Gardena, That '70s Poker Capital

By the mid-1970s, poker had two distinct capitals. The Texas road gamblers' no-limit hold'em sanctuary in Downtown Las Vegas was active mainly during the World Series in April, while Gardena, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, had hundreds of five-card draw players in action every day except Christmas. While poker remained for the most part an underground national pastime, its legal status in these far-western towns was a double blast of oxygen for high-stakes professionals and recreational players alike.

In Poker Faces: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players (1982), David Hayano paints a vivid group portrait of the men struggling to make a name for themselves, or at least a decent living, in Gardena. Hayano had a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. His dissertation on the Awa and Gimi people in Papua New Guinea had landed him a teaching job at California State University, Northridge. For his next project, he immersed himself in the indigenous tribe of Gardena draw players, becoming what he called an "autoethnographer." It was the first time a significant corner of the poker world had been systematically analyzed.

In 1872, California's poker-playing legislature passed a statute outlawing "stud horse poker" (a casino game with a built-in house edge) but omitting five-card draw from the list of prohibited games. It wasn't until the Depression, however, that a few commercial card parlors began to spring up around the state, usually as efforts to expand the tax base. No fewer than six -- the Rainbow, Monterey, Gardena, Horseshoe, Normandie, and El Dorado -- would open in cash-poor Gardena, whose city council explicitly made poker welcome there in 1938. The Gardena clubs prospered by featuring posh restaurants with crystal chandeliers, while the draw games down the hall proceeded in briskly unglamorous fashion.

The clubs' gaming licenses were usually held in the name of the local VFW or American Legion posts. To further insulate them from charges of fostering vices like prostitution and loan-sharking, their owners promoted them as friendly places to have an inexpensive meal and as tax-paying businesses that employed hundreds of citizens and kept property taxes low. They made money not by raking a percentage of each pot, but by renting seats for between $1 and $10 per half-hour, depending on the stakes.

Without professional dealers, the deal rotated among the eight players. Even so, Hayano describes the action as "a no-nonsense, speedy affair," with as many as 60 hands per hour being dealt, though the average at full tables was closer to 40. "In contrast with the staged scenes of poker games in popular novels and films, commercial cardroom players never make long-winded speeches about calling, raising, or folding because other players would not allow them," he writes. "Nor can players run to the bank or sell their houses for more money while involved in a hand, for the law prohibits playing with any money that is not on the table."

Security personnel banished troublemakers -- drunks, cheats, thieves, anyone who started a fight or otherwise disturbed the peace of regular rent-paying customers. Floorpeople made sure that open seats were filled efficiently on a first-come, first-served basis. "Chipgirls" in large, bulging aprons exchanged cash for "checks," getting players into action more quickly. The clubs also hired proposition players to help games get started and fill seats at short tables to keep those games from breaking up. Then, as now, a "prop" received a salary (up to $150 per day) but had to risk his own money in whatever game the floorman directed him to play. The main games were five-card draw jacks or better, high-low, and lowball.

The six clubs were limited by law to 35 tables apiece, for a total of 1,680 players -- a critical mass whose gravity attracted the toughest poker pros in the country. There were reputations to be made in Gardena, plus all those extra hands dealt per hour multiplied the expected value that their edge in skill already gave them. The amateurs they feasted on included businessmen, housewives, retirees, and students. Hayano reports that 90 percent of the players were men; 46 percent of the men and 74 percent of the women were over 60. Older players favored clubs offering the best low-stakes action. Younger men liked to play higher, often through the next morning, or longer. The high-stakes tables were in corners less accessible to railbirds and other distractions. They received better service and, notes Hayano, "their players are generally accorded some degree of curiosity and respect by small-stakes players." A player's preferred game and stakes tended to be so consistent that "two men may play in the same club for ten years, only twenty feet apart, one in a high-stakes draw game, the other in a small-stakes lowball game, yet they may never recognize or interact with each other."

The smaller games were beatable, says Hayano, by passively waiting for strong hands and betting them aggressively -- that is, by playing ABC poker. Bigger games had much wilier players, many of whom were professionals. The very toughest pros were inclined to raise and reraise before the draw, sometimes without even looking at their cards, and to stand pat "with absolutely nothing at all." Instead of waiting for strong hands, pros "manufactured" or represented them with a variety of betting and acting maneuvers, which made them much harder to play against.

