might not seem comprehensible) but there are situations where you could. There are several people who decided to give online poker a try and were very poor and now make big money doing it. Of course it's not your typical story but it's happened.
Anyways, I wanted to say that I completely understand what many are not understanding about getting so emotional about the game. People keep saying "it's just a game", and while it is, for some it's much more than that.
There's a guy I know who started to play poker at the casino I play at. The first year he played he lost a lot of money. He was a single guy who had made a lot of money at an early age in the stock market and didn't have a job. During his 2nd year of playing he begun making a profit on a regular basis, playing live, he didn't dabble in online play. After his third year playing, he started traveling around
Michigan and to Vegas and other cities and ended up making $125k. Not bad for three years playing poker.
He made the decision to sell his house and move out to Vegas. His first year there he ran in the red. After his 2nd year he lost everything, his bankroll, the extra cash from selling his house, his savings, stocks, everything. 2 years and he lost it all. His name is Eric and he is one of the nicest guys you'd ever meet. The kind that would give a stranger a place to sleep at night on a cold night, buy a homeless guy dinner, literally give you the shirt off his back.
Eric had a good life, had never been depressed but after losing everything he tried to commit suicide. It was a man who was going through some personal hardships that Eric let stay with him for a little while that came back to the house and found him lying on the floor unconscious. He had taken sleeping pills. Eric lived and is now working in Vegas as a dealer, he no longer plays the game.
A mutual friend of ours, who was a really good friend of Erics, flew out to Vegas and visited him in the hospital. It turned out that Eric viewed poker not as a game, but a dream. He made it his life dream to become good at poker and then to become a pro. He fell in love with poker the way people fall in love with their spouses. So for him, to not succeed and to go on life tilt and lose it all was a huge failure in his mind, one he couldn't get over.
So it wasn't just a game, he failed at his life dream.
Anyways, just saying I can see why some people feel so much stronger about poker than others. I can't relate, but I know Eric and can understand why things went so horrible for him and why he took it so very hard.
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