3d • 📖 Players Stories
I Forgot Why I Started Playing Poker
I'm sitting at my computer and Casino Royale is playing in the background.
I've seen it before. It's just noise.
But something makes me look up.
It's the exact moment Bond walks into the casino to face Le Chiffre. They sit down across from each other. The tension. The reading. The cat-and-mouse of two men trying to see through each other at a green felt table.
I didn't know then that those hands weren't real. That situations like that almost never happen in actual poker. It didn't matter.
The atmosphere grabbed me.
The mystery. The observation. The confrontation.
A game played face to face, breath to breath, where every blink means something.
That night I started Googling. I wanted to understand what this game was. I wanted to be in that room.
And the first thing I did was sit down to play online.
Within a week — maybe a month — the first dopamine hits arrived. A pot in a freeroll. A micro-stakes win. Money appearing in my account like it came from nowhere.
The dream got buried before I even knew I had one.
The thing that pulled me in — that initial spark, that scene at the casino table — was smothered by pings and graphs and volume. Gone in a month. Maybe less.
For years, through my entire poker career, I never thought about what that dream actually was. I invented new goals instead. Win a WSOP. Move up to high stakes. Build a real bankroll. They sounded right. They looked like vision.
They were never it.
I only understood what poker was for me — what it was supposed to be — when I stopped playing.
If I could start over, I would do one thing first.
I would describe the dream.
Not vaguely. Not as some distant "someday" goal. I would write down exactly what it looks like. The room. The table. The people sitting across from me. What kind of players they are. What it feels like to sit there, chips in hand, reading another human being in real time.
I would be specific about the emotions I want to feel. The calm focus. The aliveness of a big decision. The quiet confidence of knowing I belong at that table.
I would make pictures of it. Put them where I'd see them every day. On my desk. On my phone. Somewhere I couldn't ignore.
And then I would find ways to live with that dream as a partner. Not something far away. Not something I'm grinding toward for years while staring at a screen.
Little bites of the dream. Snacks. Small pieces I could taste during the daily routine.
Maybe a live home game once a month. Maybe watching footage of players I admire, not for strategy, but to remember what drew me in. Maybe just sitting at a table with friends, cards in hand, feeling the thing I forgot I was chasing.
The dream can't survive if it only lives in the future.
It has to show up today. In some form. In some small way.
And now I'm sitting here, thinking about that moment at the computer. The movie in the background. The scene that made me look up.
I wonder how different things would have been if I had just remembered it.
If I had asked myself, even once in all those years: why did I start?
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I Forgot Why I Started Playing Poker
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