For every guy you see on TV, there are a hundred thousand guys that play equally as well, that play even better, that play constantly. Their life is completely suffocated by this game. They live in this game and they are the game. What people are seeing now through television and Internet sites is just a flash. It’s like a twinkle in the sky. To those people, it’s a light in the distance, but to plenty of other people it’s an entire universe.

Beyond the half-hour segments of televised coverage, there is a whole world of poker that embraces success and failure, that rewards careful study and good play, which presents unlimited variations to explore. A world where games are measured in days and weeks, not minutes and seconds. A world where the game takes years to truly learn and a lifetime to master. A world in which those who fully embrace this game of ours are rewarded in return. A world that will pull you in and give you lessons no other game can. Truly a life’s lesson.

It is that world that I know and love. It is that world I have tried to present in this book and it is that world and that game that I encourage you to explore. I have been playing poker for almost three decades now and I have made significant sums of money. The irony, however, is that at the end of the day I won’t remember the millions, or the trophies or the ingenious plays. What I will remember most is a defining moment in my life. A moment that defines my soul’s existence. The moment I embraced this game of ours and placed in it my heart for keeps sake. That moment I became one with this game. The game that lead me through my childhood, that provided for my loved ones, that saved my very life, that made me the success that I am today. This game of ours that I love so dearly. It defined me.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience.

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.

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.
“
“I’m sorry?”” I fired back confidently. “”You’’re under the impression I’’m here to be interviewed?””

“Well, yes. Why? Aren’t 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. Don’t 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 it’s 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 firm’s 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 opponent’s 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 anyone’s 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.

The establishment was a family run business, operated by three brothers with the help of their sister. The oldest brother and I became very close friends. I made it a point of dropping by there for the night at least twice a week. During the week they usually played a limit game ranging in levels from $5-10 to 40-80, good stakes for those days. On the weekend they held a no limit game that I could hit pretty hard.

It was a great environment to play in, and the camaraderie was even more enjoyable than the winnings. In fact, it was the first time in my life where I found emotion actually starting to affect my play. Whenever I found myself heads up with one of the brothers I caught myself intentionally slow playing a hand or even checking down with the nuts from time to time. It wasn’t a conscious decision to do so, it was an innate reaction. As good as it felt to win and outclass opponents, it didn’t feel as good to do so at the expense of a close friend.

Much to my surprise, they picked up on this rather quickly and immediately began to reciprocate. After a few months it turned into quite a gig as the three brothers and I basically ended up splitting all the winnings from anyone unfortunate enough to join us at the table. That’s not to say we were colluding, just that we always found enough other people to take money off without needing to put a hurt on each other. As the months went on, sessions in that game became a risk free and very profitable venture. Even better than that, I had the time of my life when I was there.

This was a very different poker-playing friendship to my childhood relationship with Joey, Mikey and the others. Whereas my friendships in Queens had been borne out of convenience and necessity, the relationship I enjoyed with these three brothers was purely an exercise of my own free agency. I didn’t need their money or their protection, and they didn’t need anything from me. I went to their restaurant only because it pleased me to do so, I spent time there only because I enjoyed it and I hung around with the brothers only because it was the best thing I could think of to do with my time. I expected nothing in return but their friendship and they became like the brothers I had never had.

But as much as I enjoyed my nights there, my initial arrival at the establishment every night was agonizing. Their younger sister Angelica was always the first person I saw as she let me in to the restaurant. And if looks could kill, I would have died a thousand deaths that year. The woman hated and despised me. The mere thought that I was coming there to hustle her brothers out of their hard earned dollars make her sick, as did the game of poker in general.

Like most Greek women, she knew what demented gamblers her countrymen could be. She had grown up hearing tales of those that had lost businesses, homes, even life and limb to gambling. She didn’t like it, and she didn’t like me as a result.

Every morning when she arrived at work the first thing she did was look for traces of cards and chips from the previous night’s game. If she found any, she would immediately discard them in the garbage. This of course did not impede our game one bit, as I always had a carton full of decks of cards in the trunk of my car. I was never without.

But every time I arrived at the restaurant, I chatted with Angelica. I quickly realized her bark was much worse than her bite. I began to enjoy our conversations more and more, getting a kick out of knowing my mere presence there was annoying her. I was rude and obnoxious to her and in return she was the most aggravating woman I had ever met in my life. It was fun.

I tease her about it now, but she made the fatal mistake of beginning by hating me. Once you get emotional, there’s a fine line between love and hate. I think she began to realize I was looking out for her brothers far more often than I was taking advantage of them. Valentine’s Day rolled round that year, so I decided to send her a bouquet of roses and offer to take her out to dinner that night after work.

She said yes and from that night on we were inseparable. We were never apart again as I continued to see her seven days a week. On poker nights I spent the mornings with her, and after days studying or working, I spent I would see her every evening. She worked hard in the family restaurant whenever she wasn’t with me.

Almost before I realized it, things began to get serious. And that didn’t please her brothers. After about a week without visiting the game, I was in the neighborhood and decided to pay the restaurant a visit. The reception was cold, to say the least.

“What do you think you’re doing with my sister?” were the first words out of her brother’s mouth.

I told him he had no need to worry. I would never do anything to disrespect her or her family; after all they felt like my family anyway. I told him my intentions were serious and that I wasn’t messing around with her.

But that didn’t make any difference. He wasn’t worried about my intentions, he took those for granted. He just didn’t think I was suitable.

“You know, she’s a very good girl and a wonderful person, he said. “She deserves better.”

I was shocked. I realized that there was some hypocrisy in this situation. I had been close friends with these three guys for almost a decade. I had played cards with them for hours on end. I was good enough to play with, good enough to drink with, even good enough to be considered a friend and be included in all family functions, but I certainly wasn’t good enough to marry their sister.

I realized that despite our friendship, the three of them viewed me as nothing more than an egotistical womanizing gambler. That was all I had ever been as far as they were concerned. I was disappointed and, somewhat heartbroken by this judgment, but I did not allow it to slow me down one bit. In fact, I began to pursue Angelica with a new found passion. After all, I knew who I was. I knew what she and I wanted and I remained convinced that in time her family would realize I was as good for her as she was for me. In fact, it took them nearly another decade to come around completely (a tough crowd).

Despite her brothers’ initial disapproval, Angelica and I were engaged within three weeks. And we married two months later. Getting married wasn’t a difficult decision. In fact, I’d say it was the best read I ever made. We had 3,000 years of heritage in common; it didn’t take long to catch up on the last 20 years. I hadn’t set out to look for a wife, but as soon as I got to know Angelica, it was obvious to me I had found the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

But she would never be my only love. We had talked about many things during our engagement, but had never discussed why I played poker. I guess my new wife assumed it was just something I had done for entertainment, a bachelor’s amusement I would drop after our marriage. That, of course,
was far from the case.

After we returned from our honeymoon I took a couple of days to get settled in. On that first Friday night back home, I was getting ready to set out for a session of poker. My wife surprised me by interrupting my ritual and decided to intervene in my plans for the evening.

“Where are you going now?” she asked in a very obnoxious voice.

“Where I always go on Friday,” I replied.

“Yes, but now you are married.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, you are not planning on playing cards the way you used to before we got married, are you?” she asked, with a confused look on her face.

That annoyed me, so I was quite abrupt in my reply.

“Listen, first of all I don’t play cards, I play poker. Second of all, what the hell does being married have to do with playing poker?”

“That’s something you did when you were single, I won’t have it!” she shouted back.

We had clearly reached a key question in our marriage. I needed to find out how far she was willing to commit on this issue. As not playing was a non-starter, I needed to see where I stood. So I borrowed my tactics from the poker table and pushed all in.

“You are my wife, honey, and I love you very much, but poker always has been and always will be my only mistress. Don’t ask me to pick between the two of you, because you will lose!”

This was obviously not the answer she wanted to hear. Nor was she prepared to lay her hand down just yet. She began a 30-minute tirade, until I looked at my watch and realized the game had started ten minutes ago and I was still stuck in a pointless argument. It had become horribly obvious that
neither one of was going to win this hand, so I decided it was time to chop the pot.

“Listen, I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “I have always kept my poker money separate from house money and I don’t plan on changing that now. If I ever need to use house money to replenish my bankroll I will repay it within 48 hours with interest.”

“Why? You think you’re that good?” she asked, grinning sarcastically.

“No, honey, I know I’m that good. If you get the hell out of the way long enough, you’ll know it as well.”

