Commenting on his accceptance onto the Board of Directors, Mr. Leontakianakos, expressed his utmost gratitude.

It is sincerely an honor to have been selected by Jesse Jones, the founder of the WPA to contribute in this effort. There is a great deal of work to be done in this arena. Ranging from standardized rules; improving player conditions; assisting in the legalization of poker worldwide; and representing player interests to insure proper compensation as professionals.

This is an organization, we as poker players, should all be involved in because they represent us all, from the amateur poker player online, to the semi-pro at a World Poker Tour or World Series of Poker event, to the professionals we see on television.

His car was a big black sedan and it used to dominate the forecourt when he pulled in to fill up. But the weekly ritual was about far more than just putting gas in the tank. All the local kids would compete for the honor of washing the windows, cleaning the mirrors and pumping the gas. The right to service Big Tony’s car was highly sought after and it wasn’t just for the honor. Uncle Tone would always tip the kid who serviced the car with a 50 dollar bill.

50 bucks back then was a huge amount of money. It was enough to keep you and your friends in smokes and sodas all week as well as buy two new bikes. I watched the carnage that erupted every week and analyzed the situation, determined to secure the prestigious gig for myself. Needless to say, all hell used to break loose every time the black sedan pulled into the gas station and it was clear I needed a defined strategy. I was always big for my age, but I couldn’t match up to the dirty dozen who formed a scrimmage around the car every week.

I did what any good businessman would do and formed a partnership to take on the operation. I enlisted the help of Joey and Mikey and offered to cut them in for 10% of the action in return for their muscle alongside mine.

The following Saturday we put our plan into action, working together to secure the coveted gig for ourselves. We were bloodied and bruised, but we were still standing when the sedan pulled up and the honor was ours. Shortly afterwards, so was the 50 bucks. Despite the physical pain we were in, nothing could detract from the pride we felt in achieving our goal that day. We had set out sights on something, planned how to achieve and made it ours. It was a great feeling.

There was no doubt the other kids looked at us differently after that day. We repeated the feat for three weeks in a row and went for the record. No one had ever held that corner for four straight weeks and we managed to make history in our neighborhood. We were standing proudly waiting as the sedan
pulled in as usual. But that fourth time was to be no ordinary day. It was the catalyst for my career in gaming.

After we washed the windows and cleaned the mirrors, the window rolled slowly down. The man in the back seat beckoned me over. He was a big guy. Even sitting in the back of a sedan, he towered over us. Immaculately sculpted black hair sat atop an imposing round face, itself the pinnacle of a well built meaty frame. He had a very strong physical presence. Everyone looks old when you’re that age, but looking back I guess he can’t have been more than 35, judging by his unlined face. He was, however, an utterly stupefying presence.

“What’s your name, kid?” he drawled.

“I’m Johnny,” I stuttered nervously in reply, “and these are my friends…”

I was cut off before I could finish my sentence.

“I didn’t ask you about your friends, kid. I asked who you were.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sorry,” I apologized, rooted to the spot in sheer horror.

“You’ve got some set of balls kid – this is your fourth week here,” the man continued.

“Yes sir,” I agreed tentatively.

“I’m impressed,” said the man. “Listen, take this note and go give it to Vinny at the Barber Shop. He might have some use for you.”

He passed me a note with the usual 50 bucks, rolled the window back up and the car sped off. I stood there trying to compose myself.

I decided to wait until the next day to find out just what Vinny might have in store for me. And, so at midday, I wandered into a busy barber shop, realizing I probably hadn’t picked the best time to call. But I made my way through the customers and staff to find Vinny.

I didn’t need to say a word in introduction – my black eye and bruised face told him who I was.

“So you’re the kid they told me about,” he said. Vinny was older than Tony and, if anything, was even larger and taller, towering over me. And he wasn’t impressed. “You’re late.”

I stood there in confused silence, awaiting my instructions. He told me to come back in a couple of hours to pick up a package and take it to another address down the street. That I duly did, and I was paid $20 for my troubles. It was to become my regular job.

To make a long story short, Vinny’s was one of the places that took bets on the daily numbers – our version of the State Lottery, in which everyone participated. The package I took contained everyone’s bets. I would drop it off to the “boys” who processed all the information and prepared to pay off on the winners.

And that was my introduction to organized gambling – my way into New York’s complex underworld of illegal bookmakers and card rooms. I didn’t realize it then, but I had taken my first steps into a world that would provide for me and my family for years to come. That first job was just the tip of the iceberg. I soon got to be on a first name basis with the local bookies as I helped them in their daily work – taking bets for them and delivering loans to their regular customers.

