But after nearly a decade as a professional poker player, with all those manic ups and downs, the bankroll collapses and earnings in excess of $6 million, I'm guessing the monastic life and its subtle pleasures no longer had any pull on him, and he knew it. Busquet could have gone back to the quieter delights of his high school years, when he played on the chess team and sang in the school choir, or gotten reacquainted with the life of the mind he'd lived while a philosophy major at Cornell University. In his early 30s and newly divorced, the New York City native decided he needed to forge himself a new identity to deal with what he called his 'traumatic personal experience.' The problem is, when you're a high-stakes professional poker player famous for taking enormous risks, your options for identity-forging are limited. Not long ago professional poker player Olivier Busquet found himself at just such a collapse.
