Alcohol helps my
poker game quite dramatically in a positive sense, I become far less nitty and play much more aggressively and that makes me far more unpredictable and dangerous to my table opponents.
Having said that, there IS a line and I ALWAYS cross it... that moment when I should stop drinking because I am getting too drunk, but I never do stop. At that point, alcohol goes from being a positive for my game, to a terrible negative. I lose my judgement on the
hands requiring a deeper thought process, and I begin to take more risks than is wise. Sometimes I even misread the board or fail to put my opponent on a proper range (such as not realizing the flush just hit the river and fail to recognize they were drawing to it).
For this reason, my experimenting with alcohol usage is now over for good.
While poker is less exciting without drinking during my play, I realize that over the long run my game was never going to benefit from it and quite clearly this is the best move I could make. It was fun while it lasted, I'm honestly not even sure why I started doing it in the first place, I was never really a drinker for most of my life. I guess now I realize why - I suppose in all honestly, it is a sign of addiction when you start but cannot seem to stop at the appropriate time.
Long ago, before Black Friday (April 15, 2011) I went deep in an online tournament, but I got so drunk that I literally "blacked out" and had no recollection the next morning of how I had finished, and had to fire up the
poker site to check and see how much I had won. No, I didn't win the tournament, but that was a big wakeup call at the time. Due to our American government taking away our rights and our freedoms to play online at that time, it forced us to take a very long break from
online poker, and this incident had faded from my mind for the most part. My recent experiment with alcohol and poker brought this incident back into sharper focus for me and it all has led me to quit drinking again. I really don't miss it, but it was fun and I have no regrets - thankfully, I didn't really hurt myself or my
bankroll, and emerged relatively unscathed from it all. As I've always said, I learn my life lessons the hard way, by making mistakes and then correcting them. This is just another example of that process.