Over the next five years, I started to grow along with this thriving industry, taking on more and more jobs. By that time, my friends and I were running our own hustles, mimicking what we learned from the bookies to take some small bets and offer loans on a smaller scale.

Of course all this activity was illegal, but there wasn’t a cop within 50 miles who would have lifted a finger to stop it. It was what kept things going in the neighborhood. Things were different then.

It was that introductory note from Uncle Tony that completely changed my life, and those of my friends. Looking back now, I can see that only one other guy from our group of six friends made it beyond his 21st birthday – actions we took as kids turned out to have far-reaching long-term consequences.

For example, I remember two brothers from just outside our neighborhood that always used to come over and join the fight to service Tony’s car. One of them got pretty badly beaten up that first day and ended up in hospital. We didn’t see him again for about six months, but by the time he resurfaced it emerged that he’d used his time recovering to hit the books and discovered he liked it. He studied hard from then on and ended up graduating from med school and becoming a doctor. If the fight had gone the other way, he could have ended up in a coffin before he left his teens like so many of my friends did.

It’s amazing to think one little event triggers so many different paths for people. And looking back, that’s the event I can figure out to be the cause of my deep involvement with this game of ours, the thing that caused me to take my poker seriously enough to make a living from it.

It wasn’t the card game in the hospital, it wasn’t growing up in a block suffocated by poker on every corner, and it wasn’t the fact that most everyone in the neighborhood was a demented gambler. If you think about it, that background could have just as easily turned me the other way. If you grow up in a drug infested neighborhood it’s just as likely to turn you away from drugs and make you disgusted by them.

But it was that day and the note from Big Tony that opened the doors of serious poker to me. A kid my age wouldn’t even be allowed into the building when a high-stakes game was going on, partly for his own protection but basically because no one wants to hear a kid whining when they’re concentrating on their game. But as soon as you start working for the bookies and loan sharks, well, you’ve got a front seat pass to all the gaming activity.

By running numbers here and there, doing favors for this guy, working for this bookie, taking something to that address, you’re seeing how the operation works and getting to know where all the card rooms and illegal casinos are. Far from you trying to work an invite, you’re being called down there. If this was the movie business, we were the production assistants. We did all the running to make everything work and in return we got to learn the poker and gambling business from the bottom up.

And that’s exactly what we did. We learned how the bookies operated. I was always fascinated with how disciplined their operations were. A Certified Public Accountant would be impressed with their book keeping methods and discipline. Contrary to popular belief, bookies rarely participate on the action. Their job is to balance their books by taking an even number of bets of both side of a game and shipping off the difference to Vegas or to whoever else wanted to take overage. A good sum of their profits didn’t just come from the vig on the bets, it also came from the vig on the loans if you failed to pay off your losing bets in time.

So if you placed a $1,000 dollar losing bet, they have you into them for $1,100 with the vig on the bet. Then you also owe the vig on that debt, ramping it up to $1,200. If you can’t pay it, it soon goes up to $1,300 as the average vig goes up by a couple of points a week. It was the loan sharking that made them the vast majority of their money.

And of course, we were able to see where the bookies were making their money and how they were doing it. At the same time we had money in our pockets. Even from the age of eleven, I was pretty much self-sufficient in terms of income. Now when other kids needed money, we were able to lend them ten bucks, 20, 50, even $100. A hundred dollars was half a week’s salary in the mid-seventies. If you spot someone a hundred, it’s going to take them a month or two to pay it back and you can triple up your investment pretty quickly by just putting some money out to work. If you start doing that in your early teens, you’re earning a good living at little risk, on top of the money you’re making for running the numbers.

Money was always pretty tight at home, so having a source of income came in handy. My father was virtually permanently away, so he wasn’t aware of what was going on, while my mother was sheltered with her family as a support group, so I was pretty much free to do as I pleased.

Naval captains traditionally worked six months of the year in two or three month intervals while being paid for 12, but my father was one of those driven individuals who liked to work all year round. He would come back from four months at sea, be home for a week and then be back off to sea again in a different vessel for another four or five months.

Back in Athens, there was one time when I was around seven and went down to the docks with my mother to meet my Father after he returned from yet another voyage. The ship just docked at pier and I ran up to give my father a hug. Well, I hugged three different captains before I got the right one. Mainly because I couldn’t remember exactly what he looked like. I think I must have upset three housewives that day as they saw a strange kid run up and call their husband daddy! I recognized the uniform and the rank but beyond that, in the captain’s apparel, they all looked the same through my young eyes. They all had black wavy hair and a mustache.

He continued to work like that once we moved to America. While he was away his son carved out his own living in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, at school I still hardly needed to open a book to keep up. I entered my teens untroubled by any specific ambition. On the one hand I knew I had no desire to join the military, as my father suggested, or to become a doctor, as my mother wanted. But by the same token, it had never occurred to me that lending money or playing poker may actually be a career choice. They were just the things one did to get by and make money because they were the best options available to us.

