I’ve been where you are. Here’s how I found my way out.

My Story

The gradual progression. Then the moment everything changed.

I remember gambling from an early age. My grandmother had Bridge nights. They gathered around the dining room table to play their “adult” card game — one I could never figure out how to play. I can still picture the scene I stumbled into at seven years old: overflowing ashtrays, train smoke gathering on the ceiling, rye poured in generous amounts, and the racket that went up whenever a hand was won or lost. Money changed hands across that table. They tried to be discreet about it, but that only made me look harder. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it, with all those vices congregating in one place. Which, of course, made me want in even more.

When I was eleven, she let me tear open a few Nevada tickets from a gas station. Three lemons in a row. Turns out I’d hit the jackpot — the top prize, and only one existed in the entire lot. She immediately anointed me her “lucky charm.” Praised me. Smooched my cheek. Handed me fifty bucks, which was more than I’d earned doing two months of chores. I felt electric. Special. Like I’d done something right.

I would spend a good part of my life trying to chase those same feelings.

Through my teens and early twenties, gambling was always around. In grade nine, I discovered you could bet on sports through the provincial lottery. Parlays only, but I didn’t care. No one was supposed to sell tickets to anyone under eighteen. Just like Bridge nights, the restriction only heightened the desire. It might mean walking to three or four convenience stores, but there was always someone willing to print a ticket for a fifteen-year-old. At school, there was always a Euchre game running in the cafeteria. After school, whether it was at the pool table or on a round of Goldeneye, there was always someone willing to play for money. For a long time, the wagers stayed small. I never chased. It was social. Going to the local casino was more about the experience than anything else — lose your twenty bucks at the slots, maybe fifty at a table, have a drink, soak in the atmosphere, go home. The amount I bet crept up gradually, but it was always manageable. I even had rules I stuck to back then: never more than ten percent of what I made in a month.

For a long time, I had a handle on things.

Then, at age twenty-four, I decided to check out an online casino. That was when everything changed.

What started as a quiet evening with a couple of beers turned into something I’d never experienced before. No crowded tables. No minimum bets. Nobody waiting for me to leave. And a lucky streak the likes of which I’d never seen — in a couple of hours, I’d taken my deposit to fifteen times what I’d put in. My girlfriend and I were taking a road trip the next day. The adrenaline was surging through me, not just at the money, but at what it meant. I started planning the weekend in my head. The upgraded hotel room. Taking her to a nice restaurant. A shopping spree. I had enough to do all of that and still come out ahead.

And even though I could have cashed out, I couldn’t stop. It was like I was stuck in a trance, unable to pull myself away from the screen. You can probably guess how the night ended. As fast as I’d built it up, I lost it twice as fast. I sat there staring at a balance reading zero, wondering what the hell had just happened. It was 2am. I needed to be up in four hours. And all I could think about was putting more money in and trying to get it back.

That was the first sign that something was changing. It definitely wouldn’t be the last.

Not long after, the poker boom hit. Chris Moneymaker — the accountant from Tennessee who turned a $38 satellite entry into a million dollars at the World Series of Poker — became a folk hero for an entire generation of guys my age. Like most of them, I was convinced I could do the same. What started as small deposits and learning the game became something I can only describe as an obsession. I went from losing deposits quickly to holding my own, and eventually to the point where most sessions saw me at least breaking even. It felt like proof. Proof that the dream was real, and that I was living it.

Just like that first night at the online casino, both my gambling and my personality were rapidly changing. What had started as an hour or two a night had become staying up until 6am every night. I used to be open about what I was doing. Now everything was hidden. On the surface, I told myself no one would “understand” my master plan. The reality was that I already knew. I knew that foregoing sleep because I was “running hot” was not the behaviour of someone with a healthy relationship to gambling. So I kept it hidden — from my parents, my friends, my girlfriend. From anyone who might see what was actually happening.

