Patrick Chester attended his first University of Washington football game at the age of 5. When he was 9, his parents divorced, and he remembers his dad would frequently go “out drinking and gambling.”
“Seeing that as a kid, that was pretty exciting,” Chester, now 50, said of his dad’s carousing.'
Chester was aware that his family had a history of substance abuse, so he was careful not to fall into those traps himself. But as for gambling, even as he entered the University of Washington as a student, Chester said, “I had no idea what could happen if I got carried away with it.”
Chester's football fandom never let up, and by the time he was 28 and making a comfortable living in the construction industry, he was betting regularly on the sport's college and pro versions – first through bookies, then through offshore websites. In 2006, at the age of 34, Patrick got married. This newlywed era, he said, marked “the early days of my gambling problem.”
“The early years of my marriage were pretty stressful financially because, behind the scenes, I was using our money to gamble,” he explained. “I was able to keep that from her (his wife, Erica) the first nine years of our marriage. She didn’t know I had a gambling addiction. She just knew we didn’t have any money.”
While Erica knew that her husband occasionally gambled on the golf course with friends, she said she “had no idea he was a sports bettor.”
However, she added, “Red flags would come up. I really never could put my finger on what was going on with banking issues and stuff like that. He always had an excuse for stuff and I had no reason not to believe him. It really was not until the day of his intervention that I was told it was a severe gambling addiction.”
'I had not a clue'
That day came in early 2015, the morning after the Chesters returned home from a trip to Arizona to watch their hometown Seattle Seahawks lose in heartbreaking fashion to the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.
“My dad called me and said, ‘You need to come to the house,' and it all went downhill from there,” Erica recalled.
She said the intervention was set in motion when Patrick sent a “cry for help” email to a relative along the lines of, “I've got a severe gambling problem and I am in real trouble.”
That relative reached out to Erica's father, who, along with her sister, found a rehab facility – Project Turnabout in Granite Falls, Minnesota – with a gambling-specific track and an available bed.
“Pat was on a plane to Minnesota within 24 hours,” said Erica.
Of the intervention itself, she said, “I was absolutely in complete and utter shock. I was terrified. I had not a clue. I don’t remember saying a whole lot. I just sat there and listened. It was basically people telling me what was gonna happen. I just kind of went along with it.”
As for Pat, he said, “I wasn’t in any position to fight it. I was actually pretty relieved. I was on board with it. I read the room. It was either that or I was on my own.”
With Pat in Minnesota for a month of inpatient treatment, Erica was left to raise the couple's 5-year-old son on her own while juggling a full-time job as a nurse.
“It wasn’t until after he was in Minnesota that we uncovered years and years of financial destitution,” she said. “I was so angry. I was scared. I felt just completely betrayed.
“I ended up having to hire three different lawyers on my end because a lot of the gambling funds came from bounced checks that he took of mine. He stole thousands of dollars from my retirement fund. I had to hire a divorce lawyer, a criminal lawyer, and a financial lawyer. It was financially devastating. The only saving grace was that I still had a career.”
When it comes to gambling addiction, lack of spousal awareness is par for the course.
“It's almost across the board how it ends up going down,” said Jamie Salsburg, a recovering gambling addict and current host of the After Gambling podcast. “It's very commonplace.”
Rehab, jail, and fighting for family
Project Turnabout is one of just a handful of inpatient facilities in the U.S. that avoids commingling gambling addicts with those suffering from substance abuse or other illnesses, a focus Chester found very beneficial.
“When I got there, I was glad I was in a place like that,” he said. “I wasn’t in a group of drug addicts. Some of us had co-dependencies and cross-addictions, but it was good to be in a group of just gamblers, not getting sidetracked.”
While Chester's time in Minnesota put him on a path toward recovery, he faced another significant hurdle when he returned to the Seattle area: two criminal charges of first-degree theft related to money he'd previously stolen from construction clients.
“I was also working for myself for a few years as a general contractor, and I had people writing $30,000 checks and had a raging gambling issue. That was a problem,” he said. “I wasn’t taking people’s money with the idea that I was going to take their money and hit the road. I was looking at gambling as my way out — 'If I just keep gambling, I’m just going to win all this money back at some point.'”
Facing a potential sentence of more than two years in prison, Chester cut a deal that would limit his time behind bars to four months. He had to agree to three years of probation that would require him to enroll in a program that would continue to help treat his addiction. After his release from Snohomish County Jail, Chester moved in with a friend, began working in landscape design, and tried to keep his family together.
“That took two to three years after I got better to get back in the house with my wife and son,” he said. “Once you lose that trust, it’s hard to get it back.”
Indeed, said Keith Whyte, executive director for the National Council on Problem Gambling.
“Problem gambling has some of the most damaging impacts on family. It’s not the financial stuff — it’s the deception,” he explained. “The lies, the secret bank accounts — that’s what I hear makes gambling addiction perhaps harder on relationships than other addictions. Rebuilding that trust is so difficult.'
“If you marry someone who has a substance abuse problem, you know they have a substance abuse problem, although they may be in denial. But you may not even know your partner is gambling at all. There are few outward physical signs. Even if the partner knows you’re gambling, they almost never know how far you’ve gone until a big precipitating event happens. When that whole house of cards comes crashing down on the addict, a lot of relationships don’t survive.”
The Chesters' relationship, however, did recover. Her husband's time in rehab and jail, Erika said, “really gave us the time to focus on our own recovery and just dive deep. I wanted to submerge myself in learning about gambling addiction — why this happened, if I played a role, and separating the person from the addiction.
“I needed to separate the person that I married from this sickness. If he wasn’t 100 percent focused on his recovery and doing the right thing and taking action to better himself, I think we’d be in a different scenario here. But he ‘s put in the work, I’ve put in the work, and I wasn’t about to give up on something that I believed in and we had built together.”
The Chesters now have another son, age 4, and recently explained to their older boy, now 13, why his dad was scarce for a spell seven years ago.
“We made the decision about six months ago that he was finally old enough to know some of the details that took place, so we started by saying, ‘Do you remember the time when you were in kindergarten and Dad had to go away for awhile?'” said Erica. “We told him the reason he had to go away was because of gambling. And [because of] the choices he made through this addiction, he had to face consequences.”
Underserved demo, stigmatized addiction
With his life back on the right track, Pat decided to start speaking about his experience to college students.
“I recognize that a lot of people can gamble responsibly,” he said. “I share my story and get into some of the things to look out for. You’ve got college students 18, 19, 20 years old — they’ve got credit cards and don’t really know what the dangers are. When I talk to them, I try to engage with them, and a lot of times after I do a presentation, they’ll stand in line to talk. They don’t necessarily volunteer a whole lot, but the way they’re doing it is from all these apps. Eighty to 90 percent of the students who gamble are doing it from their phone.
“I’ve got a good job. I’ve paid back hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past seven years. We’re back on solid footing. It took awhile. I’m speaking more and I’m really passionate about that. As gambling addicts, we do a lot of sh*tty things. A lot of us don’t want to talk about it, but I made the decision early on to talk about it.”
Yet despite Chester's considerable efforts, including an upcoming TEDx talk in Spokane, college-age individuals represent a vastly underserved demographic when it comes to problem and responsible gambling outreach.
Introducing #TEDxSpokane2022 speaker Patrick Chester!