This Game of Ours, Chapter Five
published on 09/08/08 at 11:02 am
My father was only 46 when he died. That’s young by anyone standards. He had been in great physical shape and blessed with immense mental tenacity, so his departure left a huge hole in our lives, most particularly my mother. She was numb. She was pretty much a walking zombie. It took her the best part of nine months to remember how to breathe for herself. She was a young woman alone in a foreign land with three young kids and she needed help.
Even while we were on the plane on the way back, I started to analyze my options. The amount of money we needed was substantial, so there was only one realistic avenue open to me. Using the education I had gained, it was quite natural for me to turn to poker to pay the family’s bills. Back then; this was a very different proposition to now. It meant hours on end back in the underground card rooms. That was hours on end not only making sure I was earning enough at the tables, but also making sure I would get invited back to profitable games, and taking precautions to ensure I was able to leave with my winnings in my pocket.
But, of course, it wasn’t a case of carving out a career as a poker player – the impetus was much more immediate than that. In the short term, the family desperately needed money. I wasn’t choosing a career, I was just looking for the best way to bring in the cash we needed to live and survive. And, of course, as the weeks went by and became months, it remained the best way to bring the weekly expense money home, so I kept on doing it.
That’s something young players who think about going pro now need to keep in mind. I find it incredible how vague and directionless many of these new young players are. They just seem to think you can give poker a quick try as though it were like a desk-based office job. But it doesn’t work like that; you need to understand the rhythms of the game. You need a tight and disciplined approach. You have to keep on asking yourself, “Why am I playing? What are my objectives when I sit down at the table?” Back then of course, these objectives were obvious. I had my bankroll in my pocket and my family’s debts in mind.
As a traditional European head of a household, my father had run everything. My mother was quite literally incapable of coping after his death. Two days after we returned home from burying him I walked into the kitchen to find her sitting at the table with a load of bills in one hand and a checkbook in the other. She had no idea how to pay the bills using the checks. It was something she had never done. Until that point she had just been given money for household expenses and my father had taken sole and total responsibility for everything else. It was clear to me, therefore, that the role of head of the family fell squarely on my shoulders now.
There could be no question of my staying in college, because the family’s ongoing debts were considerable. My older sister was already in college, studying law, and my younger sister was still in school. The mortgage on our house in the suburbs was commensurate with my father’s salary. And that, of course, was before you took into account the medical bills that had accumulated.
He had only been in hospital for a short time, but already the total bills were more than three times the value of the house. He had possessed the finest medical insurance he could, but that didn’t cover a seven month stay in intensive care. Those bills had to be paid off immediately, and then there were the ongoing payments on the house and my sisters’ tuition to consider, not to mention the money my mother needed for the household expenses. On top of that, I needed enough to live on myself as well. Essentially, a teenage boy suddenly needed to match the earnings of an experienced Vice President bringing home a salary in the top 5% of the national average. The hustle was well and truly on!
There was no way I wanted my mother to have to contemplate moving out of the house so soon after losing her husband, so I quickly ruled out the option of downsizing. My older sister did offer to withdraw from college, but I didn’t want her to give up her studies, so I added her fixed costs on top, as well as the cost of my younger sister’s education. At that time she was still at elementary school.
That meant all I had to do was work out how much money we needed each week by adding the household bills to the tuition costs and mortgage payments, then go out and play till I won it. It was that simple a calculation.
It was an amount of money I knew I was capable of bringing home. As I’ve already said, I was probably earning more than my father during the last couple of years of his life. But this was different. Until now, I had played poker for fun. I played games in spurts, I had hit and run and losing hadn’t bothered me. Winning was a question of desire, not necessity. Now necessity took precedence, what kind of effect would that have on my play? It put me pretty much on scared money from the get go. And that wasn’t a good place to be. That fear probably resulted in more losses over the next few months than I had ever suffered before when I didn’t care.
My mother had never been keen on her son gambling, so what I was going to do to raise the money was never overtly discussed. She and my father had always enjoyed visiting casinos from time to time, especially on vacations, but that was seen as an acceptable diversion in small doses. The Greeks
have always been inveterate gamblers, so every Greek family knew someone who had wrecked their business or home life through gambling. And my mother was incapable of understanding that you could play poker in a way that wasn’t gambling. I would take on an occasional part time job here and there to pacify my Mother, but proved to be nothing more than a distraction.
So as she sat in the kitchen with a pile of bills and checks she didn’t understand, I went through everything with her and worked out first of all how much money we needed by the end of the week. As soon as we had the total figured out, I gave her a few dollars from my bankroll to keep the house going, told her I would be back soon and went out. I returned a couple of days later with the first week’s money and we went on from there.
In those days there was no question of picking your game. I had to take what I could find, wherever I could find it. Of course, I was already comfortable playing in the various underground games in the neighborhood and across the city. The only difference at this point was my motivation for playing. Now I was sitting down at games with my family’s livelihood on the line. I have no doubt that testing my conviction in that way at such a young age gave me a tremendous tolerance of risk which has stood me in good stead in everything I’ve done since.
