As news broke about a Supreme Court lawyer, indicted for charges that include making false statements to mortgage lenders in regard to poker winnings and failure to report poker winnings to the IRS, I did a bit of snooping.
I found something that made me nostalgic for the days of the poker boom.
It was a gossipy 2008 Washington Post story in which the lawyer in question, a guy by the name of Tom Goldstein, was giddily referred to as a “high roller poker maniac.”
At the time, it was meant as a compliment to the full-time lawyer who played in high-stakes games alongside pros and sold his life story to Sony Pictures Television.
Goldstein might be completely innocent of the charges – as per Bloomberg Businessweek. His lawyers have said that he will “vigorously contest” the charges.
And he might even be a winning poker player, but this story does make me think of other “high roller poker maniacs” and how tough it is for amateurs to win money when swimming with serious sharks.
Where the amateurs are concerned, I remember guys like Alan Meltzer, Jerry Buss, and Hustler magazine founder and casino owner Larry Flynt.
Pros were so eager to play Flynt, that they weathered the frigid temperatures of his Bel Air mansion. (Barry Greenstein went so far as to wear thermal underwear to the games.)
As a music industry entrepreneur, Meltzer made a fortune in the business of CD distribution and, whether he liked it or not, he also distributed his hard-earned cash to young and hungry Las Vegas poker pros.
“Players used to say I was good for the game,” Meltzer, now deceased, told me when I interviewed him for a story on amateurs taking on high-stakes professionals. “They couldn’t wait to sit down with me.”
That’s not a good thing and, from what I understood, their feelings toward him never became a past-tense situation. But he was a good loser and kind enough to fly around his opponents on a private jet.
He called it Air Meltzer and once gave David “Viffer” Peat and I a flight to Teterboro Airport. Meltzer even provided me with a limo from the runway to my house.
En route to Teterboro, he regaled me with tales about bluffing Brian Rast and rivering Johnny Chan.
But when I asked him about his profits overall, he was honest enough to reply, “I’m not going to boast that I’m a winning poker player.”
Of course, I knew what that meant.
Accepting You’re a Fish
None of this is to say that I am very far above the Meltzers of the world.
There was a time when I too became enamored with the game, and I spent more nights than I should have at the tables of a venerable, quasi-legal poker club called the Mayfair in Manhattan.
My losses were financially modest but emotionally brutal.
One night I played in a game with the man who inspired the Joey Knish character in Rounders. If Joel ‘Bagels’ Rosenberg (as the real-life iteration was known) didn’t clean my clock, he could have.
Another time I was at the table with a Russian who beat me on a hand and sneered, “I read you like a simple novel.”
Soon after, he did exactly that, telling me what I had before I turned over my losing hand.
Able to relate to the Meltzers of the world – albeit, at lower stakes, against players who were far from the likes of Chan – I remember covering a WSOP during the aughts, chatting with high-stakes cash crusher Andrew Robl, and having an unrecognized guy approach us and greet me by name.
I had no idea who he was. Then he said that we played together at the Mayfair. I expressed confusion as to how he could possibly remember me.
Knowing the guy, and knowing he was a fairly serious player, Robl howled with delight and resolved my uncertainty by saying, “You never forget a fish.”
Initially embarrassed, I am now happy it happened. Nobody wants to be called a fish more than once and, if you’re me, you do everything you can to ensure that it does not happen again.
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of five books (“The Advantage Players” out soon) and has worked for publications that include Wired, GQ and the New York Post. He has written extensively on technology, gambling, and business — with a particular interest in spots where all three intersect. His article on Kelly “Baccarat Machine” Sun and Phil Ivey is currently in development as a feature film.
*Photos – Wikicommons via Legaleagle22, PokerGO