She sat there staring at me with a blank look on her face. It had never occurred to her that I might be good at the game. She thought I was just a social player, who risked money to sit around playing with his drinking buddies. And I was just standing there staring back at her and feeling annoyed. How I could have put myself in the predicament of needing to negotiate to play poker?

“Who the hell needs this crap,” I thought, “a thousand times better off single!”

My thoughts were interrupted by a settlement offer.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “You go, play and enjoy yourself. If you touch family funds, I want it back in the house in 24 hours, not 48. And I want it back double.”

I started laughing uncontrollably. Can you believe the nerve of this woman? First she dictated my actions to me, and then she charged me vig on my own money. And what a vig – 100 percent a day! But I was too tired to argue and the clock kept ticking, so I figured it was time to cut my losses and move on.

“Fine, you got it. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I went off to the game.

After I had time to cool off I realized the wisdom of the request. If you are taking money out of a household to replenish a portion of your bankroll, then doubling up just that portion should not be a problem. In fact I could not see any harm in putting more money back into my own household than I had taken out initially, as that’s what I would have done after a couple of winning sessions anyway. So I stuck to my wife’s deal and in 17 years of marriage I have never had to miss a payment. Only in a few rare occurrences have I ever needed to touch household funds.

As time went by and Angelica started to see a regular influx of cash making its way home each week, she soon realized that there was a method to my madness. She realized poker could be played profitably for prolonged periods of time and there was a significant difference between the game of poker and games of chance. For the first time, she understood this was truly a game of skill.

It’s actually pretty funny when you think about it. Angelica was not only Greek, she came from the same island as my mother and had a very similar upbringing. And they reacted to my playing poker in exactly the same way, both at first when they were worried and subsequently as they saw the money it brought in.

The argument that night was not only the last time we quarreled about my playing poker, it was the last discussion regarding that matter. From that day on, she has always stood by me and supported me in any decision I have made. She has been right behind me in every business venture and everything I have done to provide for her and our children. She has never questioned me, my commitment to our household or my commitment to the game she shares her husband with. Even today, 17 years later, she is as supportive as any man could ask for. Our marriage has been a true partnership and she has been involved in every decision I have made.

At the end of the day her brother was right after all. She was too good for me and I am truly blessed to have her in my life. Eventually, as our family was further blessed by the arrival of three children, two girls and a boy, even her brothers managed to come around. Throughout our marriage, relations with her family had always been polite, but I would say it took about a decade to reach true acceptance.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.

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.

Of course I was upset about Joey’s death. But I was upset for him, not for myself. Grieving is generally a selfish emotion, in the sense that it is your own loss you mourn. When my father died, my grief was that he would no longer be around for me, that I had been left alone. That’s what you cry about, not the death itself.

My relationship with Joey was not the same as with my father, or with my best friends today. If my brother-in-law died I would be unable to function for about a month. My sense of loss would be tremendous. That’s not to say I didn’t care about Joey, but I wasn’t close to him in the same way.

I spent many hours with the guy, we even had a hell of a lot of fun together at times, but I never made friends with him because he was the nicest guy in the neighborhood. I cared for him in a way, but ours was a friendship of convenience for so long. Friendships in Queens were like friendships you make with cellmates in prison. You may well up end genuinely liking someone in that situation, but you start off being friends with them because you have to. In fact, it was just at the point when we were both trying to build a true friendship out of that relationship that he got shot.

So I was upset by his loss, not mine. He spent all his life in Queens. He was pretty much born into the mob. He made it through all that shit to get to where he was. Just as he got set, it was all taken away from him. That’s what saddened me.

I had been slowly leaving behind the world I had grown up in. All the benefits it brought me in my youth I ended up paying for many times over. I saw Joey get shot and I was forced overseas for three years of military service. My Queens connections were never any use to me again. That whole
aspect of my past faded from view and Joey’s death was the final stage. Now it was time to adapt to a whole new world of challenges.

I actually enjoyed the training. Boot camp was as tough as the folk tales suggested, but I was able to adapt to survive. I would say I have the ability to adapt to any situation I find myself in – it’s one of my God-given talents. If I go on holiday to, say, Trinidad, then after three days you’d swear I was born and raised there. I’ll know every back alley and every underground game. I’ve always been confident, almost aggressive, in my exploration of a new environment. And the way I approached the military was no different. It was another set of rules to live by and another system to adopt.

In fact, it was a set of rules I had already learned to live by. The toughest disciplinarian I ever met wasn’t in the military – it was my father. The meanest, baddest, toughest drill sergeant the marines could dredge up to terrorize raw recruits couldn’t put a dent to him. In our house, if you did something wrong, you weren’t just punished. You reported to my father as though you served under him and a punishment was handed down to you. It was like being court-martialed. That made adapting to life in the military one of the easiest tasks of my life – boot camp was like a Saturday at home!

The key to adapting to any situation is actually very simple. You just need to understand what the rules and guidelines of the system are. And the quicker you understand the system, the quicker you can function within in it. It’s just a matter of observing your surroundings so you alter your own behavior accordingly. The military, like my house, is a very easy environment to understand because it’s so highly regulated.

People have this strange misconception that growing up in a densely populated urban environment like New York is a free-for-all. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. There are a hell of a lot more rules on the streets than there are in the Marines and the penalties for breaking them are far more severe. Added to that, no-one tells you what the rules are in advance. Most of the time you only find out you’ve broken them after the event. In the Marines, on the other hand, they tell you exactly what the rules are in great detail and even helpfully explain what the punishment will be if you break those rules.

After the trauma of seeing my oldest friend shot, I was in a situation that was risk-free. My mind was clear and I was able to concentrate on the physical side of the training. My primary responsibilities were: wake up, shut up and listen. How hard can it be to adapt to that? Everything was laid on a plate for me – for the first few weeks it felt like a vacation.

Physically, I left the boot camp in the best shape of my life. My body fat was down to 3% and I felt great. I had been in reasonable shape in New York, but a lifestyle of spending 40 or 60 hours a week in smoky card rooms playing poker and drinking scotch was one that could send you downhill pretty
quickly. In the 1970s, it just wasn’t main stream for men to be body conscious or even fashion conscious. If you went to the gym, you snuck off and did it quietly. Physical exercise was almost taboo. Running or jogging was unheard of.

So I enjoyed the chance to really feel in peak condition. Mentally, the training period gave me a three month break from playing cards – the longest run in my life without poker, before or since. The beauty of it was that I was busy enough and exhausted enough not to miss it. They spent three months running us into the ground. I was so tired that whenever I had any time off, my priorities were to grab a shower and get some sleep.

Long before my mind ever started to drift, it was already morning and someone was shouting at me to wake me up. Then I’d be off for another day packed with fun and activities – it was like a bad package holiday!

And I didn’t miss the competitive element of cards, because that element was there in the training every day. You have to realize that Marine training is designed not to bring you up, but to break you down. They want to completely break you before they can start again and build you up again as a marine. That way they make you feel invincible in your new persona. So the training was very much a head game and an arena in which a poker mentality came in very useful.

In that environment, as soon as you work out what their objective is, you can tell them they’ve fulfilled it and behave as though they’ve shaped you the way they want to. The sooner you do that, the sooner they stop trying to break you and get off your back. I worked out what they wanted to see
and hear from me. Life got easier for me after that.

It would have been a very different life if I’d held out for a commission instead of enlisting. I think the decision to join the ranks, and to opt for the infantry over going in the navy, was probably one last way to spite my father, an act of defiance against my family’s heritage. Not only had my father held the rank of colonel in the Greek royal navy, his father had been an admiral and his grandfather had been a rear admiral. By contrast, three months after fleeing New York, I was a private in the 1st Battalion of the 8th Marines as part of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit. And I was setting out to sea on a transport ship of the sixth fleet as a passenger, not a seaman.

Our original destination was Alexandria in Egypt, but after only a couple of days on board, we learned that new orders had come through. There had been another flashpoint in the checkered history of the Middle East and we were sent to be deployed in Beirut, Lebanon. Ostensibly, our role was to act as peacekeepers, but the reality was that the situation was rather more complicated than that.

A civil war of sorts had been raging since 1975, with various Christian and Muslim factions competing for control of different parts of the country, backed at different times by neighboring forces, most notably the Syrian army. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was also heavily present after being expelled from Jordan. After fierce internal fighting in the 1970s, a second conflict raged in 1978 when Israeli forces crossed the border into South Lebanon, ostensibly to wipeout Palestinian bases responsible for rocket attacks on Israel.

A period of ceasefire followed the withdrawal of that first Israeli advance, but the situation escalated once more in 1982. Israel bombed PLO positions in Beirut and the PLO launched further rocket attacks across the border as tensions rose following the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, the
Israeli ambassador in London.