Despite the gravity of the situation, I had to remain calm and to view my sessions as part of one long game, essential if I had a night where the bankroll took a bit of a beating. In all honesty, I never had massive losing sessions. At a time when a night’s buy in would be around $4,000, I had nights where I would lose one or two thousand, but no more. A night with a couple of bad beats would be a pause in the action, nothing more than that. I’d take a break and get straight back into it the next time.
I had nearly a decade of poker under my belt at this point and five or six years playing in undergrounds games, so the nuts and bolts of a winning game were already there – I had those tools at my disposal. What the situation now demanded of me on top of that was discipline and bankroll management. Going broke just wasn’t an option. And having to always play within my means was a very effective way of quite literally taking the fun out of the game.
I had already proved to myself over the previous five or six years that I could play solidly in well-staked games. But before my father’s death there had been no strain on my bankroll – my poker money had been essentially fun money. I had been able to spend the proceeds from winning nights on
going out with my friends, drinking and other indulgences. It hadn’t mattered if I skimmed money from my poker roll as I could go back and replenish it as and when I pleased. Now I was living off my bankroll. In fact four people were living off my bankroll, which meant my poker capital had to be able to withstand regular withdrawals.
When you’re playing recreationally, you are often tempted just to call an early bet when you know are ahead, to keep someone on the line for future rounds. When you are playing for a living, even if you are 80-90% to win the pot by the showdown, you’re still far more interested in going over the top and taking down a guaranteed win right there, even if that win is smaller. You’re not thinking about the cards as such, or even worrying about how many pots you will win, your only concern is the bottom line at the end of the night. Going bust and having to scratch around to rebuild my bankroll would have been disastrous, because all the time the family debts would have been accruing.
Of course that meant I often laid down good hands that could well have been winning to wait for a better spot. On an average night, I would keep myself in profit by taking down a lot of small pots, and wait for one or two big hands. A lot of the time, 90% of my night’s take would come in that one or two big hands. In a ten or twelve hour session you would keep ahead of the blinds and antes with a few small pots and wait for the one or two good hands you could reasonably expect in that time, that would actually hold up and you would get paid off on.
That’s not to say I was sitting back and waiting for the nuts, of course. If I’d done that, I would never have got paid. I was prepared to get into a lot of pots, to pay people off here and there, go up or down a couple of grand so I knew that when I did finally catch a monster, someone would pay me off. In poker you have to give action to get action.
In those first few weeks and months as I adapted to providing for the family, the only way I could mitigate against a bad run was by dropping down the level of game I was playing. Here’s an example by way of explanation of how I would do that in a manner that lessened my risk but still enabled me to play for high enough stakes. Every Sunday there was a No Limit Hold’em game at which the buy-in was would range between $1000 – $5000. I knew I was able to take that game for a good hit, but if I’d had a bad week, and couldn’t take that much of a chunk out of my bankroll, I would spend all my time Thursday, Friday and Saturday on the hustle purely to build up enough of a stake for a seat. Once I’d won enough money to sit down, I would either win at least $5,000, or lose $2,000 by the end of the night. Even in a worst case scenario, my overall bankroll remained intact and I had the capital to compete the following week.
As I went round town, I would play games at a wide range of limits – everything from $5 – $10 to $100 – $200, as well as a fair amount of no limit. I would estimate that about 60% of the games were stud, either five or seven card, and the remainder was a mixture of a whole load of variations and dealer’s choice.
I believe five card stud to be the most honest variety of poker there is. Of course, it’s fallen out of favor because it’s seen as boring and lacking in action – you don’t get the adrenalin rush and excitement of community cards. But back then, there were plenty of games dominated by old-timers who wouldn’t play anything but stud.
The variations you’d end up playing often reflected the ethnic diversity of the games. There were certain versions of the game peculiar to the Italians, while the Greeks had a predilection for varieties in which you could end up with two or three flops to encourage the action. Hold’em and Omaha were played to a small degree in New York at that time in one form or another, but there’s no doubt stud was dominant.
You had to be able to make money no matter what form of the game was being played. Of course there were varieties I preferred, there still are, but that never meant I stayed away from certain games. I just didn’t have that luxury and I think modern players are missing out by only playing Hold’em.
The difference between the games wasn’t just one of limits. There was a huge variety in the kind of game in terms of location, clientele and etiquette. Most of the games were played in tight little cliques – you had to work hard to earn your invitation to the table and then you had to make sure you
would be invited back.
The safest and most stable games were probably those played in upscale restaurants and clubs after closing. There’d generally be a pool of ten – 20 regular participants sitting down at a few tables, with the host taking a rake for his troubles. The good thing about those games was that there was almost no danger of you being rolled on your way out – even though the stakes weren’t generally that high, you could still leave with thousands of dollars in your pocket quite safely.
Bar games tended to offer easy pickings from working men and drinkers, while there were always games going on among the cops or firemen at the station you could take a seat in with the right introduction. The high stakes games tended to be in the Italian neighborhoods. There was a lot of money at those tables, but it wasn’t a game you could hit hard, you had to tiptoe carefully through those mob-infested waters in order to keep your winnings safe.
