This Game of Ours, Chapter Nine
published on 11/04/08 at 2:52 pm
Unsurprisingly, living through events in Beirut did change my outlook somewhat. I wouldn’t say it was so much that my experiences in the Marines changed me as a person, more that I chose to change myself based on those experiences. It was a fully conscious and rather humbling thought process.
On one hand of course, I was very unlucky, in that hundreds of US servicemen had served on much longer tours of duty without coming under the same kind of attack the 24th faced. But there was no doubt that having seen so many of my friends killed, and spent painful days digging their remains out of the wreckage of the barracks that had been our home, I was only too aware how fortunate I was still to be alive.
It gave me the opportunity to reflect on my dreams and aspirations, and also to consider my responsibilities to those who had raised me, and those who would follow after me. I thought I owed it to them to do a little more with my life than I had up to that point. Now, the decision to go into a “proper” career wasn’t solely based on events in Beirut, but it is a choice I might not have made without those events taking place. Everything that you experience shapes your opinion as you move forward and it was the trigger for me to realize that there was a whole world beyond poker. Some people may actually be offended to hear me say that, but there is!
If you’re truly a poker player, if you have really mastered the game, you live it, breathe it and understand it at its deepest levels, then there are a lot of places you can use those skills outside of a poker table. The stakes are higher, the game is different, but the competition is just as good. Before I left to join the military, I had lived life very much on a day-by-day basis, doing what seemed easy and living for the moment. I resolved that when I returned to New York, I would get myself on the career ladder.
Of course, I still had to conclude my tour in the military first. Back in the States, I managed to get myself transferred to military intelligence, an oxymoron if ever there was one. I really enjoyed it – I used the time to think about what kind of career I wanted and started to explore the opportunities in finance. I figured my math ability and time spent analyzing poker hands would come in pretty handy in that arena.
Meanwhile, the international fallout from the barracks bombing continued. The US eventually withdrew all its troops from Lebanon, which set an unfortunate precedent in the face of the threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. I strongly believe that a stronger response from Reagan could have done much to strangle the source of hatred that would eventually see Manhattan attacked. Now we watch the Bush administration make exactly the same mistakes in Iraq.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating the US getting deeply involved in another country’s affairs without good cause. I’m just saying that Bush in Iraq and Reagan in Lebanon played terrible hands of poker. There is a great tradition of US presidents being good poker players, but those two clearly have no understanding of the basics of the game.
When Reagan sent us into Lebanon, he made two fatal mistakes. First of all, he failed to analyze the situation correctly, so in a poker sense his reads were all wrong. Secondly, and even worse, he limped his chips into the pot and folded to a raise – he failed to have the courage of his
convictions.
After nearly a year sitting there with our hands pretty much tied behind our backs, we were sitting targets for the kind of action the bombers took. And then the US government crumbled at the first sign of aggression. By allowing the terrorists behind the attack to bluff us off the pot, we pretty much told anyone with a grievance against the US in future that we would gladly fold our hand and we would pull out of any situation if they attacked us. Even a poker novice knows that if you are going to commit to a pot, you have to commit yourself hard. We were tentative and weak, and 241 men paid
the price for that. The wider cost was only appreciated 20 years later and we are still experiencing the ramifications of how badly the whole situation was handled today.
Before they gave me an honorable discharge, the Marines also gave me something else of great value in my future career. During my time with military intelligence I was introduced to a subject known as “gesture clusters.” They’re several books available on the topic. In fact, I recommend any businessman or poker player reads at least one book on gesture clusters, and re-reads it every year.
Put simply, it’s the science of body language – the way people’s actions betray their thoughts and intentions. There are also all the actions that people are unaware of. For example most people cross their feet in a dentist’s chair. They also tend to do the same in an aircraft during take-off and landing. People tend to know some of the more obvious signals, such as crossed arms being a sign of irritation, anger or disgust. But there are many more.
Some of them were familiar to me from the poker table, of course, but it quickly became apparent that knowledge of these things could be just as useful, and even more lucrative, in a business setting. Touching a nose or an ear is a highly reliable sign someone is a lying, which is in itself enough of a reason to resist the temptation to scratch a nose itch.
Indeed, I would go further. If you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself being questioned or interrogated, the only posture you should adopt is the Lincoln memorial pose. You should sit as Abraham Lincoln does in the Washington DC statue – legs apart, shoulders back, right hand on right leg, left hand on left leg. You will look open and honest. In fact, it’s the only position in which you will be believable.
The details of the science go on and on and I highly advise everyone to read up on it. You will be amazed how much information you can gather just by looking round a room when you walk in. And if you’re still skeptical, consider this: how much money could you save in a business setting by using this knowledge to gather just one piece of information you would have otherwise missed?
Let’s assume you’re in a business setting pitching a deal. The guy you were talking to was hunched over in his chair, concentrating hard. Now, as you get to the end of the meeting, he’s sitting back a little, his legs have slid open in his chair and maybe he’s even scratching his palms. That says he’s happy – too happy in fact. It means you offered him too much money and he can’t wait to close the deal. You can use that information. You can take a break because you tell him a call is coming in, or whatever excuse you need. Then you can regroup and change the terms. All because you picked up on a tell.
