This Game of Ours, Chapter Twelve
published on 11/15/09 at 9:44 am
The realization of being viewed by my daughter as a paper pusher, creating nothing of value, was grim, to say the least. In one sense I was pleased as she proved to be a chip off of the old block. She got a read and stuck with it. Regardless of what I was to say or do, nothing was going to change her mind. And why should it? She was dead on.
At the beginning of the new millennium, stocks on Wall Street were still flying and business was still good. But the Internet bubble was about to burst and everyone heavily invested in that sector was in for a cruel awakening. I began to look around for non-conventional investment opportunities, mostly in the private sector. Public companies’ evaluations were clearly overstated and there was no perceived appreciation.
During my years working in mergers and acquisitions, I had gained a considerable amount of knowledge about pharmaceutical companies, and so I concentrated my search in this field. I set my sights on a private biotechnology company that had some tremendous technologies in the areas of proteomics and genomics. But the company was well in bed with a large investment bank and about to issue an underwriting with them. The chance of a successful investment looked slim, but mammoth changes were just around the corner.
And it wasn’t just finance that was affected. All of our worlds changed on the morning of September 11th 2001. I had beenplaying poker the night before and was in the process of preparing for a meeting in Manhattan. I was scheduled to meet with a large overseas client that morning on the 38th floor of the World Trade Center, at the offices of Lehman Brothers. I tried contacting them early in the morning to inform them I was running a little late and to ask to push our meeting to noon. I never did get through. An hour or so later news of the first plane hitting the towers aired on the news. I still did not have a clear understanding of the severity of the situation and wrote it off as an accident. After all, my meeting was in the other tower. Minutes later, when the second plane hit, I realized what was happening.
Once again my life was directly affected by a cowardly act from extreme fundamentalists. Once again, I lost several friends and colleagues in the rubble, just as I had in Beirut 20 years earlier. And once again, I was spared from being a casualty because of my commitment to poker.
The attack on the Twin Towers was a rude awakening for many people stateside. It really shook everyone up. The barracks bombing in Beirut took place thousands of miles away, so citizens back home didn’t view it as an attack on their country in the same way. The lessons then went somewhat unheeded. This time the atrocity was committed on US soil and difficult to ignore.
Once the short-term sense of personal loss subsided, the professional ramifications of the attack lasted rather longer. It took the financial community quite some time to get back on its feet and functioning again. All underwritings were canceled indiscriminately and it became extremely difficult for private companies to attract investments or accept the public markets.
Amidst the grief I shared with the rest of the city, I soon realized that the situation actually presented a great financial opportunity for me. The company I had been following no longer had any underwriting options and was quickly running out of capital. It’s a well known saying that as one door closes, another opens. And I walked eagerly through that door.
I resigned from the investment bank and gladly left being a Wall Street paper pusher behind. I invested the money accumulated over years in mergers and acquisitions to enter a new and exciting phase in my professional life. That investment enabled me to become a co-owner and Senior Vice President of a pharmaceutical company engaged in the research and development of anti-cancer drugs.
That certainly passed the daughter test. It’s easy to see the benefit of our work, to explain why what I do every day matters. When what we do works, sick people get better and terminally ill people get their situation eased. It’s partly selfish, of course, because I get a better sense of self-fulfillment and self-worth now. But at the end of the day, we are making more then just money. We are making a difference in the quality of people’s lives, and that is obviously something to be proud of.
Over the last five years, I have expanded my interests in the sector. I’ve started several other entities in the field of cancer research, both domestically and abroad in conjunction with a group of committed scientists and businessmen. Now, as my business interests begin to mature, I find myself close to having fulfilled my professional aspirations outside of poker.
20 years after leaving the Marines to carve out a career, I now feel able to look forward to when I will be able to bring my time in business to a close. I can see I am close to being able to divest myself of the various interests that have occupied so much of my time over the last two decades. Then I will return full-time to the game that made it all possible for me in the first place.
At the moment, I still play a hell of a lot of poker, but nowhere near as much as I would like to. My commitments have caused me to sacrifice time at the tables, commitments both to my work and to my family. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret that for a moment. After my discharge, I made a conscious decision to make something of the opportunities life presented me, to explore the world beyond the poker table. Game time missed has been a small sacrifice to make in order to remain true to my convictions and ambitions, and in order to fulfill my responsibilities to my family. It has been a small sacrifice that has more than yielded a positive return. But I am still excited at the thought of returning more completely to poker.
Every day when I wake up, I ask myself, “When I am going to play poker today?” If the day goes by and I don’t play poker, then I’m disappointed. But I analyze the day and see if it was better served by doing other things. Then I go to bed thinking, “That’s ok, I will play poker tomorrow.” I have never gone more than a week without sitting down at the tables.