Eventually, my dreams of poker stardom hit a wall. After building up a decent bankroll over an entire summer, I decided it was time to move up stakes. I was cocky, arrogant, and impatient. In two weeks, I lost everything I’d built over four months. For the first time, I started chasing. I needed to win it back, and fast. Before long I’d cleaned out my savings account. Next was cashing out the small retirement fund I’d been building. I can still remember the guy at the bank asking, “Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” before I agreed. That didn’t last long either.

Here’s the thing about this that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it: no matter how much I lost, the wins always found a way to pull me back. Not because I was naive. Because I was looking for evidence, and the wins — however rare — were exactly the evidence I needed. I’d build a system for poker. Then sports betting. Then daily fantasy. Then roulette. Each one would work for a stretch. Each period of success felt like confirmation that I was close to cracking it, that a little more discipline and bankroll management were all that stood between me and a completely different life.

The big win. And why it still wasn’t enough.

As the years went on, it was getting harder and harder to ignore the cumulative time and money I’d sunk into this. The idea that had hooked me in the first place — that gambling was a ticket to freedom from the 9-to-5 grind — was getting harder to keep believing. So I built myself a new story. The kind you see in heist films. I just needed one big score. A chance to clear the debts, reset, start clean.

And then one afternoon, it happened. Playing online blackjack, I went on a run of the most improbable proportions. Multiple times I was convinced there had to be a software error, that an error screen was about to pop up and render everything null and void. My balance kept climbing. I remember hitting a number and thinking: this is it. I had enough to pay off every credit card. The balance on my truck. A down payment on a house. Everything I’d been telling myself I wanted. Right there.

But I couldn’t stop. I told myself I needed a bigger down payment. Besides, why would I stop when I was running this hot? Within a couple of hours, it was all gone. And just like that first time years earlier, I sat there in disbelief, trying to understand how I’d just watched an obscene amount of money disappear.

In the days after, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not in an abstract way — I genuinely could not stop. And for the first time, I couldn’t lie my way out of what that meant. If I couldn’t walk away when I was up that much, I was never going to walk away. There was no version of the story where I got control back on my own. It was the first time I remember saying to myself: “Chris, you’ve got a serious problem here.”

So I vowed that was it. Time to stop for good.

A few weeks passed, and the lies came back. I convinced myself the problem wasn’t gambling — it was blackjack. Too fast, too reactive, too easy to slip into a trance and lose control. I decided to stick to poker exclusively, tournaments only, where my losses could be capped. If I could just hit one big finish, I’d cash out immediately, I promised myself. And so I kept going. High-stakes Sunday tournaments, chasing the miracle finish that was always one week away.

This is the true nature of a gambling addiction. The delusions. The distortions of reality. I had actually convinced myself I was going to win the Sunday Millions on PokerStars and walk away clean.

By my late thirties, life looked nothing like what I’d expected when I was twenty. Same job I’d never really liked. Failed relationships. A mediocre apartment. Debt I’d stopped even pretending to pay down, because what was the point when the next paycheck was already spoken for. I’d pushed most of the people closest to me away. And somewhere along the way, I’d just stopped caring.

“The cruelest part wasn’t the losses. It was that gambling had become the only thing that still made me feel something — and it was also the thing that was destroying me.”

The walls close in. And the moment something finally shifted.

By the summer of 2019, everything I just described was in full swing. The debt had reached a point where the interest alone was eating most of my take-home pay. I was so far in that gambling my way out felt like the only option left. Except by that point, any pleasure I’d ever gotten from it was completely gone. I’d log on in a full state of panic, throw up a prayer that tonight would be the night everything changed, and log off with more anxiety and rage at myself than when I’d started. I would regularly slam my laptop shut, midway through tossing it frisbee-style into the wall — but I always held back at the last second. Because I knew if I destroyed the laptop, I’d have no way to gamble.

Every session made it worse.

As fall arrived, my body started keeping score in ways I couldn’t ignore. Daily headaches. My doctor couldn’t find anything physically wrong. When he started asking about stress and sleep, it all made sense. The debt was strangling me. Gambling was making it worse. I was using alcohol and weed just to get to sleep. I wasn’t eating properly — any money that wasn’t going toward gambling felt like a waste.

