Midnight encroaches. Three poker players sit around a felt-topped table, angling for a mountainous pot of chips. One of them makes a good-size raise. The next quickly goes all in. A third player contemplates what to do next. The corner of his lip ticks a little bit, then he matches the bet, as does the original raiser. All the players turn over their cards. An audible gasp rises. It’s monster-hand over monster-hand, with one full house just barely edging out the other. Smiling tightly, the winner rakes in the chips.
“Sick beat,” somebody mutters.
Another guy marvels, “He won with the worst starting hand out of everybody.”
It could be a heart-stopping moment from this summer’s World Series of Poker, running into November on ESPN, with a seven-figure prize pool at stake. But no. This game takes place every few weeks in the lower Manhattan apartment of 36-yearold attorney Charlie Prince. Tonight’s first-place finisher will receive around $750, taken from an empty plastic pretzel container jammed with $20 bills. Alongside it resides a crystal trophy that will be engraved with the 2014 champion’s name.
More and more Americans are going all in for poker. This summer, more than 82,000 people bought into the World Series of Poker (WSOP), setting a record for the tournament. Last November, 1.23 million viewers tuned in to watch the WSOP’s final table on ESPN, up 68 percent from 2012.
“It’s growing around the world, becoming increasingly mainstream, and people are getting more and more into it on all levels — at the casino and at home,” says WSOP spokesman Seth Palansky.
Across New York City, home games — which are legal as long as organizers don’t profit from them — are getting increasingly serious.
Every few weeks, Prince clears his living room of furniture to make room for three casino-worthy poker tables, topped with custom-made felts printed with the logo “Steak & Poker Night” — some players gear up for the game with a big dinner at Sparks, Minetta Tavern or Peter Luger. Bottles of artisanal whiskeys dominate a kitchen counter. Occasionally, Prince sports a knowingly gaudy ring, loaded with diamonds representing a royal flush, valued at $30,000 — his prize for acing a charity poker tournament. It’s become known as “the Liberace ring.”
He’s even created a so-called TV table, complete with cameras capturing the action and hole cards. It feeds into a computer program that calculates each player’s odds of winning. Special software tracks the night’s progress on a wall-size stack of monitors. He broadcasts the whole thing online using a webcasting rig he dropped $5,000 on. Prince has even had T-shirts made, along with oversize books documenting the history of his game, which has been going since 2