Several witnesses observed “Street3” (aka Steve Carse, aka “Isildur1”) last Wednesday, entering the FTC Oklahoma facility located on the western edge of Will Rogers World Airport, just 3 miles west of Interstate 44 and 4 miles south of Interstate 40. “Apparently Mr. Carse was “visiting” an inmate for a routine conjugal visit” says FTC guard George “Pee Wee” Herman. “When strange noises arose from the visitation, secret cameras and microphones were used to ascertain the entirety of the conversation (as well as to be used for the enjoyment of us other guards).”

While the videos were too graphic in nature to release to the general public, transcripts from the “conversations” were made public, and his “dealings” with his Swiss counterpart were revealed. “The two men were speaking about the best ways to win money, and Mr. Carse indicated that he had a poker account that had more money in it than Michael Mizrachi had won at the this year’s World Series of Poker” says Herman. “The swiss dude said that he played his cards a lot more like Fillipo Candio did, and that if he was gonna drop all of his money to some “Cheeseburger guy” then he should use his address.”

While it’s still unclear what Herman’s message exactly means, the inferences that came from the audio were unmistakable. “The trouble is, we don’t know what agency is the appropriate agency to handle this particular incident” says Herman. “We’re not sure if this is a crime against the U.S., the State of Oklahoma, or if it’s really just a fun time that us guards got a good giggle out of.”

Charges have yet to be filed, however it seems that it is only a matter of time before the criminals will be arrested. Mr. Carse was unavailable for comment.

So, Mr. Taylor.  Or Swyyft.  Or Taylor Swyyft.  You are known as “swyyft” on all poker sites and twitter and god knows what else.  Where did you get that name?
Because of how fast I can blow Mrs. Carse’s face.  Naw, just kidding (sort of), I got it when I was playing football. I am a big guy. I am not quick however. In fact out of 100 people playing football I was often one of the 3 slowest. They nicknamed me Big Swift because of how slow I was as a sort of ironical nick name. The coaches found this out and laughed and just started calling me swift for fun. When I started getting into Online Gaming and names, I wanted the name swift because It was what every one called me. However being quite common place I decided to use yy instead of I because it looked cool. (Still does IMO) thus Swyyft was born. I know its always available so and since i do not want have 30 different logins I just kept using it. It has been with me for about 9 years now.
 
Okay, now that that nonsense is out of the way, let’s talk poker.  Online or live and why?
I prefer online. I am not a big live person, I think live is fun but a lot of my game is about isolating a player. This is quite a bit harder live than it is online. A lot of people come along for the ride. It does not fit my game well. I am also ok losing several buy ins before making moves. I like to gamble and be aggressive early and set a tone to get big hands paid off later. You do not do this as much in a live game. It can also get boring to me, I get distracted easily. I however can give the same stare to these players when they do something stupid that Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning give their teammates when they lose the game for him.

I prefer online for several reasons, You can multi table like no other. This means constant action. It also allows me to keep my variance as low as possible even though due to my style I am a high variance player. I have had +15k+ months and -10k Months. Great example is I was +3k one week this month and then down 2k the next week. The downswings really have nothing to do with the cards though and more to do with how focused I am at the game. When I am on top of my game I feel I can hang in almost every tournament. Last night I went deep in a tourney. (Busted 45th or so of 1999 players) Not because of my cards. I got AJ 3x and 88 and 77. Other than that I got no good hand out of 132 hands or so after the bubble broke. Going from 300th to 45th when I was a mid stack at 300th is quite hard when you go card dead. I was able to get someone to call off 30 BB with A8 vs my AJ and I 4 Bet shoved 2 times with KJ and J6 and both times got the 3 better to fold. I had no doubt they were folding based on exact reads. One guy folded TT vs my J6 and not sure what the other guy folded. Being able to chip up and add 15+ big blinds to my stack with nothing on good reads is what my game is all about. The problem with making plays like these is I am not always right. Which causes variance. the guy could have called off 45 bb with TT and Ko’d me in the tourney and no one would have thought much about it.

