Erick Lindgren was one of the stars of poker’s tournament circuit during the boom last decade. His story is an excellent reminder for all speculators and gamblers to never allows yourself to lose control. Taking losses often and keeping them small, as frustrating as it can be, is far better than allowing yourself to go down the dark path of gambling. 

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via Bluff Magazine

For a man once labeled “Everybody’s All-American” the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are usually jam-packed with trips to the mall to buy presents for the family, multiple trips up and down a ladder while putting Christmas lights on the house and then back to the mall so Junior can have his picture taken with Santa.

That’s not at all how Erick Lindgren, who once appeared on the cover of BLUFF with that All-American title, spent those weeks though. 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.

“They told me that there was a place like Morningside that was doing this and that if I wanted to get things right and do things the right way, I could check myself in and after some long thought and checking my ego at the door, I came here,” Lindgren said.

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, who is married to Erica Schoenberg and has a 1-year-old son, Jake, with her. It was a number of close friends, and Schoenberg, that convinced him he needed professional help.

“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. “I owed people a bunch of money, and it’s something that I’ve been working on for a long time, but I definitely slipped up, made some really bad mistakes and I needed to address that.”

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