For the second time in my life, my father decided the family had to move. And for the second time the upheaval was very sudden. He had finally tired of spending months on end at sea and took a job as a Vice President with a large shipping company.
His salary was good, so he wanted to move us all out to the suburbs, upgrading from a Queens apartment to a Long Island house. As ever, the decision was quickly backed up with action and the moving trucks were rolling down the road within days.
For some reason I can’t really explain, I was actually looking forward to the move. I thought the change would be a good thing and was optimistic about it. I’ve never been slow to adapt to new circumstances anyway and this was hardly on the same scale as the original move to New York from Greece.
This time, I wasn’t leaving my friends behind. We were only 18 miles away and I continued to commute back into the city every few days to see them. I was still able to put in a couple of days a week at the underground poker tables over that first summer by staying with my friends, so in that sense nothing had changed.
My parents remained remarkably clueless about where their son went for nights on end. And if they weren’t clueless, they chose to stay in a state of denial.
“Where are you going,” they’d ask.
“Going to Play,” I’d reply.
“Play what?”
But I never answered that question!
At the same time, now that he was home regularly, my father wasn’t all that impressed with what he could see of my lifestyle. He made a second decision and told me I would be sent to an upscale Parochial School in our new neighborhood, not back to public school. So, despite not being Catholic, his
money was good enough to see me enrolled at Catholic school. I didn’t argue. I could see he was holding all the cards on that one and I was drawing dead.
I think he thought there would be less temptation for me in a more disciplined and rigid academic environment. He turned out to be wrong, but God bless him for trying - it presented me with the best money making opportunity of my young life thus far.
Suddenly I found a whole new source of poker games. And these games were populated with very weak players. After three years or so learning the ropes in darkened corners of Queens, taking money from Long Island patsies was like shooting fish in a barrel. We settled into a consistent routine. I would go back into the city nearly every weekend to see my old crew and hit the tables, ending up staying with Mikey, Joey or one of my cousins before commuting back out to school the following week.
And during the week the old crew would return the favor, driving out into the suburbs to join the games I had found going on. There was no shortage of action for us. Within a couple of months, I had lined up seats for myself and my friends in the biggest regular games in town.
The action was plentiful, but the environment was a lot more casual and upscale than we had grown used to. People out here had more disposable income, so they viewed the poker game as much as entertainment as anything else. That meant the stakes were higher than in the inner-city rooms, but the standard of play was much lower. There were home games and games behind closed doors in restaurants and bars. I was starting to learn that wherever in the world you go, you will always find poker games in restaurants and bars. The only difference is how plush your surroundings are to be.
Higher stakes and lower standards made the grind much easier. If 80% of the opposition in Queens had been tight players who leaked money about as easily as stones leak blood, here 80% of the opposition was only too happy to slide their money into the middle of the table in a loose fashion.
This was great news for us. We quickly realized that our experience so far gave us a tremendous edge at these tables. There were kids our age and locals older than us and they all thought they were poker players. But they weren’t, not as we knew it. Despite all still being in High School we were able to put in at least 30 hours at the table every week. And the increased stakes at an easier standard saw our hourly rate rocket upwards. My bankroll was growing and I was a teenage kid with money to burn. Life couldn’t get much better.
But to be fair to my father, his plan did actually work, despite these unintended fringe benefits. The private school forced me to pay more attention to my studies and I found, to my surprise, I actually enjoyed it. The public schools had never challenged me, to say the least. I arrived in Queens ahead of the system after a Greek primary education and that meant I had been able to coast for several years. Now, for the first time, I found teachers who started to push me, who actually challenged me.
I responded well to the challenging environment and began to engage with my schoolwork, especially math. My grades had never been bad, but they had never been spectacular. Now I discovered I was drawn to math like a magnet. Suddenly I couldn’t get enough of it. I discovered that my brain was innately suited to numbers. I had always been able to pick up new processes immediately and see shortcuts without thinking about it. Now I began to hone that ability by tackling harder and harder problems.
In fact, in my late teens I was outstripping my teachers and solving problems quicker than they could. But rather than suppressing my ability, one teacher suggested I enroll in night classes and summer courses at the local university. With a recommendation letter from the school, they permitted my attendance even though I wouldn’t get any academic credit for the work.
In my last 18 months at high school, I completed four years of college math. That did a lot for my self-esteem and opened my mind up to new directions and possibilities. I started to see that a whole world lay ahead of me that didn’t just involve taking money off the poker table. In fact, this newfound
infatuation only further instilled my commitment to poker as I quickly realized that my initial attraction to this game was as a direct result of the mathematics and game theory associate with it.
