The Nut Heart Flush: 10/01/2006

Thoughts on Poker Crackdowns

The recent crackdown on online gambling has made me remeber another series of crackdowns on poker in my life. Once, in New York City, where poker clubs have always been technically illegal, there was a thriving underground poker scene. Any night of the week, you could go to a club and play in a tournament, a no-limit Texas hold'em cash game, limit poker games, and I knew even of a $5-10 rotation game that consisted of Omaha, Hold'em, Seven-card stud, and even Pineapple poker.

Pros such as Howard Lederer, Dan Harrington, and Erik Seidel got their start in these clubs. They were featured in my favorite poker movie, Rounders.

The first time I went to a now-gone club on the upper west side, Mickey Appleman was there. It was a poker paradise, just a walk or a subway ride away from anywhere I was in the city. While I can't claim to be as good as World Series of Poker bracelet winners, it is also where I spent many of my first hours playing poker. Like the NY poker scene, many World Series of Poker champions would not be champions without online poker. Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer are just the most famous, but there are countless other successful tournament players who started online.

When the busts began, it didn't seem like that big a deal -- clubs had been busted before, and others had always sprung up in their place. At first, it seemed only the sloppiest clubs were getting hit -- ones mentioned in papers, advertising on Craigslist.com. Easy targets. New clubs kept opening. Then, the larger clubs got hit, and their replacements, too. Soon enough, the casual players that used to drop by with their friends fell away, leaving mostly sharks in the formerly fish-filled poker waters. Finally, the club I played small-stakes no-limit hold'em at, a small .25/.50 game with a maximum buy-in of just $60, got shut down. It marked the end for me at the clubs -- I couldn't keep up the search just to be shut out again. More and more people I knew had been at the clubs when they were raided and lost money. And besides, I still had my home game. And, of course, online poker.
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