Under the leadership of then defense minister Ariel Sharon, Israeli troops crossed the border into Lebanon en masse once more on 6th June, on a program entitled “Operation Peace for Galilee.” The published plan was to advance 40 kilometers into Lebanon and destroy PLO bases. But in reality the Israeli forces continued on to Beirut and besieged the city.

The capital suffered severe damage in the shelling that followed, as first the PLO fired on Christian-held positions in the East, and then the surrounding Israelis bombed the PLO themselves. The international community tried to broker as peaceful a solution as possible. But a UN security council resolution demanding the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the city environs was vetoed by the US on the grounds it was “a transparent attempt to preserve the P.L.O. as a viable political force.”

Finally, Ambassador Philip Habib, who had been sent to the region as a special envoy by President Reagan, managed to find agreement from all sides for a new solution. Israeli troops agreed to pull back from Beirut while a multi-national force of American, French and Italian troops oversaw the withdrawal of the PLO from the country.

The 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit formed the American portion of the multi-national force and arrived in the city on August 25th 1982. They successfully supervised the evacuation of the PLO at the start of September. The evacuation passed off as peacefully as could be expected, although a major incident was narrowly averted when French, American and PLO troops almost clashed over the right to oversee the departure of PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

With their job done, the Marines actually withdrew back to their ships in the Mediterranean on September 10th. But later that month, the assassination of President Bashir Gemayal and the massacre of 3,000 Palestinians by Christian militia as Israeli troops stood guard plunged the situation back into confused chaos. The multi-national troops were recalled on September 26th, this time as peacekeepers.

The continued presence of Syrian and Israeli troops in the country, as well as several heavily-armed militia groups, meant it was hardly an easy peace to keep. To make things harder, because the troops were technically there to “assist” the Lebanese government in maintaining law and order, the marines were told their primary objective was just to be “a presence.” If troops were fired upon, they were instructed to respond “with minimal force.” And all this was about to become our concern. A month after returning to Lebanon, the 32nd’s tour of duty came to an end and they were relieved by my unit. We landed in Beirut on 30th October 1982.

Unlike the vast majority of Marines, I actually knew a lot about Beirut. It wasn’t first hand knowledge, but my parents had vacationed there several times in the 1960s and I had seen their photos and home movies. Beirut had been pretty much the Monte Carlo of the Middle East at the time – with a strip of hotel after hotel, casino after casino. It was also a banking Mecca somewhat akin to Switzerland. All in all it was a desirable holiday destination for the European jet set.

Now this tiny country had become the theatre for an increasingly complex conflict, the latest battleground in the ongoing war for control of the region. The state I found Beirut in when we landed really shocked me. Comparing what we could see to the movies I remembered watching as a child was
an awakening experience. By now the buildings were so riddled with bullet holes the city looked like a Swiss cheese.

And by now, poker had re-entered my life with a bang. I had worried the three week Atlantic crossing would be hellishly boring. In fact, it proved to be the start of another extraordinary chapter in my poker-playing life.

The sheer scale of the ship astounded me. It wasn’t a vessel, but a floating city. There were 6,000 of us on board, Marines and navy personnel, other ranks and officers. And the second big surprise for me was how little difference I found between the crowd on board and the people I knew back home. You had similar diversity to a five mile radius of the neighborhood in New York: blacks, Hispanics, Italians, Greeks, the Irish etc.

The only group that was really new to me was the Southerners: the good ol’ boys from Oklahoma, North and South Carolina and Georgia. They were like a breath of fresh air. They had a certain innocence about them – the southern states are pretty much a different world compared to New York. That’s not to say I considered them ignorant. They certainly weren’t stupid, but they’d just had such a very different life experience to me up to that point.

As ever, if you throw a load of guys together, a poker game will break out. And several did. In the mornings we had physical training and classes on matters like bio-chemical defense, but in the afternoon and evening we’d have free time before and after supper. There were only so many times you could go for a jog round the deck or watch the reruns of terrible old movies, so poker was an obvious way to pass the time.

At first it didn’t strike me as a financial opportunity. It just seemed like a good distraction and a welcome taste of home. But as I walked through the ship and saw the games being played all over the place, I realized that this was a situation with good earning potential.

If you spend enough time in poker rooms, you soon become able to spot good players, and identify the weaker ones. I got to know a couple of the other guys who had grown up in inner city environments and had strong knowledge of the game. I knew they would understand what I was trying to achieve. It was to be a long-term strategy. First we needed to build the infrastructure and then the opportunity would follow. I had gone on board with $5k of my bankroll and soon put it to work.

As ever, the key lay in understanding the motivation for people to stay in the game. You must understand what your opponents are doing there. You have to tailor your approach to the environment. Setting up the game needed exactly the same qualities that it took to survive military training: understanding the situation and adapting to it.

Overall, this was a very different poker-playing environment to New York, but there were a couple of key similarities it was important to note. Back home, when I used to play with people like Joey and Mike, I wasn’t trying to beat them out of their next mortgage payment, but I still wanted to get paid at the end of the night. So if I got into a pot with a friend of mine, I was more likely to slow-play a hand, or check it down to the river. I wanted to win money, but I didn’t want to put a hurting on them in the process.

Onboard ship that was the situation I was in with everyone. You don’t have one friend in the marines. Everyone is your friend. Everyone is your lifeline. You will depend on these people in a life or death situation. So you don’t want to hurt them. Equally, you have to understand who is going to be in the game and why they are there. You have to work out what will keep people in the game the longest. Unlike New York, you know they don’t have any other source of income. They get paid on the 15th and 30th of every month and that’s it. There’s no bookie or loansharks to lend out money with like there was in Queens, and no Daddy to write out checks like there was in the suburbs.

That doesn’t mean we set out to play soft. It wasn’t a case of worrying about everyone else more than worrying about winning. But it was a simple function of longevity. If you run a restaurant, you don’t poison your customers on your first night. I had a choice. Did I want to take people for a grand each on day one and then god knows when I would get another game, or did I want to set up a regular game in which they would drop their money on a weekly basis and let it go on for a year?

And the lessons of my teens served me well at this point in time. Once more, my new crew and I were able to make money the way I had with the old crew back home. We lent money to people who wanted to take a seat in the game, at the usual vig of course. There wasn’t anybody on that ship who
couldn’t use a few extra dollars now and then. And the collection system for debts was brilliant.

If one Marine owed another money, they were able to write out an IOU. The second guy could then take the IOU to the disbursement officer, who handled the payroll. When the pay was sent out twice a month, that amount would automatically be debited from the first guy’s paycheck and credited to the second guy’s account. So for the duration of my time in the military, the Marines gave me plenty of opponents keen for a game of poker and then Uncle Sam collected my debts pro bono!

The biggest problem we had with the games was calming people down enough to play a sensible form of poker. We mixed up stud, draw and a bit of Hold’em to keep people interested. A lot of them were used to crazy games of deuces wild and follow the queen. Those are games of chance. If people wanted to play those games, then great, we would lend them the money and good luck to them! But why would I want to sit down with people gambling like that and play something ridiculous in which I have no advantage? That’s not poker, it’s roulette with cards. So along with the solid players I had identified, I set out educating people away from those games of chance in favor of regular reliable poker sessions.

As far as limits were concerned, we didn’t play anything under $1-2, and levels went up to $5-$10, as well as some no-limit games from time to time. The average buy in was $100-$500 at a time when the weekly wage was $400. It took time to build it up to that level, but we got there as the games became more aggressive and more regimented.

That in turn produced regular paydays. I cannot stress enough that my aim was never about being viewed as the best player on the boat, or even being identified as the best player in any particular game. The whole setup wasn’t a question of stature or grandeur. It was just about taking care of business and getting paid.

And there were more games going on than we could be part of. In our circle, there must have been 20 or so games going on, while we were actively involved in two or three. That was fine, because we benefited from the rest by bankrolling them. If someone needed 90 dollars to play, they would sign an IOU to us for $100 and then sit down. So we were able to take out the equivalent of a rake, not from the table itself, but in the vig on the money.

And things really got interesting when we got to Beirut. In many ways, being stationed there was like being on vacation at a European camping ground. Every country had its own area, and every area had its own action and its own games. The ones who were a real riot were the French. For a start, they
were the only ones who brought women with them. They’d brought along an entire hospital of 200 nurses. And I have no idea where they found 200 women who looked that fine. I can only assume they were handpicked on physical grounds because there’s no way a couple of hundred women looking that good could have ended up there by chance.

