I remember the very first time I played poker in a casino. It was the summer of 1991 and the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City New jersey was the place to be if you wanted to gamble on the east coast of the united states in the early 1990’s. My friends and I had been going to the Taj for months. We mostly stuck to the pit games in those days. Poker didn’t exist in my world back then. Blackjack was my game of choice. I would occasionally play Craps, or Roulette, or even Baccarat if I was feeling extra lucky, but Blackjack was my one true love. All of that changed one night in August of 99′ when I like to tell myself I evolved from a gambler into a poker player. Even if it’s not entirely true.
Back then I was tending bar in my family’s restaurant to pay my bills. It was for me, at the time, the perfect job. It allowed me to be social, try and pick up chicks, and earn a decent amount of cash all at the same time. In short it was a young man’s dream job.
Me and my buddies would close up the bar at 4am on the weekends and head directly down to Atlantic City to gamble. It didn’t matter that we had just worked for 10 hours straight, or that the one way trip down south would take us up to 3 hours. We were young and we all had money to burn. Atlantic City was the perfect place to set it on fire.
On this one particular night in question I was having one hell of a run of bad luck. I had lost the $200 or so I had earned that night tending bar, plus an additional $500 that I had set aside for that months rent money. That was the good news. The bad news was that I had managed to also lose $1500 of my parents restaurant money that I had so intelligently decided to take along with me to the casino for safe keeping. I was in a really bad spot.
I decided that the best course of action was to beg my best friend for a few hundred so I could win all my money back. After all if anyone knew how great I was at Blackjack it was him. He had to understand that it was just a matter of time before I won all my money back, plus a few bucks extra for all the time I had invested. At least that’s what I was trying to convince him of at the time. Thankfully for me, my best friend was no idiot.
Eventually my friend agreed to lend me $100 but only if we went and played poker together instead of going back to the Blackjack tables. I can only assume that he thought at the time getting me out of the pits even if it cost him $100 would be an excellent idea. Turns out he was right. If I did nothing else well when I was a younger man I can always at least say I had a knack for picking good friends.
Ten minutes later, me and my buddy are sitting in a $1-$3 spread limit 7 card stud game in the Taj Mahal poker room. I must admit that my first thoughts of casino poker were not positive. I remember thinking to myself, how in the hell am I going to win back my $2200 playing this boring ass game? Turns out that I did win back a decent chunk of the money I had lost earlier that night. A grand total of $15 to be exact. Still to this day one of my proudest moments was the night I cashed out $15 ahead in my first ever casino poker game.
That night in the middle of August way back in the summer of 1991 was the beginning of my poker journey. It has been almost 25 years of playing cards in casinos since then. Some of those times have been great and some of them have been awful. But I can honestly say that none of them have ever been boring. At least not for me. I am pretty sure however that I may have bored a few of my opponents in my time playing.
What I hope this Blog/Vlog becomes is a record of my next 25 years at the tables. It has taken me almost a quarter of a century to figure out what I really want from the game of poker. This is hopefully a first step in that direction.
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