One Year of Going Sober Allowed Shannon Shorr to Reset and Grow
In January 2024, Shannon Shorr woke up with another hangover after an Alabama Crimson Tide football game and decided to make a change. One year later he's a different poker player, husband, and father
It’s late in the night during one of the myriad of events at the 2024 World Series of Poker and players are anticipating bagging - some for the first time ever. Celebrations are in order for what poker players have lovingly nicknamed ‘the beer level’.
As the server brings a round of Corona’s or Michelob Ultras, Shannon Shorr reaches into his backpack, pulls out a bottle and steadies himself with a quick sip. While the other players at his table were celebrating bagging a WSOP event with an adult beverage of their choosing, Shorr takes another swig of a non-alcoholic beer.
He brought the Heineken 0.0 in his bag to the table, just in case an opportunity came up to celebrate. Shorr didn’t want to be excluded from the ritual, he just didn’t want to do it with alcohol. He wouldn’t do it with alcohol.
Six months earlier, Shorr was in Pasadena, California watching his beloved Alabama Crimson Tide football team in the Rose Bowl. The combination of New Year’s Day and a football game meant Shorr was enjoying himself with a few drinks along the way. The Crimson Tide lost that night and their season ended one game earlier than most fans were hoping, but when Shorr woke up the next morning he saw an opportunity to make a change and it had nothing to do with the Crimson Tide.
“Same old story … drank a ton, felt terrible the next day like I had so many times after football weekends and was just over it. I'd gotten to a point with alcohol really for the last several years where I don't know, something about it I wasn't loving,” Shorr said.
“I felt like I was slaving to it, but then I'd go do things and feel compelled to (drink). My tolerance was such that I'd need five to six drinks to feel anything.”
The start of a new calendar year is a time when so many people make commitments to change something about themselves when the calendar strikes January 1. Shorr took an extra day, but on January 2 he decided to give up alcohol, maybe not permanently, but for the foreseeable future.
“It was January, so I had the New Year‘s resolution vibes and just decided to go with it,” Shorr said. “It helped that I was at a stage of my life with the two young kids where I'm not looking to party a lot or go do much social stuff.”
He returned home to Las Vegas in time to play the PokerGO Tour Kickoff Series and bricked everything. The less than ideal start to his year at the tables forced the soon-to-be 40 year old to become even more introspective. It was then that he set a stretch goal for himself and his newfound sobriety.
“I just really didn't play my best poker and I really hold myself to a high standard as far as the level of poker that I want to play each time I sit, especially since I'm trying to feed kids and stuff,” said Shorr, a father of two. “I was just really upset with myself and feeling a lot of shame, and I think around that time, within the first week or so, I committed myself to a year.”
January and February presented some early challenges for Shorr as he adjusted, mostly in social settings where dinner would be accompanied by a cocktail or a glass of wine. His friends, at least his closest ones, quickly learned of his resolve and it never became an issue, but one spot came up just before the WSOP began where Shorr faced his first real tough challenge to his year-long mission.
“A couple social spots where I was in the first couple months where I was like, ‘Okay, man, this is weird’,” Shorr remembered. “Then I went to a good friend of mine's wedding in May. That was probably the hardest. (I was) so used to just drinking infinite at events like that.”
“I just kind of leaned into it and then just started to feel incredible.”
The cravings slowly became few and far between and that ‘incredible’ feeling started to show at the tables. In the summer, Shorr cashed in nine live WSOP events and another 12 online WSOP events. The big moment came in June when he finished runner-up in the $3,500 BetMGM Poker Championship where he won $430,367 - the fifth largest live score of his career.
“I definitely feel much better at the table in general. There's so many layers to poker, especially live poker because you're trying to lean into the energy of different people and when I had a lot of alcohol in my system, whenever I was drinking a lot, I think I would just make sloppy plays at times,” Shorr said.
For the year, Shorr cashed 39 times and earned $1,497,532.
“In the same way that a task is hard once you've given yourself that shot of cheap dopamine, so are poker decisions in the way that you're less likely to make a very nuanced play, you're more likely to just go all in,” Shorr said. ”I felt like my chips were more drawn to the middle. My chips weren't being treated as wisely as they could have been when my brain's fully functioning and I can just really narrow into each decision point.”
