I grew up in a warm and loving family of die-hard gamblers, where my father's poker games and my mother's mah jongg blended with big pots of delicious food and endless gossip and storytelling. As kids my cousins and I bet on everything--which of our Weight Watching mothers would lose the most every week, who could hold their breath longest underwater or eat the most matzo, Maris versus Mantle. I went with my father and uncles to the track most Tuesdays, carrying the Daily Racing Form in my bookbag, and when I was twelve and predicted a big race, they anointed me "The Grecian," in honor of oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek.

But I said goodbye to gambling when I left for college, and by the time I began a successful career as an entertainment journalist, interviewing everyone from Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie to Robert DeNiro and Jeff Bridges, I convinced myself that the gambling gene had passed me by.

Hats & Eyeglasses traces my love affair with poker — an obsession that didn't hit until my mid-forties. It turned out I was good at poker. Very, very good. I won routinely, whether I was playing at my regular Wednesday night game or in one of the small, seedy, out-of-the-way card rooms I always managed to find when on assignment. It was the best time in my life.

But all this changed when I discovered online poker and quickly found myself maxing out my credit cards and lying to my family and friends. It was the beginning of what one of my uncles called "hats and eyeglasses," a phrase used to describe those times when you're losing so bad you feel like you're on a sinking ship, and all that floats to the surface are hats and eyeglasses.