Here's How Ex-Professional Poker Player Lost $500k in Crypto and Realized Meaning of Life

Alex Copenhagen, an ex-professional poker player, has posted a video where he tells what lessons he’s been taught when he lost $500k in crypto.

Alex Copenhagen decided to come back to his YT channel dedicated to crypto and bring a new life to it. He will be posting new videos about business, self-development, lifehacks, interviews with entrepreneurs and more. He said that losing $500,000 in 2019 taught him important life lessons.

Alex is sharing his story in a short video, sending out the hope that his data will be valuable for lots of crypto-related folks. Copenhagen got into cryptocurrency space in around 2013 when Bitcoin was worth around 200 dollars. When Bitcoin started crashing down, Alex initiated his buy-ins. Just like Andreas Antonopoulos, Alex first heard of Bitcoin many years ago, “when it was worth cents”, but didn’t pay much attention, but later Alex decided to dig deeper into Bitcoin and the history of its development.

When he understood that the idea is very decent, he thought that this could be his chance to make lots of money by doing almost nothing. Many news stories about such events and lucky crypto people only added oil to the bonfire. A former poker player got into the crypto addiction, which is a modern type of Internet addiction of 1990-s and 2000-s.

“So I Got Back Into Crypto and Was Just a Hodler”

Alex was holding Bitcoin until it got to the price of around 700 dollars. He was a trader at Localbitcoins and made some extra cash that way, but then sold his stash as Bitcoin started crashing.

During the swings that Bitcoin experienced in the next bull runs, Alex was doing bulky mistakes: buying tops, selling bottoms, panicking, “not knowing what the hell he was doing”. He started thinking of leaving crypto trading until he dives deeper into what the hell is happening in the field. He and his poker friends were largely just holding the coins. But Alex didn’t want to just sit back, he wanted to get onto the action. He wanted to see if he could make even more money, that was his primary motive.

Why Alex Lost All Money?

Despite having a risk management plan, he was playing with big sums and failed. Being a poker player in the past, Alex was making huge bets without proper decentralization of capital. This resulted in him losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on cryptocurrency exchanges. Alex wishes to study what the game was all about and only then he will consider putting any investment into the field. He feels that the hype tricked him and that he is not a professional trader yet.

In mid-2018 Alex started his YouTube channel. He always wanted to be in social media, so this was an essential step, and a good opportunity to also benefit from the channel. He made podcasts and videos which included some interviews with traders and such.

But in the last quarter of 2019, Alex had lost a lot of money, it started affecting him emotionally. When you get emotional in any type of game, he explains, this is what poker players call “scared money”:

“Once I wasn’t so deeply into crypto, you know what happens is that you kid of zoom out, and start to see things sometimes, for what they are. This is in crypto, or in any kind of things you’re entrenched in.

Once you kind of, take a break from it, you could see everything in a different light. And what I’ve realized is that crypto is this get rich quick lure. And everyone gets very attracted to it. And that is why there’s so much money to be made in this space. Because people are willing to throw their money away on things that they never touched, felt, examined.

And that’s really what crypto now is in my eyes, its this get rich quick lure. That lure is sand, making us feeling like we can make so much money, like look, we’ve seen how the price can be so volatile.

Now a lot of you probably are thinking: obviously, you’re going to hit on crypto, because you lost half a million dollars and went broke trading crypto. But that’s not the reason. Because of my break from crypto, I started to see some things, to realize some things, but also, what kind of life I want to live. And that’s when I realized that crypto doesn’t have much to offer to me. And, I believe that it actually doesn’t have anything to offer to anyone of you either.

There is a very small percentage of people who can become successful traders. But for 90% of people out there, I don’t think trading or gambling or something like crypto which is so manipulated, so much out of your control. I don’t think it’s a good idea. ”

Alex was getting out of the trades too quickly, bet on the wrong coins and scenarios, and so on. He decided to return to making some of the side income. This trick allowed spending less time with crypto exchanges and get rid of the emotional dependency.

He says that he had luxury life with easy poker money, but now he received all the challenges of life and the honest entrepreneurship feels much better for his self-development. He says that you must bet on yourself, on your own skills and talents. The cryptocurrency is cool, but to achieve success in life, it is not enough.