Poker was just something we did. Playing poker was as much part of our daily routine as eating – not playing would have seemed about as sensible as skipping meals. No one aspired to making poker their job, I think the college kids who see poker as a career and end in itself nowadays are misguided. Poker is so much more. One would have to truly embrace this game of ours to understand that statement.

As the stakes went up, we started to make money from poker. That was certainly one of its attractions, because there were few other ways for us to make money in the neighborhood. We couldn’t wash cars – hardly anyone had cars in the city. Delivering papers wouldn’t work – most people couldn’t read English. You couldn’t work around the house – no one could afford to pay kids to do that. You could deliver groceries, but two stores meant that provided four jobs. What were the other 300 kids going to do?

Poker was many things to us. It was entertainment, but it was also a source of income and an employment opportunity. It was a pastime, in the literal sense: it made the days go by. It kept us out of trouble. Last, but not least, it was a source of bonding and camaraderie. There’s something about sitting round with your buddies, shooting your mouth and laughing your tail off while playing cards. If you covered our eyes during those friendly games, I bet we couldn’t tell you who were up or down, we could have just told you we were having a good time.

It was a slightly different matter in the card rooms, of course. As we entered our mid-teens and continued to work for the bookies, we were able to start playing in the underground games, beginning at the smallest stakes and working our way up.

These underground card rooms were aptly named on two fronts. Of course they were illicit, but they were also pitch black and windowless rooms hidden behind or below restaurants and bars only open to those known and who were invited.

It took time to adjust my game to the new surroundings. The caliber of player was much higher than I was used to and the first three months was pretty much a succession of one ass beating followed by another. But gradually I learned more and more of the techniques and strategies needed to be successful and started, after that initial period, to turn in more winning sessions than losing ones.

We played thousands of hands and all manner of games, depending on the personal taste of the various hosts. I became adept at all manner of variants of stud and draw. The more complicated the game, the more your mind is forced to work and the more I felt at home – that’s why I still prefer Omaha to Hold’em today.

One of the most important lessons I learned was discipline. Every time you got a beating at a higher level and your bankroll took a hit, you had to really struggle to earn it back. If you stepped down a level, the game would be looser and that would really increase your risk as you struggled to win your
bankroll back.

That’s when your other sources of income became important. Because of course, there’s only so many ways to you can increase your bankroll: win the money, make the money, or steal the money. he latter wasn’t really an option!

Of course, you could try to borrow money, but I never do that, even now. I had seen from an early age what happens to people who borrow money, so I never did. Many years later I didn’t even want to get a mortgage from the bank when I purchased my first home. If it hadn’t been for the tax break
that was associated with a residential mortgage, I would have tried to avoid that too.

Working with bookmakers and loan sharks at such a tender age leaves you with a vivid impression of the bottom of the barrel. I saw people getting their legs broken, losing cars, homes and getting shaken down. You sit there as a young kid wondering how people do this to themselves and how they find themselves in that situation. It turns you off from ever wanting to do the same.

I was part of a generation that grew up knowing you didn’t spend what you didn’t have. I can’t even remember how old I was before I got a credit card and even then it was only the fact that you needed one to book airline tickets and rent a car that made me do it. Eventually I realized that the credit card firms are no different than the loan sharks down the street, giving you enough rope to hang yourself. Like the loan sharks, they start you off small and then give you more and more money until they’ve given you enough credit to own you.

So discipline became important because you couldn’t afford to lose money put into the pot when you were behind – it was too hard to make money to risk it like that. At the same time, you couldn’t afford to be playing at a level where you were playing with scared money. One of the best ways of ensuring you weren’t on scared money was to know you had other sources of income besides poker.

Obviously you had to think carefully about your bankroll for the level of game you wanted to play. A lot of players now will say you should never have more than 5 – 10% of your money at risk, and by at risk I mean used as a buy in, not as a bet. As you need 100 big blinds for a buy in that means to sit down with $500 at a $5-$10 limit table you need a bankroll of $10k.

My mentality back then was rather different – I think it’s all about finding a level you can play at comfortably. I tried never to play with more than 10 – 20% of my bankroll at risk. That meant I would sit down with $500 knowing it was a fifth of my bankroll and that I had another buy in of the same
amount ready if necessary.

Of course, again the percentage of your bankroll you are comfortable putting at risk is a function of what that bankroll is intended for. If you have another source of income, like when I was older and used to tend bar, then you know you can build it back up quicker.