I ended up not final tabling because I just ran bad. I had a couple big pots go the other way. One was one where I was sure I was ahead unless the flush hit and then I had no idea. The flush did hit and he checked it down and I found out his AJ beat my A9 on an 8 board. Another one was a limp pot where a guy limped AK, the flop came Q23. I bet and he eventually 3 outted me later on. These too cost me to go from 7th in chips to 35th with about 46 left. Eventually I got it in AQ vs TT and lost a flip for a top 3 stack. If I win that flip I feel confident I can use my advantage to final table.
 
Cash/SNG/MTT? 9 handed or 6 max?
6 Max for sure. I think more flaws in your game are exposed in 6 max, which I can usually take advantage of. It’s pretty easy to hide flaws in a 9 max table. You do not get nearly as many blind vs blind/button situations which is a weakness for most players. People defend too much etc. I like both Cash and MTT, although I am not a winning player in NLHE cash games. I prefer PLO cash because the game is best played 100 big blinds deep, but what happens when you play good players is that it ends up being 200 big blinds deep once people lost buy ins and money gets traded around. That’s when the game becomes super intense and really becomes a thinking game. I like NLHE MTT though because they are the softest usually with people having no experience how to play the latter stages. Also I am a winning player at it lol.
 
How did you get your start playing poker?

3 Things.

1. Coke Binge,
2. Bad Black Jack Run, and
3. Needed to kill 3 hours while the hooker was coming down back in the suite at the Venetian.

 
Who is better, you or widmayer?  Me or widmayer?  Me or you?  Me or anyone else?  Me or a dead donkey?  A dead donkey or a crippled blind fucktard? Me or a crippled blind fucktard?  Me or a rock?
You know, results wise I am quite a bit better, but the times I play my best, are when we are both playing and talking hands out. He provides a lot of insight and keeps me from doing stupid things. He is not afraid to tell me when I am playing bad and when my risk level of how I play goes too high and I need to tighten up and play better.

I think at times you play just as well as him but I think you have some leaks in your game. I do not think you exploit him as much as he exploits you. If you are sitting down at a 9 handed cash game table its tough to say who comes out on top. If you sitting down at a final table with 9 left and short stacks all around I think he is going to come out on top.

I think you are better than you think you are, I just don’t think you have confidence sometimes when you are playing against other good players you should have. I think you don’t stop and think about what you are doing. I think if you just quit doing anything instantly and thought out every hand out late in Tourneys and SNG you would get better. Always think about what you have and what they have and apply it to the hand. Don’t just snap doing things. Always let the FTP clock start, telling you, you have 15 seconds left and you will definitely start getting better results. Sometimes I watch you and know you have no idea if you are good or not and you just bet at it instead of thinking about it and betting at it confidently.
 
Online poker is RIGGGGGGGGED?  True or False and why?
False, there are a ridiculous amount of analytical programs out there and I even use one once in a while. The numbers come out exactly how they should. I think players just are not good enough when it comes to online and don’t adjust properly to the online games. Just because you can crush your home game or go to your local casino and win at 2/5 does not mean you can get online and beat 100 Max like that. The online games are much more fierce. The great players know where they stand as far as other players go. So many bad players never go out and learn the game and learn just how deep the game goes. They simply look at their cards and decide they have the best hand they should win all the time. One of the reasons these players never get sick results and are always losing is because they rely on big hands to build a stack. They might always be getting it in as a 70/30 but they also might be doing it for their tourney life every time. 
 
What’s your biggest cash?
$8500. I finished 3rd in the 10RA 80k on stars. 
 
Boobs or Ass?  Examples of each are provided.
Ass fo sure. Its way more fun in the long run. But I really don’t care. I can have fun with both. Butt sex with girls is always fun though. Or in your case butt sex with dudes.
 