Poker wasn’t the only place where his energy shift and renewed focus was paying dividends. Shorr and his wife Joy have two young kids and Shorr says sobriety gave him a clearer mind and better sleep, all of which allowed him to be more present for his family.
“The WSOP is of course such an insane grind mentally. I would often give myself the excuse to drink, but this time I was just really, really focused,” Shorr said. “My son was about six months old, so I was determined to get home right after the tournaments or allow myself to get up as early as I could so I could spend time with him in the mornings before WSOP started.”
As Shorr navigated his way through the year, he noticed other things that were better now that he wasn’t drinking and his mind was clear including a few places where alcohol is sort of assumed to be an acceptable part of the experience.
“Concerts … I used to think I could never go to them and not drink because the more I've learned about addiction and how it just shapes our perception or the pleasure centers of the brain,” Shorr said. “I feel like as I got further away from alcohol, the music was just hitting more. It just sounded good. It just sounded better.”
Nightclubs in Las Vegas are where tourists and locals get bottle service and race to get drunk all while a DJ combines the volume and tempo of the music up to create an atmosphere that encourages partying. Shorr doesn’t frequent nightclubs, but when he did find himself in one, he found he was having more fun in that environment without booze.
He also took the opportunity to step back and evaluate some other areas of his life that he wanted to improve. With encouragement from Joy, he turned to cold baths, breathing exercises and worked to develop a daily routine to give him something to anchor each day to.
“My wife has a yoga training background, so she's been shilling (breathing exercises) to me for years. I finally made a concerted effort to stay consistent on it and that really just snowballed and all these good routines started. I bought a cold plunge and started doing ice baths daily,” Shorr said.
Along with the ice baths, breathing exercises, new appreciation for live music, and being more present with his family, Shorr also developed a newfound skill and love for cooking. It was a complete reversal from his formative years where there just wasn’t time for culinary pursuits.
“I was the worst in the kitchen. Growing up I always played sports and we were never home. We were always eating out at the ballparks and a different restaurant, so I never developed those skills as a kid,” Shorr said. “In college I was either eating fast food or meal plans or whatever, and then once poker started, I was just all over the world and not cooking. So I literally had three-year-old skills in the kitchen.”
It’s not that Shorr woke up and suddenly knew how to make a three-course meal that would have gotten him onto MasterChef. He simply found that as his brain was rewiring itself, he sought out opportunities to learn new things and the material was sticking better than it had in a long time.
“Once I removed alcohol, I just started to see the beauty in everything. I developed a self-confidence that I never truly had, I think because I was in the grips of this cheap, cheap dopamine,” Shorr said.
That “cheap dopamine” wasn’t just something he found at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon. Shorr realized other things in his day-to-day routine had been supplying it and preventing him from enjoying some of the finer points of life. This includes a trapping a lot of people his age might be able to relate to.
“I think a lot of that also was I was watching way too much porn and just not being my very best self. I've since made huge efforts to totally kick that out of my life,” Shorr said. He joined an online recovery group and continues to work on that part of his life. “I think that along with stopping drinking, I've reshaped my brain and the pleasure centers of my brain. I'm just feeling awesome.”
Shorr spent New Year’s Eve the same way he spent New Year’s Day - watching his Crimson Tide lose a football game to the Wolverines. The only difference was this time he was sober. He woke up the next morning and realized he had made it through the full year. He had a family vacation in Mexico coming up and figured that would be as good of a place as any to break the dry spell intentionally.
Shorr ordered himself a margarita one night early in the trip while out for dinner with his family. That was the plan. One drink. It didn’t lead to a second and Shorr even found having the one to be a little bit strange after a year of thriving while sober.
“It didn't really do it for me. It didn't make me more euphoric. In fact, actually I felt a bit stunted because my brain had been working so effectively,” Shorr said. “Later that night I felt a little bit slower and I'm always doing something like trying to organize and set stuff up. So it just felt a little weird being a little bit slow.”
The rest of the trip passed without Shorr giving the drink much more thought. He was focused on being present and enjoying time with his family. As for his future relationship with alcohol, Shorr says he feels comfortable to drink from time to time in social settings but not to excess and nowhere like he did before.
“I can't really envision having more than two drinks, but if an event calls … Both my mom and my dad are coming to visit me in March, so I'm likely to have a drink or two with them over the course of their stay. And anything else I feel that I deem worthy, we will see what happens.”