The marines had a tiny camp of a perimeter wall, a mess room and some tents. The French compound literally had cafes set up on the pavements, with umbrellas and chairs outside and 16 barrels of wine. They aren’t always my favorite people in the world, but I have to admit they certainly know how to travel! We would beg for tours of duty in a different compound, because at that point you could hit a different game. And then, of course, you could play with no holds barred. You could be as reckless and aggressive as you wanted in your play and the way you maximized your earnings, because it was of no consequence to you. You could spend the night in the French compound, take them for a couple of grand, and leave. You couldn’t do that in your own barracks.

In the first six months after joining my unit, I earned about $400 per week in Marines pay. I was making up to $1,500 a week from playing cards. So my take-home pay was tripled or quadrupled by my earnings from the tables. And my takehome pay was making it home almost untouched. I was only
keeping back $25 a month for toiletries and various expenses, while the rest was going directly to my mother back in the US.

Making money was easy. Many of the games were the weakest I have played in, weaker even than the Atlantic City games. One of the main reasons for that was simple. At home, people only sit down at a poker table because they want to play poker. That means you pay a certain amount of attention to the money you’re losing, even in a casino. Here, some people were so glad to have something to do, they would accept paying money just to be sat at the table and be part of the conversation.

Other people were even more profitable for us because they would drift in and out of the game, viewing it as a quick gamble. Loads of marines and sailors would think nothing of sitting down, quickly running through 20, 80, even 100 dollars and then walking out again. It’s exactly the same as the way
people play slot machines in a casino.

If you watch people whose eyes get drawn to the slots in casinos, you’ll notice they wander over and have a few spins. But if they win, they will nearly always end up sinking all the money they won back in again. In the same way, if the guys who sat down with us to gamble made some money because they hit one of their few hands, they would nearly always stick around and lose it all back again. In fact, it was so rare for someone to sit down, run up a profit and leave again straightaway, we used to wish them good luck and congratulate them if they did it. There was always someone else stepping through the door behind them to take their chances.

So making money didn’t present any kind of challenge to an established player. It was just a function of time. Added to which, we had a monopoly running. If we weren’t playing in a game, we were providing the funding.

Occasionally, we did have the odd problem or two. Once or twice a month, someone would bet a bit more than they could afford or lose too much and not want to pay. They’d try to complain, say they’d been hustled, or claim they were busted. Now and then the commanding officer would get letters from wives or loved ones back home wanting to know why the right amount of money hadn’t been transferred to their bank accounts. That meant a soldier had run up too many IOUs.

Because of our relationship with these guys, in certain circumstances out there you would even forgive a debt or two – that was something that would never happened in New York. In fact, it was of the few things my “partners” and I disagreed on. They didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let someone sit
down and play when they had debts outstanding.

But, of course, the reason for that is simple. You know these people only get a few hundred dollars a month and don’t have any other way of getting money. So if they sit down to play and lose this month’s money, when are they going to be able to pay you back?

Everybody is entitled to make a mistake and you let them off once, but only once. They get one free pass and that’s it. You love them like a brother and let them off, but at that point they are out of the game and out of your book. Their gaming ability is zero and their borrowing ability is zero. They can sit in the corner playing for quarters if they want, but that’s their level now.

We never really had any problems with the authorities over the games. The higher ranking officers knew the games were going on to a certain extent, but they didn’t really make an issue about it. The higher ranks could see that the stakes were actually pretty high, but they were also able to see that things were being handled well. There was no abuse. There were no shakedowns. The games were helping rather than hindering morale. That meant they tolerated what was going on, because they could see that we had identified longevity as a key aspect of the venture.

Of course, there will always be some people in authority who will not tolerate any gray area. Lending money without a banking license is technically loan sharking, so to prevent anyone contesting our arrangements, we always made sure the full amount was signed for, including the vig. So if someone borrowed 250 dollars from us, they would sign the IOU for the full 300 of the amount to be paid back. That meant there was no way anyone could contest the situation, or, in fact, produce evidence of interest being charged on the loan.

In fact, the longer we spent in Beirut, the better we got to know the junior officers. That was great news, because it opened up more games at higher stakes. Initially, our contact with the commissioned ranks was limited to saluting them and walking away. But as things got more casual and we started to fall into conversations with some of the officers, the more we realized we had in common with them.

We started to be invited to the officers’ camp for a drink in someone’s quarters now and then. As ever, put a few guys and some beer together and a poker game breaks out. If you hang out long enough, it’s inevitable. It was a win-win situation for us, because whilst all hell would break loose if the
fraternization led to problems, the blame would all lie on the officers. They were supposed to know better.

Once more, you had to analyze the table carefully. If you were playing with five officers and the platoon commander was one of them, you wouldn’t make sure he won, or you would check it down to the river if you were heads up with him. It was another great source of players drifting in and out for us. Officers would drop in from their battery, transport or payroll duties, only too keen to have a beer or two and a bit of fun with the troops.

A lot of the officers were basically washed-up jocks who’d been college football players. They tended to come from institutions that were third rate academically, but had excellent athletic programs. For the majority, these guys would have been there on a football, baseball or basketball scholarship, but ended up graduating last in their class as their aspirations to play sports professional did not come to fruition. Suddenly the military looked like an attractive proposition.

Most of them were extremely young and missed the college environment. They were used to frat parties, games and having fun. The military didn’t suit their lifestyle and their life experience left them less well equipped to adapt to it than the enlisted ranks. So they found anything that reminded them of home a welcome distraction.

That was pretty much that for almost a year in Beirut. Our military activities were rare enough and light enough to be a nuisance that interrupted our daily card games. Even on guard duty, we were probably playing gin rummy or heads-up poker. If you heard firing, it would only be a few sniper shots going overhead. It was an aggravation, but little more.

The whole situation was aggravating, because our orders left us pretty much sitting there waiting to be shot at. Because our role was as peacekeepers, we were told not to return fire. “Deter but do deny” – those were our orders. In practice, that led to some farcical situations.

We were often on patrol, or on guard duty with Lebanese government military forces. They wore the same uniform as us, because we supplied them with it. They fired the same weapons as us because we supplied them with them also. After four months in the desert, everyone tends to look the same. It doesn’t matter what color you start from, you end up with a hell of tan after that. The only way a Lebanese soldier differed from a marine was in his helmet cover. We supplied them with their helmets, but whereas we had a camouflage cloth on ours, they wore the plain green helmets with no cover.
That’s not that obvious a difference from yards away.

So when shots were fired at us by militia on while we were out on patrol together, I and the other marines would radio back for permission to return fire. Permission would be denied. We would be told, “They’re not shooting at you, they’re firing at the Lebanese troops.” So I’d be standing there thinking, “Ok, that’s just great. They’re not firing at me. They are firing at a guy three feet away from me.” So all you could do was trust the sniper’s aim and hope they could spot what helmet cover I was wearing. How comforting!

Because we weren’t supposed to return fire, there were checkpoints as we went back to barracks where they would examine our weapons and check our ammunition. That meant shift sergeants would sneak out to see us just before we reached the barracks, so we could reload any spent rounds. It was an absurd situation.

It didn’t make any sense to me. Marines are trained to go off and kill people, as quickly and efficiently as possible. They are athletes, and the combat zone is their Olympics. But there we were in our first Olympics, being told we weren’t allowed to run. We were manning a line that didn’t exist, trying to make friends with people who were shooting at us and supposedly that was keeping the peace as part of a multinational force. In reality all we were doing was hanging around and waiting to get shot. People turned to cards as much out of frustration as anything else.

The situation changed completely on the morning of Sunday 23 October 1983. At 6:22am, a yellow Mercedes truck packed with explosives ran over the perimeter wire barricade and smashed into the USMC barracks. The blast had the force of 12,000 pounds of TNT and the four-story building collapsed
instantly. Hundreds of marines and non-combatants were asleep inside. It was among the first examples of terrorist suicide bombing, but it wouldn’t be the last.

In total, 241 men were killed, including 220 marines. It was the biggest death toll for the corps since the attack on Iwo Jima in 1945. It remains the deadliest attack on Americans overseas since the Second World War, a cowardly act that killed clergy, clerical personnel and medical staff as they slept. Hundreds more were wounded and injured. And it was poker that prevented me from being numbered among the casualties.

On the previous evening, there was a big game organized back on board one of the transport ships, the USS Iwo Jima. I was more than eager to play, as you would expect. But I hadn’t managed to secure passage out there on one of the helicopters. At the last minute, one of the staff sergeants decided to stay behind and I was able to take his place on the last chopper that went out to the ship. As a result, he was in the barracks when the truck hit. He survived, but lost a leg. I was still at the poker table the following morning, when the alarm was raised after the attack.