Hayano claims that before the emergence of draw in Gardena, the typical pro had been born in the rural South, most often in Texas. Shotgun-packing road gamblers like Johnny Moss, Titanic Thompson, and Bet-a-Million Gates, or The Sting's Doyle Lonnegan and Henry Gondorff, all had a strong outlaw stigma that transferred even to married men playing in wood-paneled rec rooms. But as licensed cardrooms began deploying security systems and PR departments, playing poker began to seem a little less socially deviant. A related result was Gardena's "more heterogeneous modern class of professional poker players. Members are drawn from almost every segment of the socioeconomic,
ethnic, religious, educational, and occupational ranks of American society."

The downside of making poker your job included the distinct possibility of working longer hours and winding up deep in the red. "I thought it would be fun doing this for a while. You know, come and go anytime you want. But it's really a nightmare now," one pro admitted. "When you get stuck, you stay all day and night and don't make a damn buck. I'm still here from two days ago. Maybe I'll get back into business and not f--- around coming down here all the time."

The group that Hayano classifies as "subsistence pros" had to win week after week just to cover their living expenses. They tended to avoid other pros and sought out the weakest opposition, nearly always found in lower-stakes games. Those he calls "career professionals" chose the highest-stakes action, hoping to sharpen their skills against the stiffest competition available. Besides money, they were intensely interested in peer recognition. In ethnographic terms, they engaged in a considerable amount of face work, efforts to build or maintain their status. They liked to emphasize how difficult yet rewarding their chosen career was. "You can't just sit down and play," said a pro named Rick H. "I go and think about the players and the game for a while and draw up a game plan. I don't like to play long hours because I'm concentrating and figuring the odds all the time. Hell, I work less hours a month than a doctor, and I can take vacations anytime I want to."

Few pros had more than two years of college. Most were white. The next-largest ethnic group was the Asians, followed by blacks and Latinos. Despite the fact that many pros often played for days at a time, not one saw himself as a compulsive gambler. Largely because of the hours they kept, almost two-thirds were either unmarried or divorced. "I see these guys down here more than my wife and kids," one admitted. "I've sure been screwed a lot, but never been kissed."

We're lucky to have a draw-playing anthropologist's account of Gardena in the '70s, but to see that lost world even more in the round, we also need to read the Gardena chapter of Aaron Brown's The Poker Face of Wall Street. In 1976, as a 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate, Brown was able to pass as 21 in a few of the clubs. He describes them as having "the ambiance of airport gate waiting areas," and his competition as looking "like midlevel office workers after a two-day bus ride." The management seemed "anxious to preserve a friendly image, advertising good meals and companionship rather than excitement and sex, like Las Vegas did at the time." Gardena, says Brown, was "not a place to play poker for fun."

At the top of its pyramid were the winning career professionals, to whom the floormen kowtowed, he says, "as if they were star athletes." The winners' main function was "to protect the community from tourists. Most tourists can be handled by the hobbyists. If they start to win, subsistence pros take over. But if that doesn't work, each card room needs to have some of the top players in the world to bring in." Brown explains that if "a tourist keeps winning, he will come up against his match. If that weren't true, top players from all over the world would keep showing up in Gardena until the game had such negative expectation to the community that it would fall apart. The winners are the hired guns elected sheriff to keep other gunmen away." They were nearly always younger men and usually "the best educated group within the community. Unlike most of the other regulars, who have arrived at their destinations in life and will likely go down rather than up in the future, winners are usually on their way to something."

Among the players Brown befriends are David "The Arm" Hayano himself, so called because of the way he slams chips into the pot. Also lurking at the tables are David "Einstein" Sklansky, hard-drinking Steve Margulies, and "Crazy Mike" Caro. If Caro's nickname "makes you think of a cheerful eccentric, always joking around, you're mistaken. His manner suggested
serious clinical issues, and his play was wildly erratic." Brown adds that Caro "was among the best players I've ever seen, but I honestly don't think it was an act."

Brown had been warned to look out for mechanics and colluders. Some of the floormen even allowed their friends among the regulars to swipe chips from tourists who were away from the table on bathroom breaks, and to pass cards or signal the contents of their hands to each other. Brown also caught some regulars raising and reraising in tandem when strangers like him were in a pot against them. The amount of the raises was limited, but not their number, so that "two players against me can play effective table stakes poker whenever they choose, while I can only play limit." Although he observed more of this behavior than would be tolerated in cardrooms today, he says that he found most Gardena players to be friendly and honorable.