The same is true the other way round of course. When you know a guy is weak, isn’t that when you hit him hard? That’s as true when you’re up against the real estate seller whose body language tells you he’s desperate to close the deal, or the guy trying to protect just a pair when there’s a flush draw on board.
After several enjoyable months brushing up on my reading abilities, my tour of service for my country came to a relatively quiet end. Two years after witnessing the slaughter in Beirut, in November 1985 I was honorably discharged and on my way home to New York. I’d learned some months earlier that it was quite safe to do so. Those that would have wanted me dead had long since been disposed of.
New York had changed in the time I was away. In fact, it had changed a lot. Organized crime probably changed more in that short period than it in the rest of my life taken altogether, and that change swept away the old order in the gambling community. John Gotti senior had just taken control of the Gambino family and his methods were rather different to his predecessors. Where the previous evolution had been slow, gradual and, above all, secretive, Gotti almost seemed to crave the limelight. Changes were abrupt and brutal and Gotti’s high profile drew a lot of heat not only on himself, but also those under him.
Suddenly the local underground games felt the pressure. I came home to discover most of the old circuit of games gone – busted, closed down or just no longer worth keeping going. I returned to the old neighborhood and was shocked. Dance studios, massage parlors and beauty salons flourished where the card rooms had once been. Atlantic City had grown bigger too and taken players out of the city. That, coupled with the higher regularity of busts, meant a lot of the old crowd had stopped running their games.
Their place was taken by a raft of new games, but the new order was far less stable than the old. As I slowly found my feet again, I discovered that the caliber of individuals involved in many of the new rooms wasn’t as high as the old days. Card rooms came and went in the blink of an eye – they were no
longer written into the landscape in the way they had been. The process continues to this day. As I write this chapter, I have played in seven underground rooms in the past month. Six of them have been shut down since.
In the same way that gambling premises no longer anchored the neighborhood, the mob themselves had withdrawn to a great extent. Organized crime went international in the 1980s. It sought bigger ventures and continued targeting unions and organizations far more. It didn’t have time to worry about keeping its hold on small businesses. And that, in turn, contributed in a large way to the decline of the inner cities. The mob hadn’t just supplied people to run things and make a profit. They had brought protection, stability and security to the streets. In the old days, the mob kept drugs out of neighborhoods, supplied the financing to keep projects and businesses running (at a vig of course) and were themselves a source of jobs and opportunities. When the mob moved out, it’s no exaggeration to say the boroughs felt the difference within months.
It wasn’t just the big picture that brought home to me how much things had changed. I thought about all the kids I had grown up with, walked the streets with and learned the game with. Only one other of my circle of friends from those early years had made it to his 22nd birthday.
Of course, Joey, who had been the first kid I met when we moved from Athens, had been hit on the night out. But he wasn’t the only casualty. Mikey, Angelo and Jimmy were all dead too.
Mikey had been Joey’s sidekick as long as anyone could remember. The only time you wouldn’t see Mikey by Joey’s side, he was off running an errand for him. Of course, that made Mikey every bit as much of a target as Joey. They gunned him down outside the Brooklyn cardroom before they headed out of town to catch up with Joey.
Angelo was out partying with some kids one night when they pulled up to a 7-11 store. While they were in there, one of the other kids pulled out a gun and attempted to rob the joint. It was Angelo who got picked up for it by the cops and he never ratted on those responsible. He got seven years in jail for his silence and was stabbed to death in prison a few months later.
Jimmy “Red”, as we called him, had been the only Irishman that dared to walk the streets of the Greek and Italian neighborhoods. He was fiercely loyal and a good man to have on your side. His real passion was cars – they were all he ever spoke about or dreamed of. And it was that passion that killed him. He was 19 when the cops caught him drag racing another guy and he hit a light pole at 95 mph after a ten minute chase.
Vince, who had always been quiet, reliable and trustworthy, became a demented gambler while I was away. He got a little too caught up in the game and by the time he was 20 he was in the hole to the local bookies for more than 50G’s. One night he disrespected the wrong guy after he found out that guy had been responsible for fixing a race that he had lost a fortune on. He got gunned down in the street as an example to the rest.
The only one of my old crowd who was still alive was a guy named Tony. And we’d never been close. He was a quiet kid and a real loner, but really into sports. He only hung around with us from time to time and kept to himself the rest of the while. The last time I had seen him was just before my father
moved us out to the suburbs. It was Christmas day and Tony had in his arms his only Christmas present – a brand new football.
We soon set out getting a game together. Normally, on fourth down, we would just throw the ball to the other team as it was only a small park. But for some reason I decided to test my punting skills. I punted the ball a little too well and it went flying over the fence onto Grand Central Parkway and that was the last we saw of it. Tony walked off and never spoke to me again.
Now, as I returned to the old neighborhood after so many years away, I ran into Tony. Perhaps not surprisingly, he didn’t recognize me at first. When he worked out who I was, as I leaned towards him to embrace him, he hit me in the stomach. The sucker punch was belated payback for ruining his
Christmas. I took it well and laughed it off. After all, we were friends once and he was the only one left. But I never saw him again after that day.