By the time we got up on deck to see what was happening, the choppers were already returning to the ship. This time they weren’t transporting poker players, but wounded soldiers and bodies. Immediately, we got split into two groups. The first half went on shore for a “search and rescue” mission at the barracks, while the other half stayed onboard to deal with the large number of wounded arriving.

To start with, I was in the second group, after two hours, I was sent onshore to assist the mission back at the barracks. By now the search and rescue had moved on from finding men to finding body parts. It wasn’t a case of looking for bodies even. My task was to collect together enough composite parts to put a body back together out of courtesy to people and their families. There was a torso here, while the feet were over there and the head was somewhere else. It wasn’t a pleasant
situation.

Growing up in the inner city I’d seen dead bodies before, but nothing prepared me for what I saw that day. It was a slaughterhouse. Visually, I can only describe it as a violation of the senses. Those images are seared onto my mind. 25 years later, if I close my eyes, I can still see them as though it
all happened two minutes ago. But the worst thing about it was the smell.

The smell of burning flesh, and burnt bodies, is an indescribable odor. I can’t sit down and analyze it to tell someone what it is. There’s nothing to compare it to. But what I can tell you is that if you smell it, wherever you are, you will KNOW what it is. Even if you haven’t ever smelt it before, something in your body, a feeling in the pit of your stomach identifies it for you. It is a horrible sense of awareness.

That attack changed everything. Its long-term ramifications reverberate till this day. The Beirut bombing was the first major attack on the US by Islamic militants. I firmly believe that if the Reagan administration had reacted more strongly, we would not be ending up erecting memorials in Manhattan
where buildings used to stand.

In the short term, everything changed for us marines on the ground. A one km area around the barracks was designated a kill zone. That meant anyone walking into it was liable to be shot immediately. They might get a warning shot first, but that was it. Rather different from “deter but do not deny.”

As we were still coming to terms with the death of so many of our colleagues and friends, the situation continued to be tense. Every now and then a civilian would wander into the zone and someone had to run out and grab them to get them out of there. It was tough of course, because civilians have a tendency to freeze when they are fired at, rather than backing up. The US had helpfully put up signs to warn the locals to back up, but perhaps English wasn’t the best language to choose when trying to communicate with farmers who probably couldn’t read their own language. Still, those kind of executive decisions are for officers and government officials to consider, not the troops on the ground.

Our tour concluded after five more weeks in the zone. During the last month, the unit was split into three. Some of my colleagues were sent up to the hills bordering Syria and others were detailed to cover the Lebanese university. I was transferred to embassy duty, still in Beirut. While I was there,
a car bomb was detonated outside. No one was killed, but I caught some shrapnel in my back. It damaged my spine and my golf swing has never been quite the same since. Not long after that, we were finally rotated back stateside, setting off on the return voyage at the end of November 1983 with 241 fewer comrades than on the way out. We played poker all the way home.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.

My sense of wonder and surprise was heightened by the manner of my arrival. I had been cooling my heels at home one morning when Joey arrived out of the blue in a limo. “We’re off to Vegas,” he said. And he treated most of the old crew to a trip out west on a private jet. We were like kids in a candy store. We couldn’t believe the game we’d been playing with each other since children could be presented like this. After years of seeking out games, coaxing invitations and working hard for every seat we could hustle, we were in a place where action was handed to you on a silver platter.

Looking back, we saw the tail end of Vegas’ glorious era – the whole industry was still new enough to treat the gamblers and players with respect. In those days, within minutes of stepping onto the floor, the pit boss knew your name, the dealers knew your name and the waitresses knew your name. By the time you returned on day two, your favorite drink would be there waiting for you. The poker rooms were extremely personal in their level of service. The establishments prided themselves on the warmth of the welcome they provided.

By comparison, Vegas today is Disneyland with cards. Everything is impersonal and there’s a blatant disregard for the players. So many people go through each casino’s doors every day; they just see their customer-base as a nameless, faceless mass. They don’t have to worry whether you’re enjoying your time there, because if you’re not, there’s someone walking in right behind you just itching to drop their money. You can understand why they behave like that of course – it’s just a matter of economics for big corporations, but back in the early 80s individuals ran the casinos and knew how to treat the players.

And we got to meet the greatest individual of all – the man behind the Horseshoe, Benny Binion himself. Back then, anyone who gambled anywhere in the country knew about the Horseshoe. It was regarded as the gamblers’ establishment and he was regarded as the gamblers’ host. If he wasn’t quite
legendary, he was certainly a household name. The Horseshoe may not have had had the glitz or glamour of the plush surroundings of the Strip casinos, but it was known for offering some of the best action. The Sands and the Flamingo were the big name establishments at that point, but a stop at the
Horseshoe was essential for us. It was a casino with no limit. So long as you could carry in the amount you wanted to wager for your first bet, you set the limit at that amount.

We met Benny Binion in his own bar. In fairness, he met us. It was extremely casual. I was sitting at the bar with Joey and a man walked in. A bunch of people jumped up to greet him, so I asked the bartender who he was. “You’re kidding me, aren’t you?,” he said. “That’s Mr Binion himself.”

We’d been there pretty much all day by this point and were well up from Mr Binion’s poker tables. He came over to the bar and was an extremely sociable individual. He pretty much greeted everybody. The casino had that kind of atmosphere. He shook my hand and asked me how I was finding the place. I said it was great and that was that.

After years paying our dues in smoky card rooms, Vegas was a literal breath of fresh air. It combined the best aspects of Atlantic City and New York. AC gave you safety, but small payouts and poor games, while New York offered high stakes and good payouts, but an attendant risk factor. Suddenly in Vegas, we found high stakes and good quality play in a safe environment. And, most excitingly of all, we were introduced to a whole new crowd of players.

In terms of game variety, stud still held strong, even in Vegas. I would estimate that 70 – 80% of the action was stud, with five card just edging seven for popularity. The reasons for that in a casino is obvious – five card stud means the house can get more people to a table, which increases the amount of money in play and therefore the level of action for their rake.

We ate it all up and took full advantage of the action offered. The competition was tougher than AC, but I still managed to end the weekend more than 26Gs up after a good couple of sessions at the tables in Binions. To put it in proportion, a good car cost less than 4G’s at the time, so this was of hell of a payday.

It was probably around this time that we first became properly aware of the tournaments that took place in Vegas. Back east, you’d hear the occasional reference to big games out in the desert and then you’d hear tell that some players competed for what they called a world championship. To be entirely honest, we weren’t remotely interested in the idea. Coming from an environment in which you always downplayed your own ability in order to get paid, wanting to be able to call yourself the world champion seemed to us like an extraordinary ambition.

You have to remember that despite the high stakes we played for, and the stable nature of many of our native card rooms, at least in those days, poker was an illegal activity outside of places like Vegas and AC. So you didn’t run around with a big sign saying, “I’m the best gambler in the world”. Apart from anything else, the Internal Revenue Service are the biggest pimp in town and you didn’t want them looking for 40% of your action.

My buddies and I were quite content to get our winnings quietly at the tables, flying under the radar as it were. To be quite honest, the whole notion of tournament play struck us as laughable. We didn’t have any hierarchy among ourselves or worry about who ranked above whom in terms of ability, because we knew there was enough money out there on the tables for all of us.

So even when we were out in Vegas and heard more about tournament play, we weren’t tempted to try it then. We took our winnings from the cash games, bid the place a fond farewell and looked forward to our next visit.

Arriving back in New York after a whirlwind weekend, I was naturally excited about the new poker potential that had been opened up to me. It was a real eye-opener and showed me there was a whole world of poker there to explore. At the same time, I was incredibly grateful to my oldest friend for his spontaneous generosity in taking us all out there. I decided it was my turn to reciprocate and immediately arranged a night out for us both the following Friday.

Like Joey, I lined up a limo to transport us to the evening’s entertainment. Our destination was an exclusive club that had recently opened a fair way out of town in the suburbs. We were well used to enjoying good nights out, but to thank him for the Vegas trip I went above and beyond to push the call of duty.

Having gotten to the club about midnight, we soon found out it lived up to its reputation and were having the time of our life. Two hours or so later, I was wandering back to the bar when I saw two people standing quietly in the corner of the room, watching us. One of them was wearing a black leather coat – a fashion statement in those days, but a highly suspicious one in the heat of summer. I pointed the pair out to Joey and asked him if he knew them. His response was immediate. He grabbed my arm and started heading towards the back door.

