I'm slowly recovering from two years of poker addiction. It was mostly controlled and didn't affect my family life, but it did suck out most of my own time. There wasn't anything particularly addictive about the gambling side of poker. The things I were interested in were pretty academic, to be honest. Stuff like game theory or Nash equilibrium and trying to trick one's brain to understand probabilities and statistics. But even if gambling wasn't the thing, the game is still very addictive.

But the funny thing about poker is that it's centered around a huge illusion. The illusion of money. Or the illusion that money makes you happy. In fact, it's a game about this illusion.

And when I say money is illusion, I'm not saying it in a touchy-feely hippie way. It's a known fact about human mind. Daniel Gilbert writes about it in the book Stumbling on Happiness. It boils down to a flaw in our brains. We have this wonderful machinery for simulating future events, which works fine for most of the tasks, but fails completely when it's used for simulating the affective impact; whether future events make us happy or unhappy, that is.

I've known all this for a while, but I still fall for the illusion. The idea of easy and free money playing poker still feels great, even though I know it wouldn't make me any happier. This wouldn't be such a problem if the activity itself, playing poker, were really rewarding. But it isn't. It's actually pretty awful.

You don't get "highs" for winning after a while, because you learn that winning or losing individual pots isn't what wins you money. (To simplify things just a bit.) You win by losing a bit smaller pots than on average and winning slightly larger pots. And not just that: the good feeling of winning eventually wears out, but not the other way around, unfortunately. Losing still feels bad.

So what you get is oodles of mindless grinding (as poker players like to call it) where you get rather few positive feelings and lots of negative feelings, frustration, anger, what-have-you. The feeling carries out from the (online) poker table too. I've mostly played after everyone else has gone to sleep so when I've left the table with frustration, I haven't been pouring that frustration to anyone else, but I've gone through some pretty awful feelings because of poker, I've got to admit.

As if all this wasn't enough, the sad fact is that there isn't much anything else in poker than winning money. I mean, there isn't much else to any competitive hobby, but poker is special in that you aren't exactly finding out who is the best. What the greatest poker player is aiming for is the worst opponents possible. The difference between extremely skilled players is so small that there is basically no point to play against another competent player, except for the fact there aren't enough absolutely bad players to play against. But in principle, you should try to play against the worst possible players.

And the nature of the poker is such that you don't get pleasure from the activity itself, because the thing you're aiming for is kind of abstract and it's hard to find pleasure in such things. Whereas in say physical activities you get pleasure from getting better at the skill and understanding more.

So I was immersed by the game of poker, but it left me kind of cognitively numb. I mean, there are intellectually interesting stuff to learn about poker, but they aren't leading anywhere. There are some connections, but mostly it's just self-contained.

Even worse, poker is a completely zero-sum (or negative sum, in fact) game where nothing is created. Yeah, it can be fun in and of itself, but that's about it. Some poker professionals delude themselves by thinking that they are sort of like in the entertainment business. That the people who lose money to them get a "entertainment service" back, in a sense. But that's just bullshit. Better analogy would be some sort of drug business. The "donators", the losing players, get their high, because of the inherent luck factor in the game, but they are drawn to the game because it's addictive and the winning players get their money because of this addiction.

I'm not saying poker should be banned or anything. And I'm not saying you shouldn't play poker. I am saying that there's nothing more to the game, for me at least, than, well, money. And I find that's not enough.