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The New York in which I arrived in 1970 was a city held together by organized crime and gambling. I landed as an eight-year-old immigrant who knew three words of English and began my poker education almost as soon as I stepped off the plane.

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.