But he never made it out clean. We had gotten as far as the kitchen door when I heard the first gun shot. It was a hit.

As I said, this club was a fair way out of town, which made it even more baffling to work out what was going on. But at that time, such curiosity was the least of my concerns. I can’t really work out even to this day how it all happened, but we both ended up back in the car somehow. At that point I realized I had been shot in the arm and Joey had taken two slugs in the back.

My immediate worry was getting Joey back to Brooklyn. He was my responsibility as I was the one that had dragged him out of his own neighborhood and I knew the first question would be to ask why the hell he was doing in such unfamiliar territory. To be honest, I was more worried for my safety with regard to the reaction back in Brooklyn than I was about the bullet wound in my arm.

Despite my own less serious injury, I managed to get Joey back to the city, but he was obviously in bad shape. I tried unsuccessfully to get hold of his uncle and eventually the confusion began to make some kind of sense. There had been a change of leadership higher up the chain of command. His uncle had been gunned down earlier, before they came to finish the job by whacking Joey. After leaving my badly wounded friend with his people, I was told to go home and stay put. So I did.

Another friend of mine came round with his girlfriend, who was a nurse. They stitched my arm up, as I could hardly go to the hospital. Not only did I not want to face possible questioning from the cops, I had been told in no uncertain terms to go home and stay there and this didn’t seem like a good time to question or disobey orders.

I was contacted later that morning. Joey’s right hand man, the same one that had rescued my car, came to see me. Joey did not make it through the night. He filled me in on the chaos in the city which had been all over the papers this morning. He also told me it wasn’t safe for me there. I had witnessed last night’s events and there was no way they would leave a loose end walking around. I had to get away…far away, especially from my family, which I was putting in danger with my mere presence. I could not go to the cops for protection. That was not even an option. First of all, you did not know which of them could be trusted. Secondly, I had the “rules” burned into my brain at a very early age. What happens in the neighborhood stays in the neighborhood. You did not rat anyone out, even if your life depended on it.

I knew that as far as the guys who had whacked Joey were concerned, finding me was currently their number one priority. As time went by, I would recede from being an immediate threat to a potential one, but in the meantime I couldn’t afford to be found. My read of the situation was correct. In the days that followed every person I knew was contacted, my mother, my friends, and every place I frequented was visited. They were looking for any trace of evidence for my reappearance.

But years at the poker table had given me the clarity of an efficient decision-making process. Even this situation, life and death though it was, were just another hand of cards. To continue the analogy, the weaker player here would stay wedded to his hand, would decide to stay and hope things
worked out ok. But that wasn’t the smart play. The only consideration I could afford to have in my mind was finding the course of action that represented the least possible risk to my family. No other factors mattered. In this case, that was laying down my hand and walk away. I would have to leave.

That afternoon, fewer than 24 hours after Joey was hit, I went to see my mother and told her I had decided to join the Marines. I told her I thought a tour in the military would do me good. I didn’t explain any more than that. Because of being sheltered by her family and my father, she would have been unable to comprehend the reality of the situation anyway. After spending so much time at home and having things done for her, she had no real frames of reference. On the way out, I left the majority of my bankroll on the kitchen table – more than enough to cover the remainder of my sister’s law school tuition and the household expenses for the next year or two.

I went straight to the Marine Corp recruiting office and sought out the staff sergeant. He was a poker buddy of mine. Even though he only had a small bankroll, he had grown into a quality player during the time he has posted in New York and we had become friends. I explained the situation to him, especially the fact that I wanted to be posted overseas as soon as possible after my training. Despite the fact that my test scores and academic ability gave me pretty much my pick of military operational specialties, I decided to enlist in the infantry as that gave me the greatest odds at drawing a wining
hand and leaving the States quickly.

My buddy sorted it all out for me and I was on the next plane to Paris Island, South Carolina for Boot Camp. Only eight days after the euphoria of our trip to Vegas and two days after ill-fated club trip, I found myself on a military base in the middle of no where. I figured it was the best possible outcome. If I didn’t know exactly where I was, how the hell could anyone else possibly find me?

I wouldn’t find this out for a couple of years, but the people responsible for the hit on Joey were disposed of barely a few months after I left New York, as the mob’s internal power struggles came to an end. That knowledge was of little use to me, however. Because by the time my best friend’s assailants were cold and in the ground, I was on board a transport ship in the mid-Atlantic, en route to Beirut.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.

Around this time, Atlantic City began to open up, which offered a whole new opportunity for profitable poker. The games in those early days were pretty limited, but compared to the grind of New York, the standard was ridiculously easy. The tables were populated to a large degree by folks happier to be dropping money at poker than in the casino games. I was only too happy to relieve these tourists of their bank roll.

Of course, the standard and style of play was a function, as ever, of the players’ motivation. A lot of people were only at the tables for the entertainment value. They wanted to stay in hands; they wanted to stay involved until the last card had been dealt. God bless them for that. I hope they found it entertaining, because they certainly didn’t find it profitable.

But just because the standard was lower didn’t mean I allowed myself to let my own approach slip. I always regarded a session in AC as a job, as work, and had the same disciplined ritual every time.

The best action at the tables came between 1am and 6am on Friday and Saturday nights, when the poker crowd would be joined by gamblers who had gone bust at craps or roulette and thought they could chase their losses better against their fellow players than against the house. A lot of them were either exhausted or dispirited before they sat down, and of course many of them were well on the way to advanced states of drunkenness.

Turning a profit at the tables wasn’t the issue – in all honesty it was the easiest money you could make without holding a gun to someone’s head. I turned in streaks of 30 winning sessions or more in AC. But the key was to keep a close eye on your hourly rate – to make sure your profit was outweighing the costs of the table charges, tips, dinners, rooms for overnight stays and travel to and from the casino. That’s a mistake a lot of people make when they consider themselves winning players – not adding up, or admitting to, all the costs they incur while sitting at the table.

For a trip to be worth it, I had to be sure my take from the table was not only a sizable profit, but that it was more than I could have earned by sitting in New York and avoiding the two-and-a- half-hour drive. To maximize my earning potential, I settled into a familiar routine. I would arrive in AC mid afternoon on Friday and get some rest in my room. Then I’d book the last available dinner reservation, so I could plan on wrapping up eating just before midnight – prime time to hit the tables. I could make good money until 6am or so, then return to the room to sleep, freshen up and repeat the whole trick on Saturday night.

You may not always have been able to take home quite as much money from the casinos, but of course you did know you were guaranteed safe passage for you and your money. The risk element was almost non-existent. And that wasn’t always the case back in the boroughs.

After a Queens’ education, I could see when people were going to get rolled on their way out of underground games. If a player from out-of-town was well up and getting cocky about taking the locals’ money, you’d be able to spot a couple of people planning to take it back away from the tables. Of course, the quickest way for them to be able to do that was to spin him up even further so he would leave sooner.

Suddenly a guy would see himself winning six or seven pots in a row when his ace-high bluffs saw everyone fold and think he was on the hottest streak of his life. If you weren’t local, you wouldn’t know you were being set up. Until you stepped outside the club and got relieved of all your winnings and the remainder of your bankroll, of course. The irony for me was how few of those people ever associated getting rolled with their surprising success at the table. Even afterwards, most of the victims walked away thinking, “I was having a great night right up until I stepped outside, then I was unlucky to be robbed.” They never realized that other people were clearing off their money to them quite deliberately.

I wouldn’t like to suggest that things like that happened all the time, but getting rolled was certainly an occupational hazard. Even the games in the suburbs got robbed from time to time. It wasn’t so much of a concern for me – I had grown up in the area and thanks to the crew of friends I had known since childhood, I was less likely to be a target. We knew how to behave ourselves and how to show respect to the right people. I rarely traveled alone and relied on my street smarts to keep me out of trouble.

The parochial nature of the games and the relative tightness of the poker community also provided a form of insurance for the regular players. Most of the guys at the table had played with each other for years and didn’t tend to migrate too far in search of a game.

I was still playing with the old crew from time to time. After moving out to the suburb, I didn’t need Joey in the way I once had. And he didn’t need me. I no longer needed his protection around town and I wasn’t any use to him as hired muscle. Now we spent time together when we chose to, whereas in the beginning, we had been thrown together by circumstance. Knowing Joey had kept me safe in my teens and opened doors for me. And I was pretty lucky, because he had way more potential Johns to choose from than I had Joeys. He was the local kid and I was the outsider.

While I was carving out a poker career to replace my father’s income, Joey progressed still further in organized crime. His uncle was nearing the top of the organization and Joey was pretty much running a neighborhood in Brooklyn.

