This Game of Ours, Chapter Eleven
published on 08/21/09 at 6:38 am
With a wife and a degree, all my life needed now was to fulfill my professional aspirations. As soon as I left the military, I had the vague notion I wanted to work in finance. As my four years studying came to an end, I narrowed my options down further and decided that Mergers and Acquisitions would be an appropriate theatre for my talents. I fired off applications and resumes accordingly and prepared for my first interview.
It was just the opportunity I was looking for. Jobs were a little scarcer after Black Monday, but I was called in to meet the woman in charge of HR for a very well-reputed firm. The job was in the department I wanted, so I decided to give this first chance everything. At the earliest opportunity I got, I would commit all my chips to the pot.
The head of HR turned out to be an extremely well-groomed woman in her mid-thirties. She was smart, sharp and very direct.
”Why should we hire you?” she asked me immediately. ”Why should we give you a chance?”
She didn’t add, ”What have you done to deserve to stand on the hallowed ground of our office?” but she didn’t need to. Her tone was unmistakable. I took a deep breath and met her head on.
“Im sorry?” I fired back confidently. ”You’re under the impression I’m here to be interviewed?”
“Well, yes. Why? Arent you?” she replied.
“No, I’m here to interview you,” I said.
“How’s that?” she replying as she began to laugh.
“Well, I plan on making myself a million dollars over the next year. Obviously, if I’m working at this firm you’re going to take half that. I’m more concerned with what you’re going to offer me to persuade me to come here to make the money. Why should I come here, not go anywhere else? What are you going to give me for support, for analysts, for due diligence? What is the firm going to offer me? I know what I’m going to
produce. The only question is where.”
She was kind of baffled by my All In move. I don’t think she had been expecting the interview to go like that and I don’t imagine many interviewees responded in a similar fashion. In fact, she was so baffled she left the room to consult the MD. To make a long story short, he came down, we had a two hour chat and he offered me a job. In fact, he initially offered me her job, but I told him I wanted to be in M&A. After all, who actually wants to work in HR?
My whole response was, of course, a complete line. It was a total bluff - a massive re-raise. When she asked me that question I didn’t have a good answer, so I did the only thing I could do. I went over the top of her. She folded and I took down the pot.
If the bluff hadn’t worked, I would have gone to the next interview, played another hand and tried the same trick. And at the next one, and the next one, until I got offered a job. Because I had to do it like that. I didn’t have anything else. I had zero references, a third rate degree and a questionable background. The only other thing on my CV was good military experience, but a lot of people feel uneasy having someone fresh out of a combat zone that’s used to shooting people for a living around the office. Spending a couple of years in a combat zone does have its downsides.
All I could do was play out the hand as best I could. After all, I knew what my cards were, and I certainly new that her hand was unbeatable. Only a bluff was going to take down the pot. For the record, I pretty much had the 72 offsuit there. She had the aces, the jokers, and the rest of the deck. Hell, she even had the instruction card! Even though this situation was my first hand at the table, I had to trust my analysis of the situation and go for it. I didn’t have anything to lose, because I either I thanked her for her time and crept out of the room, or hit back. It was all on the bluff, because either way I was dead in the water if we turned my cards over.
But it was a bluff that worked and they offered me an excellent package to start working for them immediately. In fact, I actually argued against what they were offering to a certain extent so as to make their frontloaded offer more performance-based. Dont ask me why, but just being handed a pay check at the end of the week irrespective of what I’ve done has always made me feel a little uneasy.
I’m aware I’m about to insult about 5 billion people, but being paid like that makes me feel like a prostitute. It’s like someone slapped a badge on my ass and said, I’ve been riding you for 40 hours this week and that’s what its worth. It felt somewhat demeaning to me. Of course, I needed some form of basic pay. I needed the ante to get into the game, but what I really wanted was a shot at the pot. So I argued my starting base salary down, but managed to increase my performance based incentives and bonuses. And that worked out well for me. The percentage is very substantial when you have good deals flowing.
Wall Street was a revelation to me, and I don’t really mean that in a good way. The M&A department employed 50 – 60 people and was an entirely new environment for me to analyze and adapt to. The set-up mirrored the military. Instead of platoon commanders, you had the MD for each department. Under him were directors and assistants, each of whom had a team. Each team was like a marine squad, only in this case each squad was made up of a few associates.
But here we wore suits, not camouflage. And even though our activities were pretty different to patrolling the streets of Beirut, you needed many of the same qualities to survive and thrive. Don’t ask stupid questions, keep your mouth shut and get the job done. Remember there are no prizes for second place.
Our primary activity could pretty much be compared to a shootout poker tournament. A load of people walk into a room and one guy leaves with all the money. Just like poker, one of the key rules was: don’t be the one who grinds away for hours only to break even. If you spend a day competing and only break even, you are wasting your life.
Of course, the personnel were somewhat different to the military. In my first week, I felt almost physically sick at the people who surrounded me. I was locked in an office environment with a bunch of young, arrogant Ivy-Leaguer know-it-alls. And I had never come across such complete phonies in my life before. Those starting at the bottom spent all day kissing the ass of the person directly above them in the hope of climbing the ladder. To begin with, I wondered what the hell I had let myself in for and questioned how I could possibly stomach staying.
But then we started negotiations and I understood what was really going on. Early on, I was assigned to conduct due diligence on a large acquisition for one of the firms software technology clients. Six hours into the meeting, I was struggling to stay awake, until a flash of inspiration struck me and I realized what was really at stake. The firm was the dealer, the deals were the hands and we were the players. This was just another way of playing poker.
