 28th
Aug 2001 |
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| Jesse May |
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| Jesse May, multiple
author in the gambling field and sometimes dubded the "voice of poker", writes
a bi-weekly column. |
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Most people know Jesse as "the voice of poker" from his
colourful commentary in CH4's late Night Poker. Jesse is also the author of the
widely respected novel, Shut Up And
Deal, which looks deep into the poker playing life. Its the hard faced
21st Century Cincinnati Kid.
Jesse is
also the creator of The Gambler's Guide to
the World, an insiders look at the action and games around the
world. |
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Email :
Jesse
May
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Well, it happened again.
I’ve been stiffed. People always ask me, “Have you ever been
cheated?” Well, I’ve been cheated, hustled, robbed, gotten in the
middle, lied to, bamboozled, double crossed, stiffed, and had my nose stuffed
down in a pile of dung and laughed at. Repeatedly. And I’m not telling you
this because I’m proud of it or to illustrate how stupid I am. I’m
just saying it’s happened. And it will probably continue as long as
I’m walking. The only good thing I can say about my experiences is, not
yet by the same guy twice. At least not as far as I know. And I consider myself
about as sharply paranoid as a guy could be. But welcome to the gambling world.
The culprit this time was that Russ Boyd character who ran the Internet
card room, Poker Spot. Hey, I don’t forgive or forget. If any of you
fellows meet him in an alley somewhere, punch him once in the nose on my
behalf, please. But it does illustrate two principles about the world of
gambling. One is that sometimes you have to invest a little money to find out
what’s going on. The second is that, when fur goes flying, everybody is
responsible for their own protection. In the gambling world, nobody else is
taking care of you but you. It’s lonely out there, and you’re
responsible for yourself.
With the advent of legalized card rooms,
people seem to have forgotten what it’s like to be a road gambler. Because
in Vegas and California you walk into the room and there’s always a
hundred games going on, there’s bright lights and a sense of order and
twelve hundred people playing a hundred and twenty 10-20 Hold’em games
twenty four hours a day, and everything makes perfect sense and there’s a
house there who says, I’m gonna protect you. There are sheriffs in town
and they flash their bright yellow badges and you ante up and play. And people
forget what it’s like to be a road gambler, a stranger in a strange place
who’s looking to make some dough. But you still gotta know how to protect
yourself. You still have to know how to watch the angles being shot, and see
who’s got what gig, and that’s why these days, with all the new
gambling options available, everybody has to have a little bit of the road
gambler in them in order to survive. Everybody has to learn how to shoot the
angles, and how to spot the angles being shot. Everybody has to learn that they
are responsible for their own protection. Because that’s it. That’s
one of the keys to the gambling world, the golden rule that has been adhered to
and respected since the beginning of time, since Amarillo Slim teamed up with
Sailor Roberts and took the show on the road with their bankroll under the
front wheel of their car. You are responsible for taking care of yourself. And
it’s nasty out there.
Now in the Poker Spot case I exercised bad
judgement because the writing was on the wall. They failed once and then
started back up again and said this time was gonna be different. And I played
because I was pretty sure I could make some money. I thought, well I can beat
these games. Sometimes it’s a fine line. And sometimes, while you’re
waiting around to make sure a place is 100%, people are walking in with
toothpicks and walking out with lumberyards, and then you do get in there and
the money’s all gone.
The grand old man Johnny Moss used to tell a
story about this poker game they were playing out in the middle of Texas in an
old tin barn. And people were calling him up and saying, “Johnny! You
oughta see these games. Why last weekend there was sixty thousand on the
table!” But a dude had called Johnny up and said, “Moss, I
wouldn’t go there if I were you,” and so Johnny stayed home. And then
two weeks later people were calling him up and saying, “Johnny! You
shoulda seen it! Last weekend there must of been two hundred thousand on the
table!” And Johnny couldn’t stand it no more and so the next weekend
he went down and played. And that weekend there was a stickup, and they all got
robbed in the old tin barn.
When I was living in New York, Sideshow Bob
took me to a private game down on the river’s edge, on the outskirts of
Poughkeepsie. “Bunch a fools playing here,” he told me. “Easiest
money we’ll ever make.” He was right. I bought in for two hundred
dollars cash and got my chips and we played eight dollar high bet, and by five
in the morning I had cleaned that table out of eighteen hundred, which is a lot
of money at those stakes. It comes time to cash out my chips, so we go into the
back room, and I give the man my two thousand dollars in chips and he hands me
one hundred eighty four dollars in cash and a yellow piece of paper. I pointed
to the yellow paper and said, “What’s this?” and the man says,
“Well that’s a marker. You can come back and play for it
anytime.” I gave that yellow piece of paper to Sideshow Bob in exchange
for a pancake breakfast and a ride home. Sometimes you gotta invest a little
money to see if there’s any to be made. They might make you look like a
fool once, but I’ll be damned if I was going back there to be made a fool
of again.
Next week, part two of Gotta Beware….
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