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Erick Lindgren in gambling rehab
I didnt even know they had these two weeks stays in sunny california. If you dont want to read the whole story here are some nuggets. I like the part about the "degenerate gene". Definitely worth reading the whole article
http://www.bluff.com/magazine/broken...en-story-6094/
Lindgren, at 36 years old, was in a rehab facility in Newport Beach, California, trying to work through his addiction to gambling.
"I’ve had a gambling problem for a long time and I’ve finally got the opportunity to address it,” said Lindgren during his two-week stay at Morningside Recovery. Lindgren’s agent, Brian Balsbaugh, was approached by a mutual friend who offered to foot the bill of Lindgren’s stay at the facility in hopes of helping him out.
Lindgren’s path to rehab is largely about losing control of his action away from the poker table. The 2011 football season, and massive losses from betting it, was a life changer for Lindgren.
“I’d had a really tough year, I lost way too much money in football last year and couldn’t pay some fantasy football bets at the end of the year,” Lindgren said.
But in March 2012, it all came crashing down for Lindgren and the poker world learned that while he was certainly a man of action, he was a man of inaction when it came time to pay his gambling debts.
Max Weinberg, posting under the screen name “$kill Game” on TwoPlusTwo, called Lindgren out publicly for not paying him $11,000 in fantasy football winnings. Over the following few days the thread exploded with more posters coming forward about the amount of money that Lindgren owed them. By the time the thread reached 10 pages, Lindgren’s listed debts were in excess of $100,000. He claims he hasn’t read the entire thread but is aware of it.
Working out a payment plan for the money he owes is a crucial part of Lindgren’s rehabilitation but it’s not the only desired outcome. Like most addicts forced to re-evaluate some aspects of their life in rehab, Lindgren says he has become more self-aware and recognizes his predicament is a result of his own actions and nobody else’s.
“I’ve learned a lot about myself here. I learned that I wasn’t that different from a lot of the people that have addictions whether it’s alcohol or drugs or whatever,” Lindgren said. “For a long time now, I’ve bet more than I should have bet on games and been in too much action and yeah, it was a lot of fun at the time, but it was irresponsible in a lot of ways.”
That’s why I’m at Morningside, to help remove that degenerate gene because for a really long time I was just a single guy that didn’t have any responsibilities really. I just travelled the world, played poker, bet sports, bet golf and it was a lot of fun, I’m not knocking that
The biggest bombshell in that TwoPlusTwo thread came from Haralabos Voulgaris who claimed that Lindgren had owed him six figures for years and had failed to pay the debt in full. Voulgaris, known for being a successful high stakes NBA bettor and part-time poker pro, held nothing back.
“We all knew that (Lindgren) was pretty much a piece of shit when it came to settling gambling debts. But as long as the Full Tilt money train was chugging along paying distributions, nobody wanted to speak up. Now that it’s pretty clear that FTP is done, and so are any prospects of Erick being able to pay anyone back,” Voulgaris wrote on TwoPlusTwo.
Voulgaris’ post, in which he calls himself out for protecting Lindgren from public scrutiny while the debt sat unsettled, set off another firestorm. Lindgren’s public image of the “All-American” cover boy was left shattered, almost as completely as his finances.
According to Lindgren in 2003 or 2004 he approached Voulgaris, who he’d been introduced to through a mutual friend on the poker circuit, asking for advice on which online sportsbooks he could trust. At the time, Voulgaris was running WagerStreet.com.
“He pointed out a couple; he didn’t really want me to bet against him because he thought that I was fairly sharp in my action or whatever. So he told me a few sites and left it at that. He contacted me maybe a month into the season or something and said ‘If you want to bet really big, I’ve got a place for you’ and I said ‘Well, OK,’” Lindgren recalled. “And he put me into a place where I had a $2 million credit line and we settled at $500,000. I think I won three or four hundred the first week, so I was betting very big, $50K to $100K per game, and then I started losing and flipped that down to where I was stuck, I think I paid $400,000 once and $500,000 once. So I was down $900,000 to them. And then I lost I think another $2.3 million.”
That’s when trouble really began for Lindgren. Between that line of credit, action with other bookies and the big game at the Bellagio, Lindgren had lost roughly $6 million over a one-month span. His creditors came calling.
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Originally Posted by ttwarrior1
