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neverheeb
DD Elite
Degen Index: 5
Joined: 28 Jul 2004 Posts: 5908
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Dear President and Senators,
Let me start this message off by saying I am by no means an influential person by nature, and am not able to easily sway people with my opinions, but I hope with the deepest passion I am somehow able to convey my sentiments regarding the matter which has plagued my life for the last five years. I am going to give you a painful blow by blow along with a brief background so you understand where I am coming from.
When I was twelve years old my parents got divorced. Standard. I did not develop social skills until just recently, a decade after when this typically occurs, but instead smoked marijuana, perhaps to escape the daily reality that my mom was in her room every night crying for hours on end for two years. I completed high school with decent grades, despite my mind being consumed by drugs and the hope of being erased (I took accutane two or three times during high school, but that is a whole different issue). For one reason or another, perhaps through prayer from others and guidance from spirits of older generations I found that I could use exercise to "overcome". I got through these challenging times, but they showed to be only a teaser for what the next five years had in store for me. Out of Menlo-Atherton High School, I "earned" a 3.7 GPA and a 1400 on my SAT's despite never studying at home or doing homework - I had a knack for getting by - this would help me survive later in life.
I still smoked pot in college, (UC Irvine) but for the first two months of school, I really put some effort into my education. I still was very socially awkward around my peers, and being around others was incredibly hard for me in general, though I did make two friends. Their names are David Hicks and Bryan Paris, both of whom continue to play online poker to this day, and they are the two who initially brought my attention to online poker sites. They went to high school with me and took up smoking pot in the summer between schools. We smoked pot and played on PokerStars.com and PartyPoker.com. Bryan, being the very responsible individual that he is, finished the honors program with above a 3.0 GPA, and David also finished. My story is very different from theirs.
During the third quarter of our freshmen year, my two friends and I took a trip to visit our friend David Hestrin at UC San Diego. We took "magical mushrooms" and smoked pot. I had a very paranoid experience and found myself horribly depressed and crying in my dorm room for several days thereafter. I was somehow able to convert this experience into a good one and quit drugs altogether. I slowly got better and by the end of the year, and by the summer of 2004 a great happiness came over me; one that I had never experienced before. I surfed Santa Cruz, I ran hundreds of miles through the streets of Mountain View, and lifted weights at a local YMCA. I had a waiting job at a restaurant downtown. Things were looking up for me in a big way. Through my naivety though, I failed to cut out a practice that would bring me to my knees in the coming years.
My sophomore year at Irvine was off to an auspicious start - I felt great inside and I lived in an affordable, beautiful apartment on campus with my two best friends. They had been and always were open to loaning me small amounts of money to play with on PokerStars. They would loan me 16 or 27 dollars at a time for a "Sit n' Go" (a 9 man tournament which pays the top three participants). I played and took small loans, paid them off, lost my money, took more loans and paid them off until the endeavor was finally highly successful. I won a lot of money off that sixteen dollar loan. I accumulated $45,000 by the end of the quarter and had a fund lined up to drop the money into over the Christmas break. I had a plan to buy my mom some great jewelry and my dad a set of golf clubs - tears come to my eyes as I recall this. I lost the money, but my sanity was still in tact. That would soon be lost too though. My family was hurt from this and so was I. I did not take long to recover though. I believe I lost the money around the tenth of December, 2004, and on December 25th, only two weeks later, I deposited $200 into my PokerStars account. I had gained a great deal of attention during the first "run" in the online poker world. Again, I won, and even bigger this time. Keep in mind, I played in cash games and not tournaments, so these types of runs during such a short period of time playing poker are just generally unheard of. I gained access to the "restricted" tables on PokerStars from Lee Jones. 100-200 limit holdem and 75-150 Omaha Up Down are two online games where a player can lose $100,000 in a week and his or her mind right along with it. The truly sickening thing is that poker site now spreads a 1000/2000 game. I'll leave the math up to you for that. So I had access to the 100-200 table and ran my $200 into $65,000 by the beginning of February 2005, starting at 1/2 No Limit and working my way to higher limits while somewhat protecting myself from variance. Long story made short, I lost the money in about a week, but how I came to lose it you might find very interesting.
