Michael spent the next decade dominating the gin games of New York City. “I like to say you can make more money in New York by accident than you can make on purpose anywhere else,” Michael says. There were regular gin games at the Town Club on 86th Street, or at the famous Friar’s Club, a private club for celebrities and people who worked in the entertainment industry. Backgammon, poker, whatever he could find. Michael found games to gamble on all over the city. “In other words, they couldn’t believe that this local yokel from Philadelphia came up and was actually a better player.” I must have won nine out of ten weeks-at least six out of seven-for a year, before anyone figured out, ‘Hey, you know what? He must be a better player than us.’ There’s no egos in the world like New York egos. “All the good food does in the country I’m not sure all the wisdom does. “Well, they suffer from the illusion that all wisdom resides between the East River and the Hudson,” Michael says. But Michael quickly found they weren’t as good as they thought they were. Gamblers in New York were supposed to be the toughest to beat. This was the stomping ground of legends like Stu Ungar. Michael had heard that New York gamblers were the cream of the crop. So, if you had a bankroll of $75,000 or $100,000, you were well protected against any bad streak.” But here, although there were occasional backgammon games where guys would lose $100,000 or $200,000, the games I was playing in, in the beginning, if you won or lost $4,000 or $5,000, it was a lot. “So, while these guys were there, trying to squeeze every nickel out of it. “We were playing a peculiar structure, but it was the equivalent of $500, or maybe $1,000 a point at my club,” Michael recalls. In backgammon, games often finish with scores in the single digits, so each game could end up costing anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand dollars at those stakes. For them, it was all the money in the world.” They were playing, in those days, $25 a point at the Mayfair. In those days, the game that was all the rage was backgammon. When Michael Sall first arrived, he didn’t find a lot of gin. Some of the wildest gambling in New York went on in dimly lit basement cardrooms like Manhattan’s storied Mayfair Club, where the surroundings may have been unimpressive but the stakes were eye-popping. In New York, you could find any game that you could name for any amount that you could count.Īnd you wouldn’t just find action in the fancy private social clubs. At the time, outside of Las Vegas, there was perhaps no higher concentration of gamblers in America than in New York City. How to Keep a Low Profile When Swindling Casinos The Last Great American Pool Hustlerīack in the 1970s, Sall was winning so much money playing in the gin game at his club in Philadelphia that he decided to branch out.
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