At one point in my life I used to play to live. The game was my livelihood and my primary source of income. Now, my successes at and away from the table will enable me to live to play. It’s like fishing. I love going fishing, but I don’t fish to eat. There are plenty of cultures where if you don’t catch anything when you go fishing, you don’t eat. I imagine that takes the fun out of it. And where we grew up in Queens, we didn’t have a rowboat or a pond like the kids in the country. We had poker. We’ve grown up with it. It was our fishing.
There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing than playing poker. It is both a tool for earning money and entertainment in itself. It’s enjoyed that dual status for a decade now. I first played the game at the age of eight, but I think it took me eight years to stop playing cards and start playing poker. And then a little while longer to learn how to yield it properly. So I’ve been playing poker, really playing it and understanding it for 28 years.
Even when it was my major source of employment, I have never viewed poker as a career. It has often been a short-term source of income, but the whole idea of seeing it purely as a job does not sit right with me. At every stage of my life, I have played poker for the same reason I have eaten and slept. It’s what I do. I’ve never had to question my motivation for the game or my commitment.
My ambition for the game remains the same now as it always has been. To turn in winning sessions. But do I have losing sessions? Of course I do. Anyone who says they don’t have losing sessions is a liar. But I have more winning sessions than losing ones. I know, because a fellow player asked me recently and I went back and checked, that my last winning streak was 36 winning sessions. But cash games are no longer the only form of poker I enjoy.
Over the last two years I have also taken my first steps in tournament play. After a couple of minor experiments in Atlantic City, I made my major tournament debut in the WSOP circuit event at Harrah’s, Atlantic City, in 2005.
I also played a small WPT event at the Borgata in 2005, as well as the Main Event at the World Series of Poker. This year, I played at Foxwoods and plan to enter several of the bigger buyin events at the World Series of Poker, include the Main Event again.
I achieved a remarkably similar result in all four tournaments. Four times I ran deep into the event, before busting out just shy of the money. All four times I was outdrawn to be eliminated. That’s not a complaint, it’s just a fact. That’s how tournaments work.
Big tournaments are basically a lottery, because of sheer number of Internet qualifiers. If people are playing on freerolls, or after buying-in initially for a couple of dollars, they are much happier to chase draws. The set-up of the fields vastly increases the chance of a professional putting his money in ahead and getting outdrawn by an amateur. I’ve enjoyed the tournaments I’ve played so far. They’ve been a lot of fun. But they are not an exhibition of the best poker being played today.
The real satisfaction I have taken from tournaments so far comes from the reaction of players I respect and admire. I sat down last year as somewhat of an unknown quantity, but that didn’t last. In my first tourney I played with Howard Lederer, Barry Greenstein, Jennifer Harman and David Williams. I might have got knocked out, but I wasn’t unknown any more.
I’ve never been interested in the kudos of winning a tournament per se, but the respect of some of the finest players in the world is a different matter. To be appreciated for your play by the players you respect is the highest honor – no title or amount of money is worth more than that.
Now I’ve dipped my toe in the water, I will continue to enter tournaments alongside my regular cash-game sessions. Tournaments have opened the door to new challenges for me. I have tested myself against the finest unknown players in the world. I have played cash games all over the world and won. Now I would like to test myself against the finest well-known players in the world. At the moment, that means playing tournaments, as I couldn’t face them in a cash game environment without committing myself to a lot of time and travel.
The leading poker players’ careers are dominated by tournaments at the moment, so that is the arena in which I need to challenge them. Don’t misunderstand me, I would still far rather face them in a cash game, but this is better than not facing them at all. I would be ecstatic to turn up to a tournament, get my seat draw, go to my table and find nine top ranked professionals. At least then I know we will be playing poker.
At the same time, the tournament boom has brought hundreds and thousands of new players to this game of ours. And it has brought them to the cash tables too. For that, I am extremely thankful. There is more money to be made at the cash games now than there ever has been before. If a player sits down at a cash table and plays the way he approaches tournaments, his money is even easier to take.
I still manage to play cash games in New York once or twice a week. Or I find a game wherever I am when I am away. I always have my bankroll with me when I travel. And the influx of new players has kept that roll growing steadily. In fact, there’s often more money to be made at low stakes than high stakes these days, because the action is so loose there.
For another year or two, I will continue to juggle my poker-playing with achieving my goals and aspirations outside the game. Those things have never taken me away from the game and will never be able to. Once those aspirations have been satisfied, I will come full circle and devote myself purely to poker once again. But at that point, I will have fulfilled my ambitions in life. I will be able to sleep at night without saying, “I could have…” I will be able to sit down at the table without saying, “I should have…”
John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience.
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