Thoughts On Poker & Having A Gun To Your Head
This was only 10 years ago, but it feels like a decade. Back in 2006, I lived in a little house in the little neighborhood of Home Park in the little town of Atlanta, GA. I worked part time delivering sandwiches for Jimmy John’s, but my main source of income was poker. I played cash games every night, and my roommates and I ran a game 4 nights a week, mon-thurs, starting at 7pm and often times ending around 7am the next morning. It wasn’t legally a job, but it was most definitely work. Dealing with degenerate gamblers on a daily basis can be pretty damn daunting. Knowing what drinks and snacks our regular players liked, keeping card mechanics, colluders, and other types of cheaters out of the game, knowing how to deal in a way that didn’t piss off the anal retentive weirdos that underground cash games tend to attract…it was a full time gig.
Our game was low stakes, relatively speaking. the lowest cash games you’d usually run across were 1-2 games ($1 small blind, $2 dollar big blind, with a $100 minimum buy-in). Most games I played at were 2-5, with a $200 minimum buy-in, and I had played in/knew of several 5-10 games where you couldn’t play without putting up at least a couple grand. Our game was 1-1, with a $60 minimum buy-in. We did this because, at the time, there was a big poker boom and a lot of bars had free poker nights where hoards of graphic designers, restaurant workers, and businessmen played tournaments to win bar tabs an such. We’d go to those bars and recruit players for our game. Most of these people had good jobs and made good money, but were too intimidated by most cash games because of the buy-in. They were also creeped out by the types of characters you find regularly at cash games; people we lovingly referred to as “degens” (short for degenerates). Sounds like a mean nickname, but it’s one of endearment in the poker world. It’s a much nicer nickname than the one given to players recruited from bar poker: free poker donks.
FYI, “donk” is short for “donkey,” and it’s the last thing you want to be at the poker table next to being a fish. Free poker donks were the type of people who had to let you know that they knew everything to compensate for their insecurity (these people also exist everywhere outside of poker, I’ve noticed). They liked to work out their pot odds out loud and throw a fit when someone sucked out on them to win a big pot, stating percentages and telling people what a bad call they made. This is a dumb way to act in general, but especially around real cash game players. For one, you WANT people making dumb calls. Even if they suck out on you and win a big hand, statistically speaking, you’ll come out ahead over time. Also, Everyone at the table knows about pot odds (method of gauging bet sizes/if a bet is worth calling), it’s pretty easy math. Degenerates play poker every day; they know the game. They will sometimes make a dicey call just because they’re bored and haven’t gotten to play enough hands. If you bitch about how much money they just took from you, they’re only going to laugh in your face. The free poker donks were annoying to have around, but the reason we wanted them at our game was because they were people with money who knew enough about poker to play predictably, get wiped out, whine about it, then buy back in. Some would repeat this cycle for hours before calling it quits. They’d never play a game with a $200 buy-in, but they had no problem rebuying for $60 five times. Another reason we wanted them at the game is the fact that you can only stand so many degens at one table.
I’ve met enough weirdo degenerate assholes from playing cash games to fill a book that would creep out all the other books on the shelf. Some of the regulars at our game were so oddly fascinating that you didn’t want to know more about them for fear that your head would explode. One guy named Emilio was in his forties, about 400 lbs, ate entire meat lover’s pizzas while playing cards, and demanded that the fridge be stocked with Diet Pepsi. He was always sweating, covered in a mat of thick black hair, and ran “bear night” at Swingin’ Richard’s (a gay strip club, if you hadn’t deduced). He didn’t really converse with people so much as yell at them obnoxiously. On top of all this, he was one of the most degenerate gamblers I had ever seen. One time, he won a poker tournament in Biloxi, walked with 12 grand cash, then blew it all at a dog track on the way home. A fucking dog track. Emilio would play until there was no more money to be won or lost. On several occasions, he would be down $1,000 at 8 in the morning, begging us to keep the game going while his unexplainably attractive boyfriend was on his way over to write us a check for Emilio’s debts. These are the type of people you get to know when you pick cards over college.
One night, it was my turn to deal the game, so I did. We were about 4 hours in, and my friend Sidepot Sammy (real name is Justin btw) pushed all in against a free poker donk. There was a lot of money in the pot, so the tension was thick and everyone was quiet (the only situation to make degens shut up). That silence was then broken when I looked up to see a dude in a ski mask jogging toward me and aiming a 9 millimeter at my head. There was another guy behind him wearing sunglasses and carrying a rifle. A third guy was behind them carrying a trash bag. Ski mask dude went right to me (because I was dealing, I assume), put the gun to my head and yelled, “You know what this is! Everybody strip! Run ya pockets!”