At that time in my life, I was financially holistic in my approach. Poker was a part of my life and it represented one source of income. If needed be, you could always work to hustle up some action on the street to replenish your bankroll. That’s what all the pros have had to do at some point or another. Anyone who has spent any time in poker circles has heard the stories. Even the likes of Howard Lederer and Scotty Nguyen have shared their experiences and misfortunes with the public. How may poker players have slept on park benches or have washed dishes because they have gone broke? Any pro today that’s honest will have a similar story to tell of how beats depleted his bankroll when he was starting out. There’s not one of us out there who hasn’t done other things because we went broke. If you didn’t wait tables, you cooked. If you didn’t tend bar, you were the bouncer or the DJ. If you didn’t work in the automotive industry, you worked in construction. And there was no shame in it. Simply pursuing our conviction to return to the game.

During this initial period I experienced the biggest fluctuations of my career. Of course I was younger and spending more loosely and that was part of the reason why. I was capable of blowing several hundred dollars on a night out with my friends at a time when that was a sizable chunk of my bankroll.

If you follow a night like that with catching a bad beat towards the end of a game that sends you down a couple of hundred bucks more, you’re one more bad beat away from going broke at that point. But during my teens my money was strictly for entertainment. I didn’t have any financial burdens other than self imposed ones. It was my money to piss away and do as I pleased with. I was never a greedy individual. For example, if my mother sent me to the market to pick up six things for her, I would never take the money from her but do it out of my own pocket as a small contribution to the house.

As we continued to learn our lessons in the card rooms, the stakes we were comfortable at increased. After a couple of years of paying our dues, my friends and I were able to consider ourselves seasoned veterans. Those initial three, four months of losses were followed by two years in which I made money while fine-tuning and honing my game.

Over those two years, I slowly eradicated mistakes from my game and became a steady consistent player. I caught the occasional bad beat, of course, but my own play grew better and better. By the end of that period, I would guess bad beats were outnumbering my errors by about 8 – 1. By the time I reached my late teens, my game had matured and developed to a level where I could be competitive at any level. Even though some improvement and maturity would surely follow, there was not that much variation from my game then or for quite some time thereafter.

At the same time, I learned how to conduct myself in these card rooms, how to behave respectfully at the table and away from it. I learned how to make sure I got invited back and I learned the importance of not becoming a nuisance in order to insure I was welcome to return. As the majority of the places we played at were illegal, none of us had a “right” to be there. We were invited guests. As we relied on these establishments for a substantial portion of our income, good conduct was crucial. You took good care of the door and waitresses and ever better care of the dealers. You made sure people had a good word to say about you and would welcome you back as you were planning to leave there with more money then you came. Those lessons proved extremely valuable when I needed to rely on poker for my family’s financial wellbeing later on.

All that time at the poker table gave me a maturity of approach. I was a student of the game and I took it seriously. I was never an action junkie – I didn’t play poker to get my action fix through gambling and I never have. I learned to appreciate the game for what it is and to keep the action junkies out of it, or at least on the other side of the table. Again, nowadays I see a lot of people who think they can make a quick buck out of poker and who are using it for action.

They remind me of investors on Wall Street – they don’t understand a business but they are excited about making money out of it, even though they aren’t quite sure how it really works. A lot of players today are basically speculating on a venture. To someone who has schooled themselves in the underground card rooms, poker is not a venture; it’s as much part of their life as walking on two legs.

By this point in our Poker development we were seasoned veterans. In fact, it was becoming difficult to get a steady game in the old neighborhood anymore and we had to consider traveling beyond our boundaries. At this time once again, my personal circumstances were about to change again as the family relocated to the suburbs. This news could not have come at a better time. We had always heard about the rich kids out there and the regular house games. Poker was alive and well in the ‘burbs and we were about to get our fair share of the pie. This time, my poker skills and ability were what enabled me to thrive in a new environment as I put the lessons of the city to good use.

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

Moving into a Queens’ tenement with my parents and sisters, it was soon clear we’d left behind Athenian suburbia for a neighborhood controlled by the mob, but powered by gambling. The streets were given structure and safety by the mafia, but their lifeblood was the steady stream of bets and
wagers. The local bookmakers took small-stakes bets on the weekly “numbers”, our equivalent of the state lottery, and added to the vig they earned on that by lending money at rates and availability no bank could match.

Gambling was by far the most prevalent pastime for a tightlyknit community. Queens in the Seventies was a blue-collar area. It wasn’t the kind of place where people had the facility to play tennis or golf in their free-time. But a deck of cards cost 10 cents and, everywhere friends gathered, games broke out. People played checkers a bit and you would see the odd chess game, but those games were too slow and boring compared to poker.