Suddenly, I could see everything in a whole new light. I was energized, focused and interested. I spent the rest of day one looking round the group, scanning for tells and identifying the way people behaved - their gesture clusters and their words. At the end of that session, I was confident I had a pretty good read on the room. After that, I just had to wait for the hand to play out. It may have taken longer, and the stakes were higher than any poker game I had ever sat in, but the whole negotiations process was still nothing more than sliding chips across the table, gauging the strength of the opponents hand. Bluff and counter-bluff.
As soon as I realized the similarity, I lost no time in applying the lessons I had learned at the poker table in the boardroom. Indeed, my masters in poker served me considerably better than my MBA did. There wasn’t a single situation that came up that poker hadn’t prepared me for: playing weak when you are strong, playing strong when you are weak, trying to limp along until you catch your hand, running over your opponent whenever you smell weakness.
I quickly proved myself to be good at my new job. In fact, in those early days, my only worry was that too much time in the office would deny me the chance to play poker. Fortunately, those fears were unfounded. Poker was well on the way to becoming a huge global success story and my travels through work enabled me to experience it everywhere. The more successful business was, the more I was able to travel. It meant I could play in high stakes around the world: London, Paris, Athens, Prague, Moscow and Milan are just a few places that have shown me the global magnitude of this game of ours.
At this time, I was still only a cash game player. There was still no thought of wanting to compete in the World Series. Even in the mid-eighties, when a New Yorker won the thing back to back, it was still barely discussed on the east coast, still less taken seriously. We knew they ran tournaments in the west and every so often the “pros” would come to town. Sometimes they’d take our money, but most of the time, as I recall, we took their money.
They seemed happy to put a bullseye on their forehead, but we still preferred to stay underground. Underground was how we were taught and trained - not drawing attention to yourself was an ingrained survival instinct. Attention led to problems - you only had to look at Gotti to see that.
Even when Stu Ungar won his first two titles, it was still only a vague topic of conversation. Fewer than one in a hundred people would mention it. You’d hear more talk of it in legitimate establishments, in the casinos of Atlantic City, than you would underground. And on the West Coast, in Vegas, of course people talked about it more consistently. But in New York, we still weren’t bothered. After all, what did he win? $300,000. So what? You can make that in a week playing cash games. That was our reaction.
As the demands of the job grew greater, I started to find the potential to combine business with pleasure. When working through the night became increasingly frequent, I’d end up going to work with two suits and a change of clothes, ready to use the showers in the office. But, as ever, gather enough people together long enough and a poker game breaks out. There are some SERIOUS games on Wall Street. Much of the play is awful, but the money is wonderful.
Added to that, I realized for the first time quite what a big drug culture there was on Wall Street. If you think those are drugs people buy and sell in Queens, you’re wrong. Those are just samples by comparison. On Wall Street, people were buying drugs by the kilo. They were going direct to source, not dealing with middlemen standing on street corners or hidden behind holes in the wall. Some traders and analysts had 5g a day coke habits. And if they can’t sleep anyway, what better distraction than a game of cards?
The standard never matched the stakes to start with, but once people were playing blind drunk while snorting line after line, they might as well have been playing with their cards face up. In fact, they often had to. If they couldn’t see straight to know what they had, they would ask you to help them!
So that wasn’t really poker, but it was great to relieve these people of their money. Because the longer I spent on Wall Street, the more I hated it. Poker is the most legitimate venture I have ever been involved with in my life. Compared to Wall Street, the streets of Queens were clean enough to eat off of. If you want to talk about the mob, about a fixed game, about shakedowns and getting taken for a ride, look no further than the financial world.
It shocked the hell out of me. I left the streets to seek out a career and a future, to legitimize what I was doing. But I ended up working for biggest crooks, thieves and conmen than I had ever done before. It used to be Vinny who paid me, now it was Josh. I used to just get cash in hand, now I got an annuity, IRA and medical plan. Nowadays I had to admit I got paid more, and I couldn’t get arrested, but I felt like I’d been had. Investment bankers were no better than the mob, quite the opposite in many ways. They were certainly less honest and not worthy of anyones respect.
What was the worse set-up? The guys running the numbers, or the penny stocks that crashed in the 80s? If you bet on the numbers, you lost a few dollars. After a smooth salesman told you that you were making the soundest investment in history by snapping up penny stocks, you lost your life savings and maybe your home in a matter of months. The bookie comes out of that comparison looking like the good guy.
The only difference between Wall Street and the streets was that Wall Street was socially acceptable. I could talk about my job at the dinner table. But whereas poker was everything I expected it to be and the Marines was everything I expected it be, Wall Street was nothing like I imagined it to be.
After several successful years, the catalyst to move on actually came from my daughter. She was doing an assignment for school about what her father did for a living. So she asked me to explain it to her. I told her all about investments and hedge funds. I explained that the cash we raised funded: research, therapy, homes, all kinds of good things. I told her how we raised money from one lot of people and then funneled it to other people.
When I finished my long explanation, she looked at me and said, ”So all you do is move bits of paper around? You get this one to buy it and that one to sell it? And even if one of them loses money, you still make money?”
When she put it like that, it did sound pretty stupid. My whole life had become about moving paper around. There was little difference between the 52 cards moving round the table, and the stock certificates circulating in the market. In both cases, the money fell out as it went round and I made my living off the rake. The bigger the stakes, the bigger the rake. Surely there was more I could be doing with my abilities and
experience than that?
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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