Louis Ruggiero

I got sober, then lost everything anyway

Twelve years of compulsive gambling. More than $10 million gone. In December 2024 I was suicidal, with a ten-month-old son asleep down the hall and a fiancée who loved me.

Watch on YouTube Sit in my Monday meeting

In my words

The version I tell on stage, in meetings, and in the first episode of the show.

Before
It did not start with gambling
I was an alcoholic and a drug addict before I was ever a gambler. A $1,200-a-day pill habit, years of relapse, and the particular kind of tired that comes from being the person everyone has already forgiven twice.
I got sober from substances. I thought that was the end of it.
The bottom
Ten million dollars and a plan to end it
Gambling took twelve years and more than ten million dollars off me. It cost me relationships, money that was not mine, and eventually any belief that there was a way out.
In December 2024 I was suicidal. I had a ten-month-old at home and a woman who loved me, and none of that was enough to stop me. That is the part I keep coming back to, because that is the point: this thing does not care what you have to lose.
The way out
A room full of strangers
Gamblers Anonymous is what saved me. Not a programme I paid for, not a book, not some breakthrough. A room.
I run a free one every Monday night now, and if you only take one thing from this whole site, take that.
Now
Turning it into something useful
I started Nothing's Off The Table in May 2025. Since then I have sat down with hundreds of people: bookmakers, professional athletes, celebrities, clinicians, mothers, and people who are thirty days in and still shaking.
I also founded The Gambling Truth Project, an independent organisation that takes no industry money. We push for two things: the truth about how this industry actually works, and treatment coverage on par with any other disease.
My reason has not changed since episode one. If telling you the worst of it helps one person pick up the phone, then all of it was worth something.

The nonprofit

The Gambling Truth Project

I founded The Gambling Truth Project as an independent organisation that takes no money from the gambling industry. It exists to do two things.

01
Tell the truth about the industry
How sportsbooks and casinos actually operate, and why “responsible gambling” puts the blame on the player rather than the product.
02
Get treatment paid for
Push policymakers and insurers to cover gambling addiction the way they would cover any other disease, with federal funding for treatment, prevention and research.

“Nobody bites the hand that feeds them. So the criticism gets softer.”

On gambling industry funding of addiction charities

What I actually tell people

Four things, in the order they matter

This is what I say on a first call, and it is what I would say to you. None of it is complicated. All of it is hard.

Say the real number out loud
Not the rounded version, and not the story you have been telling. Tell one person the actual figure. Nothing else works until that part is true.
Do the boring things daily
A meeting, a check-in, a walk, a bedtime. Recovery is not dramatic. It is a long run of unremarkable days, and the unremarkable days are the work.
Get in a room with people who have done it
In person or on Zoom, it does not matter. I did not get out by trying harder. I got out because of strangers in a Gamblers Anonymous meeting.
Be useful to the next person in
The people who stay out are the ones who end up helping somebody else get out. That is not a reward for recovery. It is part of how it holds.

The numbers