You learn a lot about yourself when you have a gun to your head. For some reason, a wave of calm came over me that I cannot explain. I mean, i was definitely terrified, and not *just* because of the gun to my head. As soon as ski mask guy started yelling, one of my roommates who wasn’t at the table bolted out the front door. This definitely made the robbers nervous, which wasn’t good for me at all. Also, I immediately knew that these guys didn’t know what they were doing. There are people who rob poker games, and they know that everyone’s money is likely hidden in another room, and certainly not on each individual player. I immediately realized that ski mask guy could get nervy and blow my brains all over the suede couch behind me, then kill the 7 other people at the table because they witnessed it. So I put on my best guidance counselor voice and said, “ok, ok, just calm down and take our money. No one needs to strip or anything.” I felt I needed to throw that last part in because this was not a group of dudes you’d want to see naked. While talking ski mask guy down, I reached in my pocket and pulled out a wad of about 70 ones I had from delivering sandwiches earlier in the day (Jimmy John’s, remember?), then I threw that wad into the robbers’ trash bag and said, “ok, there’s the money.”
After that, the gunman turned his attention to the players and had them empty their pockets. I was somewhat relieved to no longer have a gun to my head, but also worried someone else would freak out and get shot. I didn’t worry too much about the couple thousand bucks that was in the game because, A: They seemed to think that fat wad of ones was the game money since I was the dealer and they didn’t get a good look at it…also, B: I knew the money was stashed safely in another room, and they’d never find it.
Just as my anxiety was dropping and it seemed like the robbers would soon be making their getaway, Emilio starts talking back. Ski mask guy was poking his gun in Emilio’s back saying, “hurry the fuck up, fat boy!” and this crazy asshole yells back, “I’m going as fast as I can, and don’t call me fat boy!” This prompted the gunman to try and pistol whip the back of Emilio’s head, but somehow he ducked it (with puzzling agility, I might add). At that point, ski mask guy and trash bag guy rummage through our rooms and left sunglasses to guard us with the rifle. They took my broken laptop and flipped my coffee table over (?). They also got my outdated nextel cell phone. They were frantic at this point and bolted out the back. They neglected to see the new macbook and XBox 360 that were right in front of them, and also never got to the 3 players to my right.
One of those players, D (the thuggest dude at the table), hit the deck as soon as he saw the first gunman and played dead the whole time. After the robbers left, he popped up and said, “I thought all y’all got WETTED,” which was hilarious to me (maybe ya had to be there). Another one of those players was my buddy Justin (sidepot Sammy), who ran the game with me and neglected to mention that all the money in the game was in his pocket because he hadn’t stashed it yet. They could’ve walked with a few grand if they just asked, but they didn’t. And in true Justin fashion, the moment the robbers left, he pointed out that the guy he pushed all in against was in the process of folding when the robbery started, and then raked the chips in. The other guy was too freaked out to argue.
In retrospect, thank God for Emilio and his big fat mouth, because we needed the money from the game to reimburse the cell phones and money the robbers took. We then decided a change of scenery was in order and went to a 24 hour diner. At the diner, Justin’s cell phone was blowing up (mine probably was too at the bottom of a trash bag). He finally picked up assuming it was the roommate who ran out, but it wasn’t. It was a cop who said, “this is APD. If y’all don’t come to the house right now, all y’all goin to jail.” What we didn’t know was that our roommate had run to a nearby restaurant and called 911: something you should NEVER DO after your illegal poker game gets robbed. By the time the cops got there, the house was locked up, the lights were out, and APD assumed it was a hostage situation. When we pulled up to the house, there were two SWAT team vans out front with about a dozen dudes in helmets, carrying assault rifles. They even had my roommate draw the layout of the house in case they had to storm in. The only reason they didn’t push the issue of a poker table set up with counterfeit-proof chips and two decks of copags (the cadillac of playing cards) was because they thought they were about to have to shoot people with hostages around.
One certainty about running a poker game that gets robbed is that you no longer run a poker game. It doesn’t matter that some idiot met with a drug dealer at our house and bragged about how much money he was winning while that drug dealer’s cousin (sunglasses/rifle guy) licked his lips…or that someone went out back to smoke and left *both* doors unlocked, even though we specifically said to smoke out front. None of that matters, because it already happened, and the game was already done. That being said, I’m glad it happened, because it steered my path away from poker and toward comedy, which was something I actually wanted to do. Crazy how shit works out.
annaxmalina
titsay
