Mean Streets

I had dinner the other night with some guys who have been around Vegas poker for a long time. Naturally, there were lots of stories. One thing we agree on is that there were a lot more “characters” when the players were from the “road gambler” era than there are now.

I’ve always held a fascination for those who make their living outside the system. I had read many accounts of the famous road gamblers, and when I started playing in Vegas I was a bit star struck when I was seated with the likes of Johnny Moss, Puggy Pearson, Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Amarillo Slim, Stu Unger and many others. However, while I knew the road gamblers were hard-bitten guys, I was taken aback when I discovered that, with a few exceptions, the bigger the name the nastier the disposition.

One of my first experiences was while playing stud eight-or-better with Puggy and an old timer named Nick Vacchiano (an interesting guy who I got to know later). In stud 8, as the players make bets, each player leaves his chips in front of him, to make splitting the pot easier. For some reason, toward the end of the hand, the dealer pulled Nicky’s chips toward the center, while leaving Pug’s where they were. Nicky went crazy. He stood up and screamed, “What are you doing? You’re pulling in my chips and leaving his in front of him?” I thought it was a bit of an overreaction. Little did I know that Puggy was well known for taking all kinds of shots, including stealing chips from pots, and Nicky was rightfully livid. Puggy just laughed.

One of Puggy’s signature moves was to break down a stack of chips in front of him for whatever the bet was, to show it was the right amount, then re-stack them and snatch one back when he pushed the stack into the pot. It was a smooth move that he had practiced a lot. He claimed to have paid for his house with that maneuver. If he got caught, he’d just chuckle and toss the chip in. For Pug, it was all part of the game, as it was for many from that era.

I was at Amarillo Slim’s tournament at Caesars some time in the ’80s. There was a really drunk guy wandering around the poker pit being disruptive, some kind of mixed drink in a glass in his hand. I watched as Slim told him to leave. The guy kind of laughed it off and kept up what he was doing. Slim just calmly walked over, grabbed the guy by his back collar, ran him through the room and out into the casino, where he slammed the drunk’s head into a slot machine. Unfortunately for him, the guy put up the hand with the glass to break the impact, the glass shattered and he ended up with a deep cut on his forehead, bleeding profusely. Slim just turned and walked back into the pit like nothing had happened. Wow, and he had seemed like such as nice guy when I played with him!

When one of the old timers lost a big pot, he often looked for someone to blame. Since he might get shot if he went after one of the other players, the obvious target was the dealer. Many of the players, who were nice away from the table, were habitual dealer abusers. Dealers in those days needed to have very thick skin, as the room managers let a lot of abuse go.

Johnny Moss would cuss dealers out, then fire them or have them fired. Stuey was one of the biggest offenders, cussing and sometimes spitting on the cards before pushing them to the dealer. According to Doyle, a player named Nick Simpson once urinated on a dealer’s leg under the table. Another player named Nate Lanette bit a chunk of a dealer’s ear off. (He returned the next day and gave the dealer $5,000.) And then there was Puggy, a constant thorn in the side for dealers.

Sometimes a dealer would fight back, even if it meant losing his or her job. One female dealer took off a high heeled shoe and beat Pug on the head with it. Another picked up a stack of Pug’s $100 chips and threw it out onto the casino floor, which caused quite a scramble. I saw Moss fire one at the Horseshoe, but the dealer didn’t leave before giving Moss a real earful, calling him every name he could think of. Johnny just ignored him.

One of the interesting things about the new generation of players, who got their start on the Internet, is that dealer abuse by them is much less common in live games. That’s because there is no dealer to blame in Internet poker. These players mostly behaved when they hit the brick-and-mortar rooms. Also, most card rooms are much better now at protecting dealers. Dealer abuse isn’t completely eradicated, but dealers today have little appreciation for what their predecessors went through.

The road gamblers are pretty much gone now and the poker world is very different. I look back on those days fondly and miss a lot of those guys. Some of the older ones, like Moss, had survived the Depression by their wits alone. They had great stories, liked to tell them, and were a living history lesson about a bygone era. Some of them had a mean streak, but many were genuinely good and likable people, especially away from the table. And they were always entertaining!