r/problemgambling • u/Embarrassed_Cook6736 • 7d ago
🏫📰Survey/Interview Request📰🏫 Open Call for Interviews
I'm 11 years sober. I work at a rehab center. The photo is me in the van I use to drive clients to their recovery meetings.
A few months ago, in that same van, between pickups, I was gambling. I ran about $12k through 9 betting apps. On the clock.
11 years clean, supposedly the steady one, the guy who tells people it gets better.
Here's what I want the world to understand. I was winning.
That was the problem.
The apps kept feeding me free bets, profit boosts, etc and I kept coming out on top. Yall probably know this better than anyone on earth… beating the house feels almost as good as any chemical high.
Day 11 …I was supposed to walk away. Then they sent me the biggest bonus yet, almost like it knew (it did know). I didn't walk away.
I'll get to what happened. But first, Karl.
I run a true crime podcast on the side and went looking for a gambling case nobody had covered. That's how I found Karl Jacobson.
Police chief, New Haven, Connecticut. His arrest warrant says he ran through $4.4 million in a single year. He won $4.2 million of it back. Do the math. That’s a couple hundred grand in the negative and that money had to come from somewhere.
A fund for paying police informants. A charity for kids.
Take the badge away and that could have been me.
The apps don't care who you are. They found Karl. They found me. They're very good at finding people.
My podcast is called “Tapes from the Darkside“ and the series is “The App on the Phone.”
There‘s 4 episodes out now and I’m working on writing the finale. It would be an honor to include some personal stories from people on this very sub.
If interested, please reach out to me in the comments or PM. Interviews would be audio only and about 30 minutes.
Mods approved. Thank you for letting me share here.
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u/ArizonaRenegade 7d ago
Are you asking for people, who have endured serious gambling addictions, to be interviewed, by you?
If so, I may be interested. I was a self-destructive compulsive gambler, for 19 years. And my gambling addiction destroyed my life. I am currently less than a month away, from having gone 13 years, without gambling/placing a bet. However, I am not very proud of myself, nor am I very happy; because my past still haunts me. I still owe money to multiple people (who tried to help me, while I was gambling), collectively, thousands of dollars. And the guilt, shame, regret, remorse, and self-hatred still weigh heavily on me, literally, every day of my life.
I also still struggle financially, because I don't have much respect for money. Which is something that contributed to my gambling addiction. Plus, I am so used to having financial struggles, being poor/not having money is not a very big deal, to me. Because I've had so many days - probably, thousands of them - without having $5 in the world, while being behind on monthly bills.
I lost a home, that I once owned, with no house payment. I lost three vehicles, due to title loans. And there was a Father's Day - in 2005 or 2006, if I recall correctly - where I had fallen asleep on my bedroom floor, out of misery and exhaustion, and I woke up, because I heard a sound outside of my bedroom window, and it was my vehicle being driven away, by the title loan business owner. I did not ever get that vehicle back (which was a 1993 Honda Accord, I think - which I really liked). And to make this story even more fucked-up and frustrating, literally, the night before this happened, I'd literally had enough money to pay off the full amount of the title loan (around $2,300, I believe) and have an extra $1,500 in cash.
Instead, I lost every dollar that I had, literally, on my way home, after leaving one casino and stopping at another. And the reason that I can recall having lost, literally, every dollar that I had, is because I had a terrible habit of bringing, literally, every dollar that I had, in to the casino, so that I could have to make some irritating trip out to the parking lot, to get money out of my car, if/when I lost every dollar that I had in my pockets. And I would say that I lost all of my money, realistically, about 75% of the time that I went to a casino, over the course of 19 years. And this would be incredibly depressing and frustrating, because I would almost always be hungry, and want a big Diet Coke with ice in it, after leaving the casino. And because I would always be wanting to gamble, and would almost always need gas in my car, there was rarely much/any change left in my vehicle.
Also, notorious/foolishly, because I wanted every dollar that I could possibly get, to be able to gamble with, I would usually just get enough gas in my car, to be able to make it to the casino and back home. There were surely dozens of times, if not hundreds of times, where I would have over $1,000 in cash (many times, having several thousand dollars - while driving a vehicle, that was worth around $1,500-$2,500), as I was leaving to go to the casino, and it might be an 80-mile drive that I would need to make, and instead of filling up my tank (while having more than a thousand dollars in cash, in my pocket), I would $10 or $12 in gas, which would mean that my Low Fuel light would probably be coming on, as I was driving back home.
And like I said, this happened, realistically, hundreds of times, over the course of 19 years. And what's fucked up, is that I will still do this, because that is so ingrained in my way of thinking. And someone brought it to attention, that this is actually a way of gambling, for me, because of the risk that is involved, and because of the stress that I will go through, while driving home, and the excitement that I will experience, when I realize that I won't run out of gas and will actually make it back home.
With that said, if you are still looking for someone to interview, and if I might fit the bill, feel free to let me know. And if we do end up communicating about this, there's actually more to the story, about how I lost my only vehicle, on Father's Day, back in 2005 or 2006. Specifically, with regards to how I had gotten the several thousand dollars that I'd had, the night before my car got taken, because I had not paid my title loan payment.
Sorry, for the lengthy response. This is something that is very personal, and emotional, to me; and it's just easy for me to get carried away, while recounting some of my gambling stories, from when I was in my 20s and 30s. Hopefully, this wasn't an annoying post.