Intriguing as his reports of gunmen, cheats, and thieves are, it's at the macroeconomic level that Brown made his most telling points. By the time he wrote The Poker Face of Wall Street in 2005, he was a senior executive at Morgan Stanley and a widely respected quantitative analyst, so he looked back on Gardena through the eyes of an investment banker. Crunching data from Hayano and other academics, he concluded that the winners comprised barely 2 percent of the players but reaped the (male) lion's share of the profits. Break-even players filled about 10 percent of the seats. At the bottom were the action players, the 2 percent who played wildly and were "by far the biggest losers in the card room." He says that a typical high-stakes table had one winner, one action player, and five break-even players.

At the lower-stakes tables, subsistence pros (10 percent of all players) were the most consistent winners. Hobbyists (40 percent) usually were break-even players or lost small amounts. Tourists (30 percent) were at the table to have a good time, but they lost even more consistently than the action players, while competing for smaller amounts. The action players' loud, flashy play made them the easiest group to identify. The other groups faded into each other as skill and luck built and shrank bankrolls.

Brown reckons that during the '70s, a typical club had annual revenues of $5 million. It was home to about 10 winners and 50 subsistence players, with 1,000 break-even hobbyists dropping in for shorter sessions, along with 3,000 tourists playing even more sporadically. Winners made about $50,000 a year, with subsistence players averaging $10,000. He acknowledges that the "actual amounts varied widely. Some tourists showed up once and won, and some break-even players had a substantial profit for the year. Other players dropped $10,000 or more." (For context, in 1975, a family of four needed $5,050 to stay out of poverty, a single male even less. The median family income was $13,719.)

Small money generally flowed from tourists through break-even hobbyists to subsistence grinders, and big money from action players to winners like Sklansky and Caro. Measured pot by pot over the course of a year, Brown says that about $2 billion was won and $2.006 billion was lost per card club. Each club took $5 million of that for taxes, expenses, and profit, leaving $1 million to be divided up by the winners. Multiply these numbers by six to get a sense of the entire Gardena "pokonomy."

The bottom line was that half a dozen poker parlors financed 25 percent of Gardena's city budget during those years. Joints like the Normandie, Rainbow, and Monterey also provided employment for hundreds of chip runners, brushes, props, cashiers, floor managers, security guards, bean counters, and restaurant and maintenance workers. They provided pricey entertainment for thousands of recreational draw players, a living wage for 300 grinders, and a handsome income for maybe 60 winners.

Mike Caro, who played in Gardena for 14 years and now prefers to be called "The Mad Genius of Poker," saw many more cheaters than Brown did. "At the old Rainbow Club," he insists, "there were always colluders -- people working in teams, with signals and codes. The club generally ignored it, but there got to be so many of them that the management finally felt they had to do something." The club issued an edict with a printed list of names, declaring that "only three of the people on this list could be in one game at any one time. Well, of course, we were outraged! They were giving us a list of the guys they knew to be cheaters, and saying they could only work in teams of three. So to calm us down, they modified their decision: only two of those guys could be in a game at a time."

After Caro became director of poker operations at the Huntington Park Casino in 1986, several Gardena players came in and confessed they had cheated him, adding, "But I swear I'm straight now." He says the cheaters "wanted to make sure I'd let them play. But I had no idea how severely I'd been cheated until they confessed to me! In the bigger games, a poker professional is supposed to average $450 an hour, but I usually wasn't at that level. I probably lost $100,000 a year to cheaters."

As to the styles and skills of the square players, no less an expert than Sklansky writes: "I intuitively suspected I was better off playing in games with the typically tight Gardena players than in the looser game with players who played too many hands. I now realize what the difference was. The tight players never bluffed, which was profitable for me, whereas in the looser games players were bluffing more or less correctly -- and that hurt me."

Gardena is no longer a poker capital, though L.A.'s landmark rooms haven't moved very far -- to Bell Gardens and Commerce, specifically. In 2000, Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt opened a new, $40 million cardroom in Gardena on the site of the old El Dorado, naming it after his magazine.

Draw poker, too, has given way to flop games and stud. Even so, it was during his years of playing limit five-card draw in Gardena that Sklansky began to develop the ideas in The Theory of Poker and a dozen other best-selling primers. These books continue to educate millions of players, particularly those specializing in the limit games that comprise the new gold standard, H.O.R.S.E.

Cameras and professional dealers also have reduced the colluding and chip-swiping. L.A.'s cardrooms may no longer have crystal stemware and chandeliers, but the food they wheel up next to the tables is tasty, nutritious, and free. There's plenty of face work still going on, too. TV exposure and online sponsorship deals provide hundreds of players with lucrative incomes over and above what they win or lose at the tables. Many of the younger ones know all about the Texans in Vegas, but remain unaware of the trails blazed for them by the first poker pros in Gardena.