One of favorite, lesser-known movies is a small 1998 film starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton and John Malkovitch. It’s called Rounders and its about the underground poker scene in NYC. It does a better job of explaining the allure of poker and specifically the culture of Texas Hold’em than any other movie I know. What 21, the MIT card-counting team movie with Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, did for Blackjack, Rounders did for Hold’em. There are other movies that deal with poker and blackjack like Molly’s Game (Jessica Chastain) and Cincinnati Kid (Steve McQueen) or Crupier (Clive Owen), but nobody shows the pain of the game better than Damon. I just got off a four-day cruise where there was a casino that would have allowed me to play poker or blackjack all day, every day for the four days, but I never even went into the casino. I do not have the bug that Matt Damon, the budding law student, had. I have enough of a gambler’s mentality that I might have had that problem, but there are three reasons I don’t.
It all began for me in Poland Springs, Maine, where I moved with my family in 1966. I was desperate at age 12 to go to work for some reason. It probably had to do with the four years I had lived under my mother’s impoverished graduate school regime. Money was not something I took lightly at that young age and what I knew was that there was only one way to get it and that was to get a job. I asked the owner of the resort we were living at for a summer job. He took a look at me in my larger-than-normal frame and said I could both caddy and be the locker room boy if I wanted. That sounded great to me so that’s what I did. I would go out double bagging for $3.50 plus tip per bag per loop. Think about that…walking 18 holes with two large golf bags on a hilly course that took at least 4 hours on a quick day to get around. That meant that I would earn $10 for almost five hours of work if I was lucky. On a really busy day, I could go out twice and that would be $20 for a very long day’s hard work. 10 hours, ten miles of lugging 70-80 pounds of clubs and running and fetching as requested by the players (I needed those tips, baby). Then, at the end of that long day I had to clean the men’s locker room. A men’s locker room in what is effectively an old public course is a very messy business, but that added a few extra bucks to my day’s pay. Now imagine the other, much older and more wizened caddies are sitting down to a game of Acey-Deucy, a very fast-paced card game that’s one step shy of betting on card cuts. I would sit down to play after that long hard day and in ten minutes erase twelve hours of hard and nasty work by losing my $20+. Good lesson.
Now flash forward to freshman year in college. That first fall semester my mother was unreachable in Colombia and I was expected to make do on my own with my summer job earnings. The first week I noticed a friendly card game in the lounge on my dorm floor. I knew how to play poker, so I sat in. I promptly lost $30 that I did not have to lose. It meant that I had to call my aunt and uncle, who lived locally and ask them for a loan. As a childless older couple, they did what they thought was best, which was to drive over and hand me a $20 bill every Sunday and that had to last me for food and incidentals for the week. It was a hard lesson, once again, on the perils of gambling. By the end of that fall semester, two guys on the floor had to secret themselves away in the middle of the night to escape big gambling debts they had racked up in that “friendly” game that ran non-stop for pretty much the entire semester. My $30 lesson was a cheap price to pay compared to what those two guys paid, which was their educational opportunity. I sometimes wonder where they are today.
My next encounter of note with gambling was because my mother moved to Las Vegas to be near my sister, Barbara, who had moved there with her husband, Dave and their young son, Jason. That is the same Jason that is visiting us with his family on the hilltop for a few days. Strangely enough, neither he nor his family have ever been prone to gambling, probably because they have been surrounded by it for forty years. When I would go to visit my mother in Las Vegas, I would occasionally play blackjack or poker, but at a level that would only put a relatively modest amount at risk. In the way the Vegas pit crews rate players I was a guy who would place average bets of $50-$100 and play for about three hours. The only thing I have determined for all those hours spent playing is that a.) I am no good at concentrating enough to effectively count cards, and b.) the only way to win is to walk away from the table when you are up…regardless when that happens during the evening. I am convinced that most people who go to Vegas for a set period of time, lose, because they can’t walk away when they are up because their flight doesn’t leave for another day and what in the world would they do in Vegas other than gamble some more?
My views on gambling absorbed another lesson from meeting a guy called Russ. Russ was a headhunter who also liked counting cards. He said he paid his way through college by gambling. I once sat at a roped off table at the Bellagio with Russ while he played an average bet size of $5,000. He was counting and using his toe to tap my toe when the count was heavy and I should increase my betting. I followed suit and was betting at an unusually high level for me ($200-$400). After several hours, Russ was up $250,000, which he kept on account at the Bellagio (that was how they allowed him to count…because they clearly knew he was doing it, but they figured his action was good for show and he didn’t take his money off the table). I, on the other hand, cashed out my biggest gambling winnings of all time and took my $25,000 with me. Several years later, I got a call while on vacation in Italy from Russ’ lawyer asking me for money to help bail him out of Rikers Island where he was sitting due to a warrant for his arrest due to leaving the state of Nevada with an open casino marker of several hundred thousand dollars that had gone un-repaid.
In the movie Rounders, Matt Damon wins the big hand against Teddy KGB (John Malkovitch), and he heads off the Vegas to try his hand at the World Series of Poker. He wins, but he also loses. He loses his girlfriend and his potential legal career. His legal mentor tells him…”our destiny chooses us”. I’m just glad that my destiny didn’t involve gambling, but then again, maybe it might have if not for the caddies of Poland Spring, the card sharks of Dorm #4 or Russ.