You have lived all across the United States.  Which city/state has the best/worst women and why?
When I rate the states I rate them by how easily it is for me to bang hot girls.

1. LA. LA has some ridiculously hot women. Like off the charts smoking hot. There are 2 scales you use to define women. The 1-10 scale and the LA 1-10 scale. LA is nothing but 9s from the south/midwest/east that come out here and realizes they are a 6. Everyone who told them they were pretty back in there home towns has never seen the level of attractiveness LA girls have. You look on TV an see these smoking hot girls on TV shows. Like every tv show has attractive people. It’s not like they are using the only attractive people in the city. Those people make up 1% of the attractive females. If you go to a casting for a show like The OC, There are nothing but girls just as attractive as Mischa Barton. 100s lined up. This allows guys like me, pull tail so far out of my league its not funny. I don’t think I could go back to living in a city where I had to hook up with average girls. The problem with attractive girls in smaller cities is that they are all stuck up cause every guy hits on them and they get used to it.
2. Miami. Miami might overtake LA one day and is for sure ahead of it in natural  beauty and pleasantness. Miami gets a lot of South American women who are in my opinion the most attractive women in the world. If I had to find a wife tomorrow I am finding some Colombian/Argentian/Brazillian in Miami and going to have as many kids as possible. Also Miami is somehow chiller than LA. The problem is, its humid as fuck so I cant deal with that.
3. Let me start by saying the drop off from 2 to 3 is pretty ridiculous. But Dallas has some smoking hot girls, Same with Austin because of UT. These girls get bonus points because they are wholesome and fun loving. Also I like dominant loud women so Texas is full of them.
4. San Diego. San Diego is a chill place with a lot of smoking hot girls. Its a beach town so everyone is in crazy shape. One time we were down there and my friends hooked up with these really good looking 38 year old broads. They were day tripping from LA. Long story short. They needed a place to stay, but we really did not want to put up with them overnight. So we made them sleep on the streets of San Diego downtown cause they had no money. Lol.  widmayer can verify to this story.
5. Idaho and Utah have some smoking hot girls. And they wholesome. Unlike most of the other cities I mentioned. Its because they are Mormon and don’t really destroy their bodies trying to dick. They are also very naive which works out. They love out of towners because they can keep the veil of innocence because no one will find anything out. I know a lot of people who frequent these places call the women in Idaho. I-Da-Hoes. These girls get all that tension out on you, if you are just visiting for business/pleasure. I spent some decent time in Sand Point, Park City and Coeur D’Alene in Utah and Idaho and have some decent stories we will get into another time. Again Me pulling tail out of my league.

5 worst.*

1. Pennsylvania. I dare you to think of a hot girl you know from Pennsylvania.
2. New England States. I dare you to find me a hot blonde who sports a Red Sox hat Pre 2004.
3. Iowa, I went to visit my parents and did not want to bang one girl the whole time I was there.
4. Oregon/Washington Even the big cities have a hard time representing. Women are too outdoorsy and manly.
5. Oklahoma. Girls allow you to sleep with them there, thus the risk of crossing bodily fluids with @street3 through 6 degrees of separation is way to high.

* Alaska would be number 1 but due to the fact it has no women, I cannot count it. Its why jordie21 wants to move there so bad. Its his utopia.
 
When interviewing widmayer, he had a funny story about you, now it’s your turn to embarrass him.  Please give us a good story.
I will give you 2.5.

Story 1. So when we both lived in Milwaukee, We used to go to this bar/club. One of my best friends Ryan worked there so we always only had to tip. Well one random night Ryan and I went there and I did not know widmayer would be there. It was probably 12:30AM at this point. The place had multiple bars, so we decided to go to the top bar where you can sort of see over everything and start doing shots.

I look over to see what’s going on, on the dance floor. And I see widmayer on the dance floor dancing with a bunch of older black dudes, just bombed as well. I am staring at this for a good 20 minutes before finally going and getting him and dragging him away. All he would talk about the rest of the night was how he was getting down and how all these older black dudes loved him.