Tackling a significant academic challenge was a new experience for me. My sister had always been the scholar in the house, but now I was able to match her achievement. None of my friends had ever been known for hitting the books, but it became an everyday and normal occurrence to me. I realized I possessed a natural ability I should be honing. My sister used to slave away on her math homework for two or three hours a night. She held down one hell of a grade point average through her hard work, but as far as math was concerned I could have sneezed on the paper and stayed ahead of her. Realizing you can stay ahead of your older sister without trying too hard - that’s pretty exciting to a teenager’s ego!
But my newfound math ability wasn’t just something that made my head swell. It sparked an interest in the wider world. I began to read more than the racing pages and the point spreads in the newspapers. Instead of just studying the form at the track, which I had always loved for the numbers, I started devouring the financial pages. I began reading the Wall Street Journal every day.
I was reading newspapers properly for the first time. I wanted to understand the economy and the way finance operated. So I started to read the stock market reports. I began to look at which stocks were doing well, to understand multiples and trends. In all honesty, I started to look at things I had no business looking at. That was partly down to my pure curiosity for numbers, and partly down to a desire to fulfill my appetite for other arenas and applications for math.
It was at this point that I began my second lifelong obsession besides poker, namely my fascination with finance. I quickly loved finance because it was an area suffocated by math. I enjoyed grappling with financial issues as much as I enjoyed analyzing pure numbers, or picking up the mathematics of poker. I loved the charts, the variables, the sheer scale of finance. It affected everything and it was basically just math. Every company could be reduced to its capitalization, calculations and amortizations. You could assess a stock from any angle depending on which variables you used for your sums. I found that an exciting revelation.
In fact, I started to argue with my father about the markets. He had certain holdings scattered here and there. After studying the papers, I would harass him daily, telling him he had invested in a dog, based on the calculations I had made. He told me to shut up and mind my own business, told me that I
was too young to understand those kind of things. But those stocks continued on to fall, which made me laugh. It made me realize how you could make money on the market, how important your knowledge and the relevant calculations were.
Finance didn’t replace poker as my main interest. I had room for both. It wasn’t as though one was my mistress and one was my wife. I found them both equally entertaining on different levels. Poker was entertainment, as well as a source of considerable income, while math and finance offered me excitement and interest on a completely different level. My old crew from Queens made little comment about my new activities, but looking back I supposed they must been a little bit surprised by it.
But it didn’t matter to them. They called me up and asked what I was doing. If I said I was taking this course or that course and they asked why, I just said it was because I felt like it. That was pretty much the end of the matter. It didn’t change anything between us, so they weren’t all that bothered. They weren’t opposed to my studying, but it wasn’t something we really discussed. Guys like Joey and Mike were pretty much anti-academics. They weren’t stupid by any means, but their intelligence was street smarts, not book smarts, on about a 90:10 ratio.
If my friends were hiding their surprise, my parents were just completely confused. They were delighted of course. Suddenly they could see their son doing really well at school, taking on extra interests and wanting to add extra courses to his studies. I think they were somewhat baffled by this change, but it did mean I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted with the rest of my time. My father was completely off my back, which meant I had no problem fueling the covert poker habit alongside the visible math addiction.
As my spare time had decreased somewhat, I immediately shifted my focus to higher stakes. That meant I could keep growing my bankroll with a series of hit and runs on about half a dozen consistent games - four in the suburbs and two back in the city. My father moved jobs to become a senior vice-president at a large corporation, but his teenage son was raking in enough money to out produce him.
At a top-500 company, he was bringing in more than $27k a year, which was a substantial salary at the tail end of the 1970s. In fact, he earned more than the total value of our house in a year, which gives you some idea of the scale. But at 17, I was taking more then $30k a year off the poker tables. That was the same as a top-level executive.
And it was all money to burn. For the only time in my life, I would able to use poker winnings just to have a good time. Poker had always made me self-sufficient. My father was making a very good living and had more than enough money to provide for all of us. But since getting involved running the numbers as a kid, I had always had my own source of income, so it never occurred to me to ask for any kind of money. I saw friends ask their parents for money, but that seemed inappropriate to me. It was kind of demeaning to have to ask for the funds to go out and have a good time.
And I never lacked for money. At that age, I didn’t have any true concept of bankroll management. I wasn’t making money because I had to; I was just making money because that was what I did. My bankroll continued to grow by the thousands, but at this point I was spending up to 40% of my profits every month. If my bankroll grew, it was more because I just couldn’t find enough things I wanted to spend the money on. It wasn’t a conscious decision to build up enough of a stake that could withstand a significant streak of bad runs.
