Quote:
Originally Posted by Alpha Fish
if you successfully dealt in underground New York games you're way ahead of the pack, I'm not surprised at all you're doing well
I dealt all over New York in dozens of different clubs and private games --Manhattan, Queens, Long Island, The Hamptons, etc.
I basically grew up in poker, my grandmother was an underground player/dealer in her boyfriend's large club in Queens way before my Mother was even old enough to leave the house. My whole family plays poker.
I went to my first underground club when I was 16 and started to deal $75 buy in NL tournaments for that club (different location at that point) about 2 years later. I was playing and dealing and did so through college to get myself through without having to get a "normal" job.
Eventually, when I was in my mid-late 20's, I was working for a software company but was also dealing for several different games/clubs at night. I was making more money from poker than I was from my job... so, I decided to move to Vegas and pursue a different path.
I thought the money would be similar or even better... I was certainly wrong, lol. But I did enjoy the fact that I was now in the gambling capital of the world.
Also, I had run my own club a few years prior with 2 partners who had invested in the game. It was a sh*tshow, but I have a ton of great stories from those days. Eventually, the game's end started to begin when one of my partners booked action with one of our regs on a sports bet for $10k, lost it, then hit the road and ghosted me. This player who had booked the action was not someone you wanted to mess around with. He was a gangster and when I rolled back the security footage to confirm that one of my partners did indeed book action with him, I sure enough found the conversation on the system's hard drive. It had occurred after the game had ended a few days prior, and the conversation concluded with the player brandishing a pistol to reinforce the fact that this debt had better be paid should my partner lose, since it was such a large bet.
To make a long story short, I of course took responsibility for the debt and basically paid the player out every night after the game, which included me putting him into the game to speed up paying off the debt. Even though this debt on the book was a serious problem, having the player around gave me somewhat of a sense of security. I knew no one was going to try and make a move on us, given the player's reputation. I'm not a "tough guy", nor was it legal to carry a gun in New York. We were not in the best part of town either.
There's a lot more to that story, but essentially having that debt on the book pop up out of nowhere was what killed the club. I never did cross paths again with the partner who took off.