While the saga of Archie Karas may sound too good to be true, those who know the scene vouch for his exploits. Karas himself told RawVegas.com, "People say that I'm the undisputed champion of gambling." If by "people," you mean "Archie Karas," he's right. But Karas has gone on several notable runs. These included hitting town in a big way with a 1992-93 winning streak that cut a swath through Vegas and remains the stuff of legend.
Archie Karas was born Anargyros Karabourniotis, in the town of Antypata on the Greek island of Kefalonia. Karas took to gambling early on, shooting marbles for money. He ran away from home at age 15, following a violent altercation with his father.
Two years later, Karas was crewing aboard a Greek freighter that made port in Portland, Oregon. Evidently, he decided that seafaring wasn't for him, and Karas jumped ship, then made his way down to Los Angeles, where he supported himself by waiting tables and hustling up games of pool. From the green felt of billiards, he moved on to poker, honing his game in the numerous card rooms of the L.A. area. By December 1992, Karas had won –- and lost -- $2 million in his SoCal exploits.
According to author Michael Konik, Karas was down to his last $50 and did what anyone would do in that situation: he made a beeline for Las Vegas. (Konik's Cigar Aficionado profile of Karas is reprinted in the anthology, The Man with the $100,000 Breasts and Other Gambling Stories.) Blowing into town, he wangled a $10,000 stake from a fellow gambler and quickly parlayed that into $20,000 at the poker tables at the Mirage. Karas' specialty was Razz, a variant of seven-card stud, in which the winning hands are those with the lowest values.
Having effectively announced his presence, and armed with a ten-grand bankroll of his own now, Karas began taking on some of the biggest players in town. After beating a then-Mirage Resorts executive out of at least $1 million at pool, Karas accepted a challenge to a mano-a-mano rematch at the poker tables. After a week of play, the exec (who is considered something of a poker ace himself) was another million poorer.
When the 1993 World Series of Poker was in town at Binion's Horseshoe, Karas set up shop there. He issued a challenge to all comers to beat him at high-stakes poker. Among the first up was Chip Reese, who'd reportedly been grubstaked by another casino owner. It proved to be a poor decision on the part of Reese's benefactor, as Karas wound up $2,022,000 the richer. "After I beat [Chip Reese] ten times, I knew I was the best player," Karas said.
He later cleaned out Stu Ungar, Doyle Brunson, and Johnny Chan, though the latter eventually bested Karas. Archie's edge at the poker table wasn't so much skill as brinkmanship. "Even if you think you have an edge, playing cards at five thousand or ten thousand limits is Russian roulette," one poker room manager told Konik.
Karas' poker winnings were quickly transferred to the crap table, betting as much as $100,000 on a single roll of the dice. He won so much and so often that at one point he exhausted Binon's supply of its famous "chocolate" chips ($5,000 apiece). He raked in as much as $4 million and lost as much as $2.5 million per single session, running his bankroll up to an estimated $17 million.
It must have been for the sake of those occasional big losses by Karas that Binion's indulged his play. As Konik writes, "The irony in all this was that Archie Karas was known to the casino as a notorious cheat ... he had allegedly been a dice slider and a card marker, and generally violated whatever rules of fair play he could do without." Karas' dice-shooting technique is said not to have involved sliding the dice quite so much as being able to cock them in such a way that, when thrown, they came up in his favor –- a skill that, in our estimation, does not constitute cheating.
That big run of ’92-93 would mark the apex of Karas’ fame, although not the end of his gambling exploits. Over the last 16 years, he’s estimated to have blown through $40 million. "Money don’t come to me first," Karas told a RawVegas interviewer, looking much grayer and puffier than in his winning days of 15 years ago. "Otherwise I don’t be a gambler. I’d be somebody else."
He’s still at it, too, even if the dollar figures aren’t so eye-popping anymore. Karas finished seventh in the 2008 World Series of Poker’s seven-card Razz event, netting almost $19,500 in prize money. (Some of his exploits can be followed online at PokerPro.com, where he goes by both his given name and Archie "The Greek" Karas.)
That seventh-place win was Karas’ highest-ever in a WSOP event. He was quoted at the time as saying, "I’m here to make my comeback. I’ll parlay the money I won in this tournament up to the $40 million that I used to have." It looks as though Archie Karas is going to put F. Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim that there are no second acts in American lives to the test.