I never really thought about how much a hit would deplete my capital. I had losing sessions, of course, but they were outnumbered about nine or ten to one by winning sessions. So I always thought one or two sessions would make back the deficit and the rest was all profit. Even though I didn’t take my bankroll all that seriously, it was always substantial. That meant a losing session was never a scary event. It didn’t bother me that much, because I always knew I would make the money back the next time or the next week.
That probably meant I enjoyed some level of good fortune in those early days. I know of very good players who went on lengthy dry spells. I mean, they went months without catching cards. They ran cold for session after session. But that never really happened to me to any great extent. So I guess I was fortunate.
Keeping tens of thousands of dollars in cash wasn’t all that easy. I took up a floorboard in the foundation of the house and hid the majority of the money down there. But I also kept a second stash in the sub floor of the storage shed outside the house, so I was able to grab money quickly without having to go inside if I needed to. Neither hiding place was ever discovered.
As my final year of high school got underway, I started to turn my thoughts towards college. My math ability had got me noticed and I found myself listed in a book called “Who’s Who in Young Americans” for my mathematical achievements. I didn’t pay much attention to it - it seemed to be pretty meaningless to me, just a list of names to impress pompous-ass parents. And to this day I have no idea where they got my name from. I found out later that people fought to get a mention in this book, which was a big prestigious, leather-bound volume weighing about ten pounds. But other than keeping my mom and dad happy, it didn’t do all that much for me.
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted something that focused on math. I didn’t want to be a teacher or a professor, but I liked the idea of working in finance. That was basically just math, so I figured I would enjoy it. I did my research and discovered that MIT was supposed to be the best school for math in the country, so I applied there.
It was a lengthy process, as the top schools were equally competitive then as they are now. They don’t just want straight-A students, they’re looking for a little more than that. They want kids with different interests and diverse backgrounds that will be able to handle the work, but do more
than just sit in the library for 12 hours a day. I had to submit papers, list my extra-curricular activities, tell them all about the books I had read and the theories I had studied. I went to several interviews. And I guess they drew a liking to me, because they offered me a scholarship.
Needless to say, there was no mention of poker on my application. But it would be poker that would prevent me from taking up my place.
After Christmas in my final year at school, I made a startling discovery. I had been a committed Marlboro customer since the age of 10 and the terrible weather led to a search for a dry location to hideaway for a smoke. Getting creative, I picked the lock to the school basement and flicked the light on.
I was astonished to see that the school had an entire casino hidden in their basement. And I mean an entire casino. It was pretty common for catholic churches to run casino nights and bingo nights to raise money - as charities they got good tax breaks. But this wasn’t a Mickey-mouse rinky-dink operation. These fucks had a Vegas-quality casino hidden away in the basement: roulette, blackjack and poker tables. The real stuff.
Well, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. The set-up was incredible. Everything a teenage Benny Binion-wannabe could possibly desire. I got the Queens crew out to take a look and within a couple of days we had our own Horseshoe up and running. My friends were all put to work as dealers and we had roulette and blackjack tables open for business. And, of course, we had some serious poker games going on.
We didn’t have to look too far for our clientele. I got some of the school kids involved. They had rich parents and money to burn. And we spread the word in the other games we frequented. Pretty soon we had players hungry for action every Friday and Saturday, sneaking into the school after dark for some gambling or a game of cards.
My first excursion into organizing a big game meant that for the first time security was my problem. But that wasn’t difficult. Joey was already pretty well connected back in Queens, so I quickly made the security side of the operation his problem. And that made it no problem at all.
The logistics of thing were very easy. School activity after 5:30pm was non-existent apart from the janitor and after 8pm you wouldn’t see another soul. We were lucky there was a parking lot next door, so everyone was able to park up there before sneaking through the athletics track to the school’s back entrance.
It wasn’t as though we were trying to hide hundreds of people. All we needed was a few committed gamblers and 14 or 18 good heads to keep the poker action going. We found that with ease. No one was ever spotted going in or out and I have no doubt that the game would easily have continued until my graduation before quietly dying out, if fate had not intervened.
There were only weeks left in the school year. We had been keeping the nights running for four or five months, had made a tidy sum for ourselves and had plenty of satisfied customers. But we did have one unsatisfied customer. This guy was a 20-year-old college dropout. His brother was in my class and his mother was the head of the school PTA, and his family was not short of money. In fact, his parents were loaded. But this guy managed to run up a $14k debt at the tables. To put that into some kind of context, that was three brand new cars off the showroom floor. In some parts of town that was half a house, although in the burbs where he lived it would probably have only got you a couple of garages.