That was good news for me, because it enabled me to get accepted as an insider in the high stakes games there. The deep involvement of many of my old crew meant I was “protected” to a certain extent and I was soon able to get on track with some big earning potential.

Despite my “connections”, I was still rolled for the first time after a big win in Brooklyn. We’d taken the game for more than $21,000, a good night’s work in those days, and headed off before deciding to stop at a diner for breakfast on the way home. But we never made it that far. At the first traffic light two very nervous (and clearly high) individuals waved a gun in our faces and demanded the car keys, our money and our jackets. I never got the jacket part, and was especially annoyed by it as four days previously I had laid out a over a grand to treat myself to a custom leather jacket with hand-stitched
embroidery – a one-of-a-kind impulse purchase.

But there was no sense in arguing with two junkies with a gun, so we handed over the keys, money and jackets as requested and watched them drive off in my car. We continued to the diner on foot and I called Joey, whose room we had been playing in. He told us to stay put and wait for him. Two hours later he pulled up in his car, which was closely followed by my Caddy. At the wheel was another guy who apparently worked for Joey as “security”. They joined us for breakfast, sliding our money back to us across the table and handing over my car keys. I asked whether or not they’d been able to get my jacket back as well. Joey told me I probably didn’t want it any more as it had holes in it, which I took as a clue not to ask further questions.

To understand the severity, and speed, of Joey’s reaction, you have to understand the way the mob really worked back then. It wasn’t like the movies. The mob controlled the streets because people knew to obey their rules – that meant respect for those rules was their primary concern. When the mob protected establishments, that wasn’t about money, which was about respect.

For example, if a kid held up the wrong store and picked a store that was mob-protected, he wasn’t in trouble for the money he had taken, he was in trouble for the disrespect he had shown. If he took the money back to the store, apologized for the damage and offered to pay for it, then he’d be ok, because those actions not only showed his respect for the mob, they also set an example for other people thinking about hitting stores like that. If he didn’t take that action, he’d be dead by sundown.

As long as you weren’t stupid, you had nothing to fear on the streets. There was very little random violence – there was always a reason why someone would be punished or hit. If you acted in ignorance, you needed to find out who you had offended and why, so you could apologize pretty quick. And if you did that, you would be fine most of the time. Most everyone is entitled to one free pass.

And the way the mob protected places has often been misunderstood as well. Every street had businesses the mob looked after – that was how they kept the neighborhood under their control. But they didn’t take that money to run places down, they didn’t go in and smash places up like you see in
films – their system was much more conservative than that, It was a two-way street from which both parties profited.

My uncle was approached by the mob because he had a restaurant in Queens. They had a mobster who had just been released from jail on probation. His terms of probation were that he wasn’t to consort with any known criminals and he had to maintain a proven legal source of income. So my uncle was told he would be hiring this guy for $400 a week. Now that guy never set foot in the kitchen – he just showed up every Friday to collect his paycheck.

That job gave the mob the legitimacy they needed for their man. In return, my uncle enjoyed their protection and patronage. A couple of times a week the boys would frequent the place, running up bills of a couple of grand a week. My uncle benefited from that, and the waitresses got the biggest
tips they ever saw.

If there was ever any trouble in the place after that, my uncle didn’t call the police. He didn’t need to. Instead of waiting hours for a patrol car to show up, he could make one phone call and three Cadillacs would pull up outside within 15 minutes. He had a problem once with a chef who was stealing food from him out the back door after closing. After my uncle made one phone call to his new associates, the chef came in the next day, apologized, reimbursed him and was never any trouble again. Not only did he recover all of his losses but he was able to rectify the situation without losing his skilled worker and without any further worry that there was a potential thief working in the place.

So while they did take some money for this “protection” from my uncle and all their other concerns, the amount people paid was very carefully chosen. They didn’t want it to be a burden on businesses. They had no interest in making profitable places run at a loss. In return, my uncle got increased revenue, a guarantee not to get rolled over and good behavior from his employees even behind his back.

But that whole system, which was the way the mob used to make its money and keep control of its territory, relies on respect. If people see supposedly protected places getting knocked over, then that respect is eroded. Joey had to react after two guys were rolled coming out of one of his clubs, because otherwise people might start going to spend their money elsewhere. He may have been a long-standing close friend, but he didn’t get my money back that night because of our friendship. He did it because it would have been bad for business not to.

While I was earning a better and better living at the Brooklyn tables, Joey was securing his hold on that part of town. Although the area was completely drug-infested, Joey insisted he would never get involved in narcotics. His primary operation was protection and security. Alongside the other premises he protected, he covered over 90 “holes in the wall”. These were apartments with eye pieces and mail slots on the door, which were run by two-man teams. One would work the scales and slide the drugs through the slot to the waiting buyer, while the other handled the money and kept the shotgun ready. Each of those 90 “holes” paid Joey $2,000 a week for his protection. A lot of that money certainly got funneled up the chain of command, but by anyone standards Joey was doing pretty well for himself in his chosen career.

And his success and high profile had a big impact on my life. First up, it was thanks to Joey that I enjoyed my first trip to the biggest poker room on the planet: Las Vegas.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.

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.

My father kept extremely well-regulated hours, so that wasn’t difficult. He took one of two trains to work every morning and one of two trains home again every night. So I made sure I returned from a night at the tables minutes after he left and went out every evening just before he got back. For the whole of that summer, we hardly spoke. We had nothing to say to each other.

I spoke to various colleges and assessed my academic options. The place at MIT had gone, but I was able to enroll at a New York State University to major in math. State universities in the US are cheaper than the private variety and they have to take you if they have room available. So I began what would become a sludgy soup of an academic degree, taking the first steps towards a qualification I would eventually draw from half a dozen institutions.

But after my four years of college math as a high school student, studies were less than hard. I spent the vast majority of my time playing poker, seeing the old crew and doing exactly what I wanted. I continued to earn thousands of dollars at the tables and life drifted along in exactly the same way it always had.

Thoughts of the future weren’t unduly concerning me at this point, to be honest. My parents remained highly pissed, to say the least. But I still had money in my pocket and was hardly swamped by ambition, so I wasn’t all that bothered.

The fallout of the basement-game bust was bitter sweet for Joey, Mikey and the others. On one level they were proud of the way I had stood up for them, the way I had respected our laws, covenants and friendships. I hadn’t violated the trust of the neighborhood I grew up in.

But at the same time, they were aware I was the one of us who had a chance to get out of that world. I had a chance to make something more of myself, to a certain extent living that dream for all of them. So they were also disappointed that doing the right thing took away my chance to leave. They were happy with my actions, but they regretted the outcome and the end results of those actions.

Personally, it wasn’t even something I considered. The alternative course of action, selling them out to keep my own passage to MIT clear, never even crossed my mind as a possibility. I think it’s hard for people nowadays to understand the true nature of the bond I shared with guys like Mikey and
Joey.

Joey and I were still as close as any two people can possibly be. Growing up in the inner city was tough enough. Growing up without friends like Joey by your side was impossible. Joey and Mike were not just friends in the classical sense of the word. They were guys that had your back and were willing to take a bullet for you. Of course, as in every relationship, reciprocation was key. And there was no doubt in their minds that I would gladly do the same for them.

Our friendship, our covenant to one another, was something few people in today’s society need or can possibly begin to comprehend. This relationship did have a dark side to it though. The positive aspect was that my friends were my safety blanket, my body armor. As long as I stood true to them, and they to me, no one could really hurt me.

If Joey introduced me to people in a club or bar by saying I was a friend of his, that didn’t mean we played ball together. It meant he would be responsible for anything I did in there. It meant he vouched for me. At that point, I had no name; I had no identity beyond being Joey’s friend. The problem with that equation is that if you ever do anything wrong in that society, it’s your best friend who gets sent to take you out. If I ever managed to offend the wrong person, it would have been Joey who was responsible for dealing with me. Joey would have been the only one that could ever get close enough, and he would have been just the man for the job. That’s a very dark side to a friendship.

So our relationship truly was the proverbial double-edged sword. Regardless of how close we were that realization was always in the back of everyone’s mind. Every time Joey pulled up unexpected, the thought that this may be my last car ride was always there. Fortunately, I never gave cause for any action to be taken against me. But even though this very real threat never materialized, it was nonetheless always present. In the meantime, I just got on with life, playing poker and studying, then playing more poker.

My father was abroad on business one fall, when he was taken ill. He was hospitalized with significant pains and they suggested he underwent a series of tests on his return to the States. He had a history of heart conditions, but this was an unrelated problem.