Games took place everywhere: between kids on porches and stoops for pennies, between old men in bars and cafes for nickels and dimes, round kitchen tables for weekly paychecks and in underground card rooms for considerably higher sums. Everywhere you looked, people were gambling, playing cards, hustling and trying to find an edge.

As poker was by far the most common form of entertainment, it was only natural I would be drawn into the game almost from the offset, although it took an illness to give me my first taste of the action.

We arrived in New York on the seventh day of the seventh month in 1970 – I hoped all those sevens were lucky omens. For the first, but not the last, time in my life I’d been forced by circumstances to relocate quickly. We moved partly for my father’s work, but largely to escape political prosecution. The monarchy had been deposed in Greece and my father’s family had strong ties and affiliations with the overthrown government.

My father was a well-educated man with a highly respected job as a merchant marine captain. In our house, his word was law. He came home at the end of the week to tell us we were leaving and by the following Tuesday we were in the States. It was that quick. We held a quick sale to liquidate our physical assets and left with what we could carry. Of course, in those days, even well-to-do kids like us only had one or two toys, so I was able to fit all my worldly possessions in a shoebox.

I remember my father hitting me for the first time in the jet on the way over. I was practicing the only English words I knew: Yes, No, and New York. For some reason I told him, “No good will come of this trip.” He slapped me and told me to shut up.

My mother was a traditional European housewife – utterly obedient and acquiescent to my father. If he’d come home and said we were moving to hell, she would have just made sure we’d taken plenty of sunscreen and she would have packed a lunch for the journey. In fact, it was her family connections that brought us to Queens in the first place, as her brother and sister already lived there. The first building we lived in belonged to my uncle and my mother’s family rallied around her to smooth the transition as much as possible.

Downtown Queens during a period of economic recession was quite a culture shock to an eight-year-old used to Athens. I had been born exactly 120 meters from the Acropolis and Athens then was rather different to how it is today. My father owned the only car on our street apart from two American Military Officers, stationed abroad, that lived down the block.

When we sold our house, we had to call a locksmith to make keys for us, because we couldn’t find the front door key. We hadn’t used it since we moved in. At nighttime in the summer, we would even leave the door open to send a cool summer breeze throughout the house. The crime rate was non-existent and the idea of someone coming into your dwelling was simply unthinkable.

To go from that to downtown Queens with bars on every window took a bit of getting used to. It wasn’t what you’d call an upscale neighborhood. If anything, you’d have to say it was an extremely depressed area at the time. I soon discovered that a street education was as essential to my wellbeing as the lessons I was taught in school, if anything more so.

School was, in all honesty, pretty easy for me. The only brief stumbling block was the language. I actually attended school for two weeks before anyone noticed I couldn’t speak English! After that time a teacher sent a note back asking where all my homework was. We got the note translated and figured out that I must have missed something.

It took about four months to master the language, but the good news was that once I was able to understand what was going on, I realized the European education system was about four years ahead of the American one. An educational system that continues to deteriorate – till this day.

Back in Greece, school had taken up most of my time. There were lessons six days a week, and three to four hours of homework a day just to stay competitive. Now I hardly needed to open a book to keep up, other than the odd bit of English grammar or literature.

Math was the biggest joke – I found myself getting into fights with teachers because of the way they wanted us to do things. They’d put calculations on the board and expect us to take four steps to work them out, when things like cross-multiplication meant you could find the answer in two steps. I started working on harder and harder mathematical problems more out of boredom than anything else.

But all the time I gained was a massive bonus, because however far ahead I felt I was in terms of book learning, I had a lot of catching up to do with language and culture. I soon discovered there were two sets of rules to live by: those supplied by the government and those supplied by the neighborhood. The neighborhood’s rules and regulations were a lot stricter than the government’s and the punishments were more severe. And, they weren’t written on the wall for you to read either! You had to learn things the hard way, generally by getting your ass beaten one way or another.

Everything was divided along ethnic grounds in those days. Nowadays things have become much more mixed, but back then every district had its own national identity. In our neighborhood we had Greek stores and Greek bars. If you walked the blocks around our apartment you’d hear Greek spoken, not English. It was the same in every area according to its ethnicity. My mother may have moved 5,000 miles, but her life hardly changed. The aesthetics were a quite a bit different, but her social group was exactly the same as it had been in Athens.

To the north of our five-block Greek area were Spanish and Irish residents. I quickly learned not to travel north if I could help it – they tended to be the most violent of our neighbors. Every so often groups of them would come into our neighborhood and all hell would break loose. They’d break
10 windows, steal bikes and look for trouble. They used to travel in large gangs and we often found ourselves outnumbered and suffering some serious beatings.