Paying attention to poker ethics and etiquette was essential for your safety on the night, and for the chance of being asked back. It wasn’t like walking into a casino – you weren’t going in to break a game. Instead, you had to make sure you got paid for your time while trying to ensure the people losing their money to you weren’t getting too pissed off in the process.
So, for example, you’d always tell people an hour or so before you got up to leave. Actually, that often worked in your favor. A guy playing in the last hour trying to win back his losses generally ends up sinking further into the hole. And if you ended the night up without pissing the losers off, it was always expected that you’d be back the next time. People like to feel that the money is staying in the game – that they will have a shot at taking it back. The fact that 90% of the time you ended up taking more of their money was immaterial. If you were well-mannered and abided by the house rules, they would still be happy to see you the next time as they would figure it was their turn to win.
You had to make sure you took care of the doormen, the waitresses and the staff. You had to tip well so the “house” wanted to see you back there again. You had to make sure you didn’t intentionally tilt people with stupid comments. Poker players are always very cocky, but you had to learn to be cocky in front of the mirror at home afterwards, not at the table. If someone made a bad play, you didn’t make fun of them – that was a simple function of respect. You took bad beats with good grace for the same reason. If you’re sitting at a mob table, getting shot is a big price to pay for getting cocky or disrespectful.
People either knew how to behave, or learned it very quickly. There may have been a lot of games going on, but New York was still a small poker community and a bad name was hard to shake off. All you had to get by on was your word and your reputation – you couldn’t afford for either of them to be discredited.
One of the factors I often used in my favor was my youth. I was not yet even 20 and I looked young for my age. Most of the people at the table were at least twice my age, a lot of them three times as old. They looked on me as a loose, reckless kid, an image I was able to exploit to make sure I got paid off. I was very happy for people to think I kept getting lucky. So long as their chips kept sliding across the felt to me, I was happy for them to think I got lucky night after night. No one viewed me as a pro or felt like they had been taken for a ride. I kept up the hustle by keeping my nights working in the bar and looking like I only played the games for fun on the side.
It was at this time I was first called “John the Greek”. And the reason for it had little to do with my heritage. Many of the old-timers had been playing the game for decades, and they gave me the name because my aggressive style reminded them of Nick “The Greek” Dandalos, one of the most famous
professional gamblers in the post-war era.
In those days you very rarely met anyone who was a true pro in the sense they didn’t do anything but play cards. There were a lot of people who earned a good living off the tables, but they all had other business ventures as well. Occasionally the “pros” might come visiting from Vegas to sit in the “novice games”, but they quickly learned that the competition on the east coast was tough. The New Yorkers weren’t novice players, they were effectively pro players with lives outside poker.
Taking over my father’s role as provider for the family probably brought me closer to him in death than we had ever been in life. He had never been a fixture in my personal life. His time away at sea had seen to that. I was as close to him as I possibly could be and in all honesty that wasn’t that close.
His chosen profession made him a visitor to my life in many ways. I felt his loss more in other ways. It brought me closer to my mother. Now she had to rely on me for the things she used to rely on my father for.
Suddenly I saw the shit that a household has to deal with on a daily basis, the real behind the scenes stuff. It really gave me an appreciation of what my parents had done. It showed me what adulthood was. Now every time the heating broke, I had to sort it out. I thought it had worked fine for 20 years, now I discovered it had actually broken 17 times but every time my father had got it fixed again. And it was the same with the roof, or the car. I saw all the work my parents did to keep a roof over our head and food on the table.
It wasn’t so much a realization of how unlucky I was now, or how hard things were for me at this point. More it was a realization of how lucky I had been before. I realized how much my father had done for us all. He might have been somewhat cold, somewhat distant and somewhat lacking in affection, but that man was the best provider you could hope or dream for. We were never lacking anything and everything we had was first rate. I had to step into his shoes and they were pretty big shoes to fill. But, somehow I managed to do it.
Right from leaving the house for the first time after my father’s death, I made enough money from poker to cover our immediate needs as a family. As weeks turned to months, I continued grinding out enough money from the tables to cover everything my mother and sisters needed, while taking enough from my bankroll to fund a good lifestyle for myself. My own tastes have never been extravagant, but I was prepared even then to put in the extra hours in order to live well. I would rather play for another hour to have enough to buy a good steak dinner with a bottle of fine wine, than quit playing earlier and make do with a McDonalds. I dressed well and always drove a decent car. But my desires were not lavish and the costs of my lifestyle remained about as constant as the family demands on the bankroll.
That meant that despite regular withdrawals, the roll continued to grow steadily and healthily. After three or four months I had enough capital behind to open out my game a bit and push on hands my risk aversion would have forced me to fold before – hands with a high percentage chance of winning, but not a certainty. In turn, taking more shots like that of course grew my bankroll faster.
At the same time, all those hours at the tables across New York honed and fine-tuned my game to pretty much its present state. I would be surprised if my game has improved any significant percentage points since those days.
But I certainly never considered myself to have “beaten” the game – rather I would say I had embraced it, learned it and fully understood it. I was able to play with the confidence that comes from trusting your reads, with the sureness of purpose that comes from certain reliance on your knowledge and understanding. Now I was able to use my game in new arenas.
John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.
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