Before this ever happened we were at this same bar. I think it was someone’s birthday or something, If you were with the birthday party you got free beer before 10pm.

Well I think I left at some point during the night but when you have 2 hours of free beer you can guess where the night is headed.  I had actually left at some point during the night, but I come to find out later that widmayer had stayed the whole night. Even after all of his other friends left. Well I guess the story goes that someone put him into a cab, and told them to take him home. Only halfway home he realizes he has no money to pay the cab driver, so when they are  stopped at a red light he just jumps out of the car and books it. He runs from the cab driver for a while only to realize he has no idea where he is and none of his roommates or friends knew where he was either. They started calling him and finally got a hold of him. He was so wasted he had no idea where he was, only that he was outside of a check cashing place. For those of us who live in larger cities, you know that the last place you want to be at 230/3am is outside of a check cashing place. Needless to say his roommates managed to somehow pick him up. None to pleased.

Also one night I had to call him and ask him if we had an orgy or not. But that story we will leave for another time.

I’ve checked out your new site http://wppokerleague.com/ and must say it looks interesting, what can you tell us about what prompted you to create this site?
I wanted to create a site to allow people to download get help with installing the WordPress plugin: WP Poker League. The site will also be used to blog about ideas, issues, etc relating to running poker leagues. Additionally, the support forum will be a place for poker league administrators/directors to share ideas about running a poker league regardless of whether they use the plugin or not.

Is this just for Poker leagues or can it be used for other types of scoring league, such as Fantasy Football, home games, etc…?
The WP Poker League plugin is really just geared towards poker leagues. The original intent was to make it generic enough to be used for a variety of points based leagues, but ultimately it was best to make it poker only. But as for poker leagues, it can be used for all types: online, casino and home games.

I see in the “Poker Leage Showcase” tab you have the Twitter Poker Tour listed. Will this be a central place for all poker leagues to be listed so players in multiple leagues can have easy access to view their standings?
Not necessarily. The Poker League Showcase is there to allow league administrators to show off their WP Poker League powered websites. It will also serve to show potential users of the plugin how other admins are using it. Hopefully there will be some crossover as we list more and more leagues in the showcase and people start to check out each others sites.

Did you create this plugin or you are just promoting it because it’s so nice?
Yes!! I actually did create this plugin myself! I have written several web based apps in PHP/MySQL but never a WordPress plugin. It took a little bit to figure out the plugin development piece but everything else was right in my comfort zone.

How long have you been using this plugin for the Twitter Poker Tour? What benefits does it have over what you previously used?
I have been using the WP Poker League plugin for the Twitter Poker Tour for about a month now but the core of the app has been in use for about 9 months. I had written a backend to the Twitter Poker Tour website to allow for importing and displaying the results and leaderboard a while back and the WordPress plugin just built upon that.

It has a few benefits over others I have tried, namely: the ability to display the event schedule, display individual event results, only shop the top X results or leaderboard spots and display them on any WordPress post or page. The primary benefit is that the data is stored locally within the WordPress install and not called in via an iframe from a remote site.

What types of poker leagues can this be used for?
The plugin can be used for any type of poker league that keeps track of points. Actually, if you were so inclined you could just use the plugin to show the event schedule and individual results without using the leaderboard itself. But the crown jewel of the plugin is the leaderboard.

Can the standings be exported at all or is it strictly viewable online?
As of now, the results cannot be exported from the plugin itself. It wouldn’t be too hard for me to code an export feature if there were a need.

From what I understand, anyone running WordPress can run this plugin on their site, right?
That’s right, all you need to run this plugin is a WordPress installation. If you are just starting out with a poker league or are on a different platform for your league website, I wrote a short article called: “4 Steps to Create and Manage a Poker League Website” to get you started.

Otherwise, feel free to stop by the site and checkout the online demo of the plugin and get your questions answered in the forum!

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.

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.