We got on much better with our neighbors to the south: the Italians. As the Greeks and the Italians had got a lot in common, we tended to get along just fine most of the time. I think that’s been the case since the classical era. It was from them that I got the majority of my street education. They were always all too willing to show us the ropes, introduce us to the “rules” and explain the way things got done. The mafia was at its height and ran everything – keeping the streets safe and drug-free. So long as you knew whom to respect, where to go and how to behave, life was pretty simple.

I soon realized this was no neighborhood to be alone in and quickly made friends to help me settle in. An Italian kid my age named Joey lived just down the street and he was the first guy I got to know. Soon my circle widened to include Joey’s best friend Mikey, their friend Vince, a smaller kid called Angelo and an Irish boy named Jimmy.

Even at that young age, these weren’t friendships in the commonly understood sense. Even back then, they were friendships of convenience and of necessity. Kids like Joey had grown up in Queens. They knew the streets and they knew the rules. You needed people like them around you to survive.

I realized early on that Joey and I saw eye to eye on a lot of things and he realized I was someone he could rely on. Soon after we met, before we really knew each other that well, we were walking down the road when we saw some kids from out of the neighborhood beating up Angelo. We didn’t really know Angelo at that time; in fact we hardly knew each other. But we both knew we couldn’t allow kids from out of our neighborhood to beat up one of our own. Without saying anything, I ran over to help him out. As I got there and waded in to rescue Angelo, I looked up and was surprised to see Joey by my side. He looked up and was surprised to see me. But from that moment on, we knew we would have each other’s back.

I did not realize how valuable Joey’s friendship would be until my bike got stolen. I had decided a mode of transport would come in pretty handy in the big city, but had no intention of asking my parents to buy me a bike. So I figured I would get creative and see how else I could obtain one.

Not too far from our house was an automotive junk yard. Its primary purpose was to dispose of cars, but various metal items were also brought there and sold as scrap metal. I climbed over the fence one night to have a look around. Even in the dark, it was clear there were enough bike parts lying amongst the heaps of metal to assemble into a complete machine over time. There was just one problem. Well, actually, there were four: the Doberman Pincher watchdogs that guarded the yard. I had no way to outrun them.

So I enlisted the help of my new friends. Angelo’s small size meant we were able to easily get him over the six foot fence. This left me free to go to the other side of the yard and distract the dogs. Once we identified the location of the parts, the rest was easy. It took a couple of months, but eventually I had the bike almost completed.

The only part I could not locate was a set of handlebars. I was not about to let a little problem like that stop me, so I managed to mount an old truck white ivory steering wheel on the bike instead. It was a rather creative solution and it even looked pretty good. The contraption was definitely a one of a kind custom creation. All I needed after that was a can of spray paint and some inflatable inner tubes for the tires.

The bike was finally done. Unfortunately, my joy was short lived. On the second day after I finished the job, I came out of our house to find the chain that had been securing it was cut and the bike was gone. Some of our neighbors were at the park across the street. They told me that some Spanish kids from the adjoining neighborhood had ridden by earlier and they had made off with the bike.

I knew I had to go and try to get it back. Even at that young an age that much was obvious. The streets of Queens were similar to being in prison. If you let someone pick on you and didn’t do anything about it, you immediately ran the risk of being treated, from that point on, like you were their bitch. It would happen to you again and again after that, with no end in sight.

I also knew I had little chance of getting the bike back on my own, but equally I knew I had to go there and try. If necessary, I knew I had to go up to the Spanish neighborhood every day until I got the bike back. Even if it didn’t work, I would show I was capable of standing up for myself.

Before I could set off on my way, Joey came knocking on my door. He had heard what had happened and was almost as upset as I was, but for different reasons. Joey was a Queens’ kid. And, at the end of the day, it was all about respect. He knew he couldn’t let such a lack of respect for the neighborhood’s property go unpunished. The mere thought, was inconceivable.

Of course, that was good news for me. Having Joey alongside me made me less of an underdog to get the bike back. And Joey brought Mikey with him, as he always did. At that point, we were pretty much favorites. And, to make a long story short, we got the bike back. We got it back in such a way those
kids never bothered us again. That event cemented us as a crew who would look out for each other from then on.

We would also go on to play many hours of poker together as we grew up. But my first hands weren’t played on the streets. I played in my first poker game just shy of my ninth birthday, while laid up in a hospital bed.

Not long after the bike incident, I was diagnosed with rheumatic fever. The condition caused a heart murmur but it also affected my legs and I was basically paralyzed for six months.

My cousins and friends would come to visit me often during those months and of course there wasn’t that much to do to pass the time as I was stuck in bed. I can still remember the conversation that preceded my first steps in the world of poker:
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“Let’s play some cards,” they said.
“But I don’t know how to play cards.”
“You got a nickel?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then we’ll teach you.”