Then the walls really started closing in. Cards maxed and cut off. Letters from the bank marked “urgent” that went straight into the trash. My phone ringing two or three times a day with collectors I refused to pick up. I started putting my phone on silent all the time. One of them eventually tracked down my parents’ number. My mom called to let me know someone was trying to reach me — said she wasn’t sure if it was a scam. I’m still not sure whether she believed that, or whether it was her way of telling me she knew something was up.

The final blow came in two parts. I found out my overdraft had been cancelled when my card was declined trying to buy a coffee at McDonald’s. Then on payday, I checked my account and nearly everything was gone — not to gambling this time, but to the bank, who had simply started taking what I owed them. About seventy percent of my paycheque, gone before I could touch it. Somewhere in the fine print of the credit card agreement was a clause letting them garnish directly from my bank account if I didn’t pay. My strategy of ignoring and evading my debt was starting to show its flaws.

The dark thoughts started coming around this time. That maybe the world would be better off without me. That maybe the only way out was through the one decision you can’t undo.

I want to name that because it matters. People with gambling problems are significantly more likely to think about suicide and to make a plan. I was deep in those numbers without knowing it. If you’re reading this and you recognize that feeling — please know you’re not alone. And it does not have to end there.

It didn’t for me. But it almost did.

I eventually made the call to my local addictions centre. One of the hardest phone calls I’ve ever made. I did an intake. I was invited to join a weekly problem gambling group. And then the day arrived — and I didn’t go. The anxiety got to me at the last minute. I waited for someone to follow up. Nobody called. Not that day, not the next. When a week passed with nothing, I told myself the same story I always had: nobody cares. That was fine by me. I’d make one last stand on my own.

A few weeks later, I relapsed — badly.

“When you run from something, it will never stop chasing you. I’d been running for over twenty years.”

Then came a Sunday morning a few days before Christmas. I woke up and something felt different. Not just physically exhausted — though I was — but completely emptied out. Tapped. I sat on the edge of my bed and didn’t reach for my phone. Didn’t check the lines. Just sat there.

And I asked myself, for the first time with any real honesty: what does my life look like at fifty? At sixty? If I keep going, is there going to be anything left to look back on — or will it all have gone toward chasing the next bet?

That thought scared me more than anything that had come before it.

Something settled. Not excitement — more like a tired, clear-eyed acceptance that it was time. It wasn’t their job to chase me. I’d been handed a door and hadn’t walked through it. That was on me.

I made a commitment that Sunday. Don’t gamble over the holidays. Call the centre as soon as they reopen. Get to a GA meeting. I kept every one of those promises. The first week of January, I found myself at both.

What recovery actually looked like. The part nobody talks about enough.

I won’t pretend it was clean or linear. It wasn’t. It was full of setbacks, real progress, and falling back again. It still is. That’s the part nobody talks about enough.

What made the difference wasn’t willpower. I’d had plenty of that — or thought I had — and it had never been enough. What made the difference was being willing to do the uncomfortable things I’d spent years avoiding. Going to group week after week even when I didn’t feel like it. Sitting across from a debt counsellor and laying out the full wreckage on the table. Calling my mom and telling her what had actually been going on.

Those were terrifying things to do. They were also the things that started to actually work.

In the groups, I met people who had years of recovery behind them. People who had been exactly where I was — the debt, the isolation, the self-deception, the dark thoughts — and had built something real on the other side of it. That gave me something I hadn’t had in a long time: genuine hope. Not the false hope of the next session. Actual evidence that the way I was living wasn’t the only way.

I found myself wanting to give back what those people had given me. And somewhere in that impulse, I recognized that my experience — as ugly and prolonged and non-linear as it had been — was something others needed to hear. Not the highlight reel. The real version. The years in the messy middle. The relapses after the clarity. The big win that still wasn’t enough.

Six years in, I’m still doing the work. And if any of this sounds like your story — or like someone you love — I’d be glad to talk.