Birth of a Card Shark

Yesterday I went down into the basement and dragged out the trunk where I keep a bunch of old papers, so I could bring to light the notebooks where I kept a diary from 1977 to 1980. I've been reading them from the beginning, finding them compelling despite their jejeune character. (I have what is perhaps an unhealthy appetite for my own writing, be it journal entries, old Usenet posts archived on Google Groups, or blog posts.)

Here is what I wrote about my first big win at poker. It takes place at SunCon, the World Science Fiction Convention held over Labor Day weekend in 1977 in Miami Beach, Florida. I was eighteen years old. It took place on Friday night and Saturday morning, September 2-3, 1977.

Later, I ran into Mike [Glicksohn] once more. He and a small entourage were going to their rooms to pick up money and cards for a poker game. I decided to join them, picked up a couple of bottles of Guinness from my room, and we all went up to one of the suites on the 14th floor [of the Fontainebleau Hotel]. Mike went off for a while to make a phone call, and when he got back the game began.

I had originally intended to spend not more than $5 in the game. This was the first all night poker game I had been to, and I fully expected to have bad luck. However, at one point there was no limit placed on the pot, so the betting was high. My cards were reasonably good, so I stayed in. I won the hand, to my relief (I was risking too much for my comfort). The game continued at the quarter or dime ante level for a while, then the stakes went up again, and I won again. This happened one more time, and I cleaned out Mike's money, leaving me with an IOU of $24.50 from him. We played at the dime level for the rest of the evening, and we quit at 5 AM. My total winnings were ~$150.

Mike Glicksohn was the only person named in my diary, but if memory serves, Ted Pauls was also in the game. And maybe Ron Bounds...?

That win was the high water mark of my poker career, until I began playing public cardroom poker twenty years later, in 1997.