And so they did. We played five card draw while I was laid up in a hospital bed. My cousins were all three or four years older than me and were just trying to find something to do to cheer me up – if I hadn’t been ill, I wouldn’t have been invited to play with them.

Of course, I had no idea what I was doing that first time. I made all the classic mistakes of the beginner, like hanging on to high cards and not working out the best draws. Losing the money hurt, of course, but it was my first taste of playing poker and I was intrigued by the mathematics of it. We played hand after hand as I gradually got better in hospital and the games continued regularly after I returned home.

I had been aware of poker, but my father wasn’t a gambler, so it was never played in our house. It was a popular game in Greece, of course, but he only played once a year, religiously, every New Year’s Eve. He would lose his money on December 31st every year to make his contribution and be thanked for taking part in the annual tradition.

But from the first time I played, I was tied up in trying to work out the game. Of course, there wasn’t much betting the way we played draw, so it was more to do with trying to calculate drawing odds rather than pot odds. You got your hand, made a bet, discarded and drew cards. That was it. Although it wasn’t expensive, the game was still more than complicated enough to challenge your mind more than your wallet.

I think draw is an excellent first game to get people really thinking about poker. Immediately you are forced to identify hands and pick which cards to discard in the hope of drawing others. You need to know the reasons why you are making that decision. Those questions fascinated me right from the
beginning and I found myself analyzing hands and strategies in my mind between games, thinking about what I should do when and why.

For example, I soon realized that if you have a pair as your starting hand but you also have the makings of a straight, you need to make a decision. You have to decide if you are going to hold on to the pair and draw to the two outs left in the deck that will give you a set, or if you are going to leave yourself open ended and draw to the straight.

So you realize for the first time that position is important. If you are acting first of five, with a pair you are likely to find yourself quickly behind, especially with two or more callers, as the average winning hand in poker is two pair. The same also holds true if you’re acting last of five, and everyone has joined you in the pot, somebody is likely to outdraw you, so you should probably consider breaking up your pair and draw to a better hand, if your hand permits it, or stay out of the hand all together.

That’s the kind of things draw poker makes you thing about and I was instantly interested in trying to get better. Of course, my lessons weren’t coming for free and I spent a lot of time trying to work out why I didn’t catch this, why I didn’t catch that. And there was no one to help me work it out. The older kids and my cousins just laughed when I asked them.

They were fairly good players for their age. You don’t do something for three or four hours a day without getting pretty good at it. But one could only get a poker education from playing hands. I couldn’t consult anyone else and there weren’t any books on strategy that we had access to, so it was more a case of soul searching and internal calculations.

I started to use my own methods of calculation, to work out why it was you were better off drawing to a straight than to a pair. Of course, once you know that you have eight outs to hit a straight but only two outs to turn a pair into a set, it’s obvious, but back then you had to work these things out for
yourself with no one to guide you.

In the same way, I learned through trial and error that a set is a tough hand to play. You will probably be ahead if you are dealt a set, and a great hand if you are up against one or two players, but against five people drawing to straights and flushes you will end up losing the hand more often than not. So what do you do? You are only drawing to a second pair or quads. It’s a tough to play.

I didn’t necessarily find many answers early on, but I gained understanding of the game before my results improved. I never really looked at it as gambling to be honest. I always saw it as a game of calculations where the more you played, the better you got.

Poker became my reading; it was what I did every day. My older sister was an excellent student, who went on to graduate summa cum laude. If she didn’t read a book or two a day she wasn’t happy. If I didn’t play two or three hours of poker a day I wasn’t happy. We started flexing different muscles of our brains, but we were both learning all the time.

I’d be out with the crew; we’d come home from school, hang out and play cards. Then we’d go do what little homework there was and come back out. If the weather was nice, there’d be some kind of sporting event in the concrete park across the street – baseball mostly, losing the ball if we hit “home runs” over the fence to the Grand Central Parkway. If it was raining, we’d play poker. And, once we were tired of sports, then it was time to play poker again.

Primarily we stuck to draw, jacks or better or occasionally stud. But draw was easier. We could play at a stoop or standing up because there were no community cards. 80% of our games took place outside, with the dealer able to deal out hands and swap discards without the cards being blown away.

We’d play sitting around the porch of the apartments, on a park bench or at the back stoop of the pool hall. We weren’t allowed inside the pool hall because that’s where the big boys were playing. But, rather like the dog you love but don’t let in the house, people tolerated us playing outside. After all, we were neighborhood kids and, this way, they can keep an eye out for us.

All the time we played these penny games, I continued to work on my strategies and to think about the way hands should be played, to work out which draws I should make and why.