My sisters and I weren’t told what was wrong with him at first. There was nothing obviously up and I continued to lead my separate life. My older sister was already well on her way to completing her undergraduate studies in a prestigious local private University, and my younger sister was doing well at school. Everything seemed normal.

But in late September, my mother sat me down and told me that my father had been diagnosed with lung cancer. As time went on, it spread to his liver. She told me about it because he didn’t want to hear about it, didn’t want to discuss it, didn’t want to be told anything it. Whether that was denial on his part or just a state of acceptance, I don’t know.

My father had never been a demonstrative man and he showed no emotion about the situation at all. Zero. He was stone cold about it. And that made the whole thing pretty much unreal. In those days, you didn’t hear of people having cancer as much as you do now. And he looked fine, was still working and doing everything as normal, still shouting and yelling at me the same way he always had. So I couldn’t relate to the idea that something was killing him.

I was used to death, of course. I came from a neighborhood where people died all the time for a variety of reasons, stupidity probably chief amongst them. But this invisible killer didn’t seem real. I guess I was reacting the same way he did – we have bad genes for skepticism and denial in my family! I didn’t accept how ill he was until I saw the physical deterioration.

That wasn’t long in coming. He still carried on as normal until the end of the year, but early the following January he was admitted to hospital for a biopsy and never came out. It became clear this wasn’t just something he had, but it was something that was killing him. From that January onwards,
whether we accepted it or not, it was just a question of time until he died.

Even then, I don’t think the reality of the situation actually hit home that hard. Through January, February and March I found the whole thing irritating more than anything else. This thing was annoying him and it was annoying us. It was still something I expected to stop. I thought things would go back to how they were. The denial continued.

My mother wasn’t equipped to cope with life on her own. Her days changed completely. She would still get up early every morning to prepare dinner and make sure all the housework was done before anyone else was awake. Then she’d make sure the three kids got off to where we needed to be, before going down to the hospital and staying with her husband all day. The worse his condition got, the longer she stayed. By the end, she pretty much spent a month straight in there. We used to take her changes of clothes from home.

As the year wore on, it became clear even to me that this situation was irreversible. May gave way to June and his situation became critical. His pain and anguish was terrible to watch. The disease spread, well, like cancer. There’s a reason why that’s a saying – his decline was rapid and awful. As the cancer took hold of his lungs and liver, it spread further. He was in excruciating pain. Towards the end of June, he lost about 40-50% of his own bodyweight and his organs began to fail. We watched my father, a big, strong, imposing man who had dominated our household both literally and metaphorically, waste away before our eyes.

And we were helpless to do anything about it. The pain grew worse and worse as his internal organs packed up. He was basically drowning in his own fluids. Watching him lie there in agony day after day was just horrific. There is no other word to describe it. And the worst thing about it was how helpless we were. Not just us, but the nurses as well.

We became good friends with the nurses on his ward, especially those that covered the night shift. His ward was not a good place to be. Everyone on there was pretty much terminal. Towards the end, he would only be conscious for about 15 minutes in an eight hour period and he was largely incoherent. His room was at the end, opposite the nurses’ station, so we were usually hanging out there. We could still see him if he woke up or stirred, but at least we were able to have a cup of coffee and a conversation, to try to think about something else instead of his impending death.

I used to chat to one nurse in particular. Neither she nor I were taking the situation particularly well as we approached it on our different paths. I was a kid standing by helpless, waiting for his father to die, wanting him to die even because of the pain he was in. And she was a highly-trained and committed medical professional who was watching a man die before her eyes. No doubt she became a nurse to help people, but there was nothing she could do. After seeing this man for eight hours a day over six or seven months, of course she had built up a relationship with him. Hell, if you play poker with someone for four hours a night you become friends with him, let alone if you care for them for twice as long.

This nurse had grown to known my father well, and she had become close to the whole family. My mother was there all the time and she had gotten to know the kids, know what we were all doing. She was pretty much part of the family at this point. But at the same time she had a job to do and it was
horribly clear that no amount of professional help could do much for my father.

July started and my father was in a terrible state. Lessons in church may have talked about souls being ripped apart in hell, but we were watching hell on earth. Dad was lying there being torn in two from the inside out. He was being ripped apart in front of our eyes. Our prayers for the dearest man in our life were “please take him now, please make this stop.”

On the 4th July, we were all by his bedside. He was dosed up to his eyeballs on pain medication and still in agony. Unable to watch any longer, I walked over to the nurses’ station and found the nurse we had grown so close to bent over in silent tears. We stood there and had a conversation. We didn’t say much to be honest. It’s very hard to describe what we did actually say. But there was an understanding, almost tacitly, that something had to be done. And there was only one thing that could be done. I walked away from the conversation knowing that something had been agreed on, even though no specific words had been used.

As her shift came to a close, the nurse gave Dad a shot of morphine that she didn’t enter on his charts. By this stage, he was on the maximum levels of painkillers possible, so his levels were being carefully monitored. The next nurse started her shift, checked his charts and saw he hadn’t been topped up, so administered another dose. That pretty much did it. I don’t know to what extent his death was due to the second injection and to what extent he just died from natural causes. His body had pretty much packed up and stopped by that point, so there was almost nothing left. I like to think it was just his time and he went.

Appropriately enough, the Independence Day fireworks flew into the sky all around the hospital as my father was given his freedom. Whilst the sense of loss was enormous for us, the overwhelming emotion was one of relief. Relief that his pain and suffering was over. Just as suddenly, the last vestiges of denial were washed away from me. No one said anything that night, but it was clear life had changed for ever.

We wasted no time in burying him, and that meant a trip back to Greece. If my father had ended up in American soil, he would have spun in his grave. Burial plots are picked out before birth back in Greece – families are laid to rest together. If someone marries outside their village, then people worry about where the “foreigner” will be buried. So there was no question he could be buried anywhere else than back home.

We had a quick wake for relatives and friends based stateside the following morning and that afternoon we flew back to Athens, his body in a casket in the cargo hole. It was a strange kind of homecoming. For me, it was my first trip back to my native country since the move to America. And I realized for the first time the truth of the saying “there’s no man so miserable as he that has known two countries.” I didn’t fit in there any more, yet I was still emphatically a foreigner over here.

I will die a foreigner in the United States, no matter what else I do in my life, even if I lived to be a hundred. No matter what devotion, dedication or sacrifice I make to this country (and so far I’ve offered everything but my death), I will always be a foreigner. I will remain a foreigner because the mindset of the people sees to that.

The only acceptance you find is in inner-city communities. In the inner-cities you have such a great ethnic diversification that the very differences are what unites everybody. That difference is the commonality. But the inner-cities are not America. Once you step outside that melting pot you are a foreigner. 90% of America is not a melting pot.

I may have been accepted by metropolitan New York, but that doesn’t make me an American. In the heartland of America and the Deep South I would never have any hope of acceptance or acknowledgment of the commitment and sacrifice I would make for this country. It would be far easier
for someone of Cuban decent to gain acceptance in Florida, or someone of Mexican decent to be at home in Texas, Arizona or New Mexico, but a Greek outside of New York, Boston, bits of Jersey, Chicago and nowadays probably parts of LA and San Francisco? Not a chance. That’s it as far as
acceptance goes in the US for European immigrants. It’s all actually pretty strange really, because actually if you don’t have feathers in your hair, you’re truly a foreigner in this land.

But being back in Athens showed me I knew nothing of life over there, I didn’t understand the people and I didn’t belong. If anything things were even more foreign to me there than here. Standing by my father’s grave I felt rootless. The first thing I asked my mother was, “Why are we going back to
America?”

Her response summed it up. “What do we have to come back to here?” And she was right. Our life was in America now. My older sister was at college, doing well. My younger sister had known almost nothing else. She had been only two when we had emigrated and all her memories were of the States. Even my mother had a roof over her head and a community of friends and relatives there.

I was the only one of the family with little to keep me in the States. Little, that is, apart from my family. I considered canceling my ticket and staying in Greece, as much because of the realization of what awaited me back home as anything else. But that was a three-minute idle fantasy. It simply wasn’t an option; it would have been shirking my responsibilities in the most craven way imaginable. It would have been the most selfish act in the world to have bailed out on the three women my father had left behind.

As soon as we buried him, I knew it was all down to me. I knew I had to provide for the family, to keep together what he had started. I knew what was coming as soon as our plane touched down back in the States. No one told me. No one explained it all to me. But they didn’t have to.

Our stay in Greece lasted just a matter of days. We laid my father to rest in his native soil and returned home.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.