[wwalser]

I know someone who did this during college.

I had a friend in college — let's call him Sam — with whom I paired on most CS projects. It was useful to find a partner who was as studious as yourself to avoid having to deal with anyone else's potential BS and end up doing all the work yourself. Sam seemed like a completely normal guy where normal is… we share some of the same interests.

Sam wasn't from money, worked hard on assignments, we shot pool and worked on projects together. I knew Sam was "into" poker but I didn't understand the extent. I was "into" lots of things too.

We're hanging out one day and Sam tells me the "funny story" that happened last week where his parents and girlfriend staged an intervention to demand that he stop playing online poker after he had gone on tilt and lost $200k in a single night.

I about lost my marbles.

He then goes on to explain that while he had agreed to quit playing online poker because he valued his relationships, he was of the opinion that an intervention was a bit much since he was still up over $600k and wasn't on tilt so much as trying out higher stakes tables in an effort to make money more quickly than on the low stakes tables he had already found success grinding.

[holman]

Same. Especially at poker's hottest peak, I had a number of friends who ended up going really large on online gambling (and they didn't come from money, either- just had built up a bank roll over a few years). After awhile they found themselves experiencing these huge $xx,xxx swings on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. I think they intellectually understood what that meant, but once you got to that level you kind of have to put the idea of it being a lot of money aside to be able to properly gamble it (if there is a "proper" way to gamble it).

Anyway, one friend in particular told me he was making ~$200k a year, when we were around 22. Asked him about taxes and he said he had never paid a dime. So, uh, that could have been his greatest gamble right there.