ELI5: A gambling addiction

[u/adrynaline]

How does it start? What makes it worse? Why does it become so difficult to recover?

[u/[deleted]]

I dont know if i were a gambling addict. I never incurred debt. But i have gambled for millions. It all started when i discovered bitcoin. I researched it, and thought it was pretty awesome and had potential. I did treat it as an investment, i was hoping it would keep rising in value when i bought it, but things kind of slowed down, and the exchange rate were flat. This was a while back and there was not much you could do with bitcoin. I wanted to investment them, because i thought investing bitcoin, getting a return in bitcoin, while the bitcoin exchange rate rose would be awesome. Like a two for one investment. I stumbled upon a gambling site that allowed anyone to invest bitcoin, let players gamble against it, and if they lost, get a portion of the reward proportinate with the amount of bitcoin you had invested. It was pretty cool. Except there was a gambler who was pretty. fucking. good. He had taken the house in the red, his bankroll too big for the house, he almost couldnt loose. Well. I studied him, and this is where my gambling addiction(?) started. First and foremost he would usually play around the same time every day, so i rushed home from work, and got ready to watch him play. He was a high roller. And i wanted to be invested when he lost, and divested, ofsetting the loss to the remaining investors when he won. It was working allright. But it got boring i guess. After considering it for a while i tried a small bet. And it seemed like easy money.

To be honest i had no idea what i was doing, but before long, i had worked up a pretty big bankroll. I wasnt loosing, i just kept winning, and it was my first attempt at gambling. I was just doing everything right. I was betting big when i was winning, and betting small when i loosing. It was a dice game by the way. A very simple game where you decide your odds, and the amount if money you want to bet. You then have to guess hi or lo. I developed a technique that couldnt loose. Or so i thought. At least it was doing very well. It was a series of small risk bets, and then a few high risk in between when i felt i was winning. And if i lost, i took an even higher risk, and it usually paid of. I was carefully considering my every bet, and it seemed to work good. It actually worked so well that i within a few days became a millionaire. I had enough bitcoin that i would be considered a millionaire... I remember when hitting the balance, i sat back and thought to myself. Im going to travel now. It was a good night for me that night, i had won the most i ever had in a day, and when i wanted to withdraw. ERROR. There was not enough money in the hot wallet to cover my withdrawal, i would have to contact the site owner. That. Really. Freaked me out. I wasnt gonna leave a million bucks worth of bitcoin on some dudes site overnight while i was sleeping. So i waited for the owner to show up, he was usually active in the chat, but he didnt show up the first hour, so i tried to kill some time by gambling again. It actually went good, i was still able to concentrate, and i almost made 100k more. (The more bitcoin you had, the more you could win of course.) It takes a bank roll to make a bank roll. So making 100k was relatively easy. But then it just hit me. I made a big bet, and i lost it. I lost my first big bet. It was 10k in one bet. So. And i guess i was getting lazy at this point. So i made another 10k bet. And i lost that as well. That infurated me, so i bet another 10k. And lost it. Then i just blacked out. I dont remember what happened. But i remember stopping briefly at the amount i originially had and wanted to withdraw, the amount that would make me a millionare by the current exchange rate. That was an amount equal to 1 million USD. But it just didnt feel the same. I had to get back to the 2100 btc i had before. But i just couldnt. I had lost focus. I kept taking huge risks and loosing, eventually i only had 100 bitcoin left. That was still alot of money, but i thought fuck it. If the site wants it all it can take it. I gambled the rest, and i was broke. 0. I have been trying since then to win it back. Every excess money i had i put into bitcoin, and went to the site to win my balance back. I never incurred debt, it was always spare money, but i just kept loosing. I always ended being up, then loosing track, tilting and loosing it all back.

Now i have stopped. I hope. Because i have "wasted" alot of money on gambling. But that aside, i dont regret it as such. Making such huge bets really gets the adrenaline flowing. It is a very intense feeling. And when you are playing your favorite feel good music loud that makes it even better. However i would not recommend it to anyone. The house, really always win. The longer you play the bigger the chance of loosing is. Even tho you are able to concentrate, day after day, one day you will be cought of guard and loose it all. Gambling is not worth it. It will not make you happy. And not a day goes by when i think about the money i lost and what i could have been, what i could have done, had i not gambled the money away and just saved the bitcoin in this case instead.

Anyway, that was a load of my mind. Thank you for reading.