Ben Wilinofsky Poker
At the end of 2015 poker pro Ben Wilinofsky announced his retirement from poker, despite a long and successful career playing cards.
In this candid interview with PokerListings.com, Wilinofsky opens up about the reasons behind that decision and the inner struggles he faced over the course of his poker career.
Ben Wilinofsky would stick with the hip-hop vibe plumping for Harmony Homicide by Kool G Rap. Nesrine Reilly is another one of those Hip Hop loving poker players. The French starlet would saunter down to the table listening to the sounds of Drake and Started From The Bottom. Total life earnings: $3,041,182. Latest cash: $21,483 on 06-Sep-2020. Click here to see the details of Jake Schwartz's 177 cashes.
In the poker world Wilinofsky is known as NeverScaredB, the screen-name he chose for himself when he began playing. Years of battling online and live earned him that reputation, but for Wilinofsky it didn't match up with how he felt.
No External Poker Success Enough
Wilinofsky explains that no matter how much external success he was able to achieve, it was never enough. Now Wilinofsky has given up a career that offered him money and freedom to pursue happiness.
Watch the full video interview below or continue reading for the interview transcript.
PokerListings.com: Did your choice of online poker screenname have anything to do with how you were feeling back then? On the outside you definitely earned a reputation for fearless play.
Ben Wilinofsky: I wanted to put that image of myself forward, of fearlessness, and I wanted to feel fearless.
You know, that's something I'd like to feel nowadays in my everyday life, not anxious and not have those doubts and fears in my head.
Maybe there was something Freudian going on. I don't really know.
PL: You accomplished a lot in poker and lived a lot of people's dreams, so to speak. How did those experiences make you feel?
BW: When I was getting outside stimulus from poker that said, “Yes, you're good. Look at the numbers getting bigger and look at how people respond to you and think of you.
You have fans and people who think that you're good and you have objective measures.
It's a salve. It's something you rub on the wounds to make them not hurt so much but it doesn't heal them in any sense.
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PL: Right. So as things started to get better and better in your career, did you start to see this disparity developing between the external state of your life, and the way you felt inside which maybe wasn't tracking the same trajectory?
BW: Yeah. When I got that first win I felt elated and really just sort of on cloud nine, for lack of a better term, for a couple of days but it faded really quickly.
I quickly returned to, like, normal and my normal was not very good. My normal was not happy.
So I think I chased it for a little bit. I think the next year I final-tabled WPT Vienna. I came third and I just felt nothingness. Just empty, devoid of any kind of emotional response.
I realized that I was looking for external ways to fix an internal problem.
PL: Did your family and the people closest to you know what was going on or did you try to play it off like everything was fine and try to deal with it on your own?
BW: I don't think I tried to deal with it at all. I don't think I really acknowledged it to myself.
I was aware of it at times. The word depression, you know, came in and out of my vocabulary and I would sometimes think to myself, “Huh, I'm depressed.”
But it was always in the context of it being a temporary state and that I needed to make things better so I'm not so depressed anymore.
PL: Like win more money.
BW: Like win more money or have sex with more girls or whatever thing.
Like, if I achieve some thing, when that thing is achieved my depression and sense of self worth will sort themselves out based on that thing.
No matter how big either number gets, you never get there.
To put it out there and to be honest and open with someone else about what's really going on in your life, it's liberating because you don't have to put up walls anymore.
You don't have to put on this mask, this brave face that everything's okay and you're in control of your life.
But now that I have accepted and identified the problem, what next?
PL: It's not just all magically fixed.
BW: No. So you try one thing. Therapy or pills or exercise or yoga or meditation or whatever you try. And you try and you try and you try again. I've tried a lot of things.
Poker's not the problem but it's not part of the solution either.
My energy is really limited. On my bad days I get six hours out of bed. And those six hours are precious and I can't be spending it on something that's not part of the solution.
Poker is the easy solution to the wrong problem and I don't want to do that anymore. So I just have to not do it anymore, is the simple answer.
I have to go start on the bottom of something else and I have to dig in and keep going with it until I either hit a wall and realize this isn't the thing, or I get through the wall and see what's on the other side.
Today is a grieving day.
I’ve never been very good at grieving. It’s one of those things that you can’t really practice until you need it, and when you need it, boy you better get it right.
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The first time I grieved was for my grandfather. I was with him the week before I started at business school. He was hollowed out. Cancer had emptied his strength, his voice, his pride. I helped carry him to the bathroom. I remember vividly, on the way back one trip, he pushed us away from him so he could take the last three or four steps to his bed. He didn’t make it. Two of us had to help him off the floor and into bed.
I got the call on the first day of classes. I told myself to be stoic, to support my mother and my cousins. I blocked out, remained neutral.
For a month after, I, too, was hollowed out. I would open a textbook to do readings, spend two and a half hours reading the same paragraph over and over. Close the book. I skipped mandatory study sessions. I was one missed class away from failing out. I was a zombie, present but not processing.
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The last time I grieved was for Pittsburgh. It was a different kind of grief, boiling hot and bitter, like oversteeped tea. I wanted to fight somebody. Grief is easier with an enemy to blame, so much so that people will make enemies out of bystanders to comfort themselves. They will lash out at family or friends or caregivers for ginned up failings so that they don’t have to face the truth: the world will bring you grief by the truckload, it will take away and take away and take away and unlike a person it is impossible to fight. It’s preposterous, to try to fight back at the grief the world visits upon you. It would be like karate kicking a tsunami.
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The deepest time I grieved was a year ago today. In the Jewish tradition, you do not unveil the tombstone until one year from the day of the death. I wish I had some words of wisdom to say about that tradition, but I have a sneaking suspicion it exists because bodies must be disposed of immediately and masonry takes a little longer.
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I am practicing traditions today. I lit a Yahrtzeit candle. Why? I don’t know. Mostly I’m throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks.
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There is an image I get in my head of that day. I know the technical term for this: obsession. A persistent, unwanted thought. I get them when I am anxious, of something terrible happening, and when my grief is pressed upon, I get the image of the veterinarian poking a finger into my dog’s eye to check that he was non-responsive, that the drugs that rendered him inert had taken hold. And I hate him for it.
I hate the clinical, dry, businesslike nature of that gesture. It feels like an imposition into my family’s grief. I hate that this memory, above all other memories, is the one that comes back to me.
Is this what the traditions are for? To fend off the dryness, the clinical nature of disposing of the dead?
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My grief has been pressed upon a lot recently. I have dipped my first timid toes in the water again, fostering a dog that needs a temporary home. She is sweet and loving and gentle. Like he was. And that part of my heart that he occupied is being intruded upon, and I love her, and I hate it. I am not ready to till the soil where he is buried.
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To love is to become a part of an “us,” to be greater than yourself. Grief, then, is phantom-limb syndrome. The pieces of us that go missing can never be replaced. Everything thereafter is just prostheses. And, yes, we can love again, and we can grow another “us.” But the things we lose stay lost.
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There is no literal soil on which to put a gravestone. So I have put a marker as close to where he lies as I can. It is my effort to keep a little piece of him with me, to override this obsession of the moment of loss with a remembrance of joy and love.
RIP Kazak, the Hound of Space.