I sent a request to cashout $50,000 from PokerStars around February 1st, 2005. The money was withdrawn from my account, and two or three days later I was informed that the check could not be "processed" until the coming Monday. I took their word for it, the money was credited back to my account and I played with it breaking about even until Sunday, at which point I requested another $50,000 cashout via check. This time they told me that a player must wait a period of one week for the check to be processed. I asked that they please exclude me from play during that time and not adhere to any requests I make to play with the money in the meantime. They put the money right back in my account and I slowly and painfully lost it all... again, only this time I lost my mind with it. My roomate had a quarter ounce of marijuana on his desk and I promptly smoked it all. During the week after this, I slowly lost my grasp on reality, coming to question the very fabric that defines it. I know longer believed anything truly, physically existed, and that every experience was merely a corruption of data by the observer - me. It seemed to be a case of adult onset schizophrenia of sorts.
Shortly after returning home to northern California, I was sent into the Psych Ward at Stanford Hospital. I can tell you things got bad, but my words cannot describe my state at this time. I can however fill you in on the tell tale sign of a person overwhelmed with a very dismal feeling - their eyes begin to grow a yellow in them, and they slowly retreat from human contact. This I know from my very own experience. After being released from the hospital about two and a half weeks later, I returned home and went online. I found that my PokerStars account had been closed and that I had been permanently barred from playing at their site (BobbaD). Their security team would not then, and will not now, offer a reason as to why the "BobbaD" account was closed. The matter, as they put it, is not, has not, and will never be open for any type of discussion. They no longer respond to my emails regarding the matter.
The years preceding these events would teach me the harsh, course reality of the world for failures. I went in and out of waiting jobs for the next two years, but was just too broken inside to do anythinig productive - I was becoming more and more schizophrenic as the days slowly churned by. I found myself regularly in and out of psych wards in the area. My drug addiction progressed as I could not replicate my earlier runs in poker; I was chasing a broken dream, and in doing so, edging closer and closer to the point of no return. Sadly I was turned onto illegal street drugs such as meth-amphetamines and crack cocaine. Before long I was homeless wandering the streets of one of the most dangerous cities in the US - East Palo Alto. I spent around five months there smoking crack and begging for money from people at the gas stations. During that period I was almost the victim of a driveby shooting aimed at me, and also had a Desert Eagle shoved half way down my throat. I could go on about the atrocities of homeless drug addiction, but it does not serve a further point in this message; but believe me, I COULD go on.
I prayed every night for a month or so that maybe somehow, some faithful spirits might relieve me of this horrible circumstance and guide me down a better path. After several failed drug rehabilition attempts, something happened one night - I can't tell you why or how it happened, but it did, and I was able to get myself off the streets and clean myself up in a Santa Cruz sober living environment. I have my parents to thank for their continued support because without both of them, I would have been dead a long time ago, and that is a hard fact of my life, not an exaggeration of words. I have almost nine months clean without any drugs, alcohol or medications. I am enrolled at junior college and know if I stay level-headed, humble and caring the rest of my life I will feel a great elation from overcoming some very serious hardships. I am even on the way to quitting nicotine with the patch.
All that is worth saying at this point is that occasions of this nature happen daily to a great many US citizens because they are addicted to playing online poker. A great many to come will find themselves in similar to worse situations; they may not be so lucky as me - they could teeter over the edge and end up in prison, lose their mind forever and end up in a mental hospital, or they could die, and then what is to become of their poor tormented soul? What I ask of you now is a simple and honest assessment from your heart. Knowing that this goes on and could happen to your very own children, can you live with yourselves not banning online poker in America? It is your job to protect US citizens from the bonds of slavery, so please, take action.
Dan Bobba
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Ship it crucial
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