I never viewed the way I was using my mathematics and calculations as an edge, because I assumed other people were doing the same. I thought they were making the same deductions about the game and calculating the sums of odds and draws in the same way. As I got older I realized I was probably giving people more credit than they deserved. As you start to understand the game better and the betting becomes a variable, it’s easier to spot people who aren’t making optimal plays. When the stakes start to go up, the wagering becomes more important then the difference in ability to analyze situations and react accordingly is clearer.

Plus of course, as we got older, we got closer to the bigger games. We weren’t playing at this point, only watching, but we started to see some of the hands played out at higher stakes. It was our entertainment to try to see how people played in those games in the pool halls and the card rooms. At the same time, we were trying to hustle for the occasional buck here and there by fetching cigarettes and drinks for people who were on a good run.

In return you could see a few hands of the game in progress. By the age of 12, I was already becoming aware that money makes no man the wiser. I saw people making the same idiotic plays I’d seen in our penny games even when the stakes were hundreds of times higher. That’s a truism of poker – at different levels you find the same fish with more cash. I guess it was at that point that I first started to realize this game was something I could probably make money at.

So poker was everywhere. The neighborhood was founded on the bedrock of gambling, and the wheels were oiled by the loan sharking and bookmaking. Even as young kids, my friends and I had started to work out how to get an edge in the card games that were all around us. But even against this general backdrop, there’s still one incident, minor in itself, that really set me on the road to taking this game of ours more seriously and becoming able to draw a living from it.

Of course, like all that incidents that represent crossroads in your life, you don’t know it at the time. It was just something that happened. But looking back, I can trace the start of my serious poker career back to the fourth time we serviced Big Tony’s car.

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

I’ve played poker on three continents, and in more than a dozen countries. I’ve played every possible variety of poker at every conceivable level of stakes from pennies to tens of thousands of dollars a hand. I’ve played poker in schools, in dorm rooms, in tents, in barracks, in restaurants, in bars, in
dining rooms, in boardrooms, in card rooms and casinos. I’ve played poker on planes and on board ship. I’ve played poker for days on end and I’ve sat in the same seat at a game for over 24 hours more times than I’d care to remember.

I’ve played every kind of poker you can possibly think of, and some you’ve never heard of. And I’ve played it everywhere. But what might surprise you more is that I’ve played poker my whole life, even when there weren’t any cards in front of me. Playing poker has informed all the decisions I have ever taken. Being a poker player has shaped my life, has changed my life. Poker gave me my education and my career and made me successful far away from poker tables. I’ve used poker in every conceivable professional and personal setting, from surviving on the streets to serving in the military, from earning a degree to closing multi-million dollar deals.

Over the last five years this game of ours has taken on a life of its own. It is quickly becoming the great American pastime, surpassing even baseball. Its worldwide popularity is growing even faster. The new breed of players is as likely to come from Russia, Sweden or the UK as from Texas, California or
New York.

As such, I thought this would be the appropriate time to write this book, but not for the reasons you may think. This book has not been written to cash in on the game’s current popularity. What is important to me is that players, old and new, understand and maintain the integrity of the game. Recently, the world has become aware of poker. Television and the Internet have taken an underground game into people’s homes. An abundance of books have been published to demystify the game, to simplify its concepts and reduce it to base calculations. But the world has only seen the tip of the iceberg. Poker is so much more to so many people.

Even though this may be my story, it is also the story of thousands. Boardrooms and card rooms the world over are filled with individuals who have shared similar paths to mine. The trials and tribulations of our youth are what provided the strength and fortitude that has led to our success. A success defined differently for each of us. To some, success has been public notoriety, to others monetary fortunes. To most, just making it out of the inner city, away from our ethnic neighborhoods, and on to a better, life was more success than anyone of us could imagine. To all, poker was the vehicle that led us down our chosen path and to the world beyond.

This book is written for anyone who’s been drawn to the game, whether they have been playing it for years or have just got their first glimpse. I hope you find it interesting. But, this book is dedicated to the millions of players in underground poker rooms the world over that have truly made the game what it is today. They are the soul and the backbone of this game of ours. It is dedicated to all those that understand the game’s philosophy and have made the lifelong commitment to master it. It is dedicated to all those that have yielded this game like a sword and attribute their personal success to it, and to all those that have given back to the game as much as they have taken from it.

To all my fellow players the world over whose very existence is bound up in this game of ours: I salute you.

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

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos has allowed PokerPlasm to publish his book, This Game Of Ours: A Poker Tale, chapter by chapter!

So get ready for some great poker stories…all of them true…all of them exciting. Read how one of the best cash game players around made it to where he is today. As John states, “Its a Bronx Tale meets Rounders with a little Platoon and Wall Street thrown in for good measure.”

Introduction and Dedication will be posted in the next day or so.