All in all, I had some pretty sobering thoughts to consider. Nearly everyone I grew up with was dead, and I’d seen hundreds of my comrades-in-arms killed in Beirut. I needed something more than just poker, as much as I loved the game.
The only kids who had gotten out of the neighborhood at all had tended to gravitate towards Wall Street. I remembered a couple of guys who had escaped the situation a few years earlier and ended up at investment banks. They had tried to convince me I should go in for the training programs before I enlisted, but I had been too comfortable in my poker-playing life to be bothered with getting a proper job.
Now, my decision had changed. As soon as I returned, I started enrolling in college to get the credits I needed to complete my degree and move on to an MBA. Having lost a scholarship to one of the most prestigious academic and demanding universities in the world at the age of 18, now I scraped together a bachelor’s and a masters piecemeal from about seven low-ranked institutions.
I wanted to stay in New York to be with my mother. Her health had begun to deteriorate and I was best positioned to be able to look after her. My older sister had used the poker bankroll I had left behind wisely. She graduated from Law School at the top of her class and was now practicing down
south. My younger sister had also started college.
There was another reason to stay in New York, of course. If I was going to complete my studies, I needed to earn money while I was getting those all-important pieces of paper. And that meant going back to the best way of earning money I knew: playing poker.
Things were very different now. The whole landscape of the game had shifted. People drifted in and out far more and that suited me just fine. Whereas before, you had needed to put in 20 hour sessions at the table, now you could breeze in for five or six hours and breeze out again with a healthy profit in your pocket. That was a much easier time commitment to fit around studying.
Although things were more volatile, there was an increase in the number and type of games available. The games had become looser. Before, 90% of the players at any game would be the same every week, which meant the action tended to be much tighter as everyone knew each other so well. Now the changeover in players was much higher, it changed the table etiquette. Short sessions were acceptable and the looser action facilitated the possibility of a quick win.
That meant I adapted my life accordingly. During this period, I had decided that poker was not my main focus. It was a tool. I would sit down purely to fund my studies and buy myself the kind of life I wanted to lead. And the stakes were getting higher and higher in cash games. That meant sessions could be shorter and shorter, while still bringing home enough money to match my ambitions. Even though I would still accept an occasional employment opportunity tending bar or managing a restaurant from time to time, poker represented over 80+% of my gross income.
It was during this period that I started to travel further for big cash games, something I continue to do to this day. I played more at Atlantic City, found time for trips to Vegas and started visiting places like Miami when I knew there was a good game on.
I was confident in my abilities at the table and I had left the Marines with a very healthy bankroll. The only additional weapon I added to my armory as I played more was that I got more confident at the stakes. As my roll increased, I wasn’t putting myself on scared money.
That combination made hitting big stakes games hard very tempting. If someone told me there was a high stakes game in Miami, say, with a $10k buy-in (and you have to remember the dollar was worth nearly ten times then what it is today), I would arrange my schedule accordingly. I would book myself a three or four day break from studying, fly out of town, take the game for a good take and leave again. Basic time management tells you that’s much more tempting that grinding for hours every night in an underground room at lower stakes. But you need to have the game, the money, and the confidence to step up to the plate like that.
If anything, I would say that overall the game had gotten easier since the Seventies. There were still some great players, but far fewer of them than there used to be. In the old days, only about 2% of your opponents would be out-and-out pro’s, truly great players. But 80% of the people at the table were very solid, very good players, so the competition was tough and making money was hard. Now, probably 10-15% of your opponents were pro’s, but only about 20% were good old-fashioned solid players. So even though there were some great players to watch out for, there was more money to be made than there used to be. You just had to watch out for the occasional bad beat.
I still tried to find time for one proper marathon evening session once a week, but overall it wasn’t too hard to juggle the twin demands of winning money and getting my qualifications. I never found the studying particularly difficult. It was exactly the same as it had been at school – studying for me has always just been a function of time spent on it.
The irony of it was that I learned almost nothing. With all due respect to degrees, my bachelors and my MBA were both pieces of paper that served little purpose beyond pacifying an idiot in an employment office.
In fairness, that was partly due to my age. The only real use for an undergraduate degree is that it enables people to learn how to use their mind and gives them the ability to process information. But if you want to learn how to process information – spend ten years earning a living at the poker table!
Teenage students also need to learn about leaving home, living on their own and mingling with other people from all walks of life. After four years in the military I pretty much had that one covered! That period of study is also when you learn to implement survival instincts, look ahead and plan for future. Again, I think you could say I’d already been forced to do that.
When all’s said and done, in four years they taught me some math, they taught me some balance sheets and they taught me some spreadsheets, but 90% of what they taught me I could have absorbed in 90 days with a $1 library card. But they did give me the two pieces of paper I needed. I needed them to make my mother proud and I needed them to get through the doors of the financial institutions of Wall Street.
By that time, I was about to obtain one more important piece of paper in my hand: a marriage license. Again, it was poker that provided the catalyst for a major event in my life.
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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