So $14k was a serious chunk of change to be in the hole for. And this guy fell behind on his payments. After two weeks, one of Joey’s associates paid him a visit and had a chat with him about the importance of settling the debt. He didn’t seem to take too kindly to the warning and appeared at the game the following week, trying to force his way in and demanding more credit.
The rules are very simple. You can’t let someone in that kind of debt play on. They have to accept their losses and settle up. He argued his case and was forcibly removed from the premises. Not to put too fine a point on it, he had the shit beaten out of him. And the rat bastard went running home and
told mommy all about it. Then the shit hit the fan.
The school investigation was immediate. The police were called and my parents and I were summoned to the principal’s office the very next day. The rat had named me as the only guy from the school involved in organizing the gambling. The school decided they weren’t too interested in making an issue out of which pupils might have been involved in playing, but they wanted to know who my associates were in organizing the games.
The finger wasn’t being pointed at me individually, but I had to put myself in the spotlight, to keep my crew out of it. The police and the school tried to put the squeeze on me to find out who else was involved. They threatened me with charges of trespassing, violating licensing laws, money laundering and loan sharking.
I stonewalled them. I told them I didn’t really know the guys that well, that I’d found the dealers in bars. They asked for names, I told them one of them was called Bob. They asked what Bob looked like, I told them he was between 20-50, my size and white. Of course I was being arrogant, but the quicker
they realized they weren’t going to get any useful information out of me, the quicker the interrogation would stop.
I took the rap for the whole thing. I told them I was organizing everything and that if people came in from outside school, I didn’t know who they were. They got bored of asking the same question again and again and resorted to threats.
“If you don’t give us any more information, all this will come down on you,” they said.
“That’s fine, do what you have to do,” I replied.
In one way, I was pretty lucky the school was so embarrassed about the whole thing. This school had a waiting list of students waiting to get in, so they didn’t want parents to find out that they would be paying to send their kids somewhere being run like a Vegas bordello. Their desire to hush the whole thing up, coupled with my academic record, saved me from jail.
My parents did not take the whole situation well at all. In fact, they reacted as though their son had been convicted as a mass murderer. I think they were more concerned with the shame I had brought on the family name than they were with the possible consequences. My mother did get an uncle of mine involved to make sure I had proper legal representation. He paid $1500 or so on an attorney. Unbeknownst to my mother, I forked out another $6k in legal fees without her realizing it.
In the end, the charges were downgraded to assault with a deadly weapon and menacing, for the attack on the guy who ratted on us. On top of that, the school claimed certain damages had been made on their property, so I had to pay out for their bullshit “damages”.
The guy who had been attacked said, “You’re not the one who assaulted me.”
I said, “Yes I am and if you don’t shut up, I’ll do it again. It’s not my fault I beat you so delirious you don’t remember me properly.?”
In the end, my appearance in court got the whole thing downgraded to disorderly conduct. I avoided jail and was made to pay a hefty fine. The school charges, damages, legal fees, attorneys on top of that made it an expensive lesson. But in many ways I was lucky to avoid something far worse.
In court, it was my academics that really saved the day. My demeanor was very different to the arrogant stonewalling I had adopted in the face of police and school questioning. It was classic poker again - you have to adapt your play to suit the game. Arrogance had been the way to get the police off my back, but it wasn’t the way to play a courtroom. So I was humble. I was well dressed and smartly groomed. It was clear I came from a good family and had a fine academic record - I had completed four years of college prior to leaving school.
That meant my misdemeanors could be presented as a simple single error of judgment. An isolated incident and piece of juvenile stupidity. “The excitement of the moment got to this young man, your honor, it will never be repeated.” Blah blah blah. My academic record and background were spotless, so I guess they put it down as a bad day on my part. Apart from the one idiot, they weren’t getting anything else in the way of testimony to corroborate the charges. So they didn’t have much else to go on.
I took the rap, paid up all the money I owed. In lieu of expulsion I was asked to voluntarily withdraw from school. I also signed a confidentiality clause never to discuss what happened so as not to embarrass the school further. I’ve now violated that clause for the first time. I then went and enrolled
in the local public high school to complete the last courses I needed for my high school diploma. There wasn’t much left. In fact I only attended classes in English and health, for about an hour a day.
But the expulsion was enough to have my scholarship and place at MIT revoked. In fairness, I think I would have lost the place even without the technicality of the expulsion. They’re not stupid up there and word of my transgression had spread in the academic community.
So I faced an uncertain future after graduating high school. Everything was up in the air and I had no idea what I was going to do next. But within 12 months, academic uncertainty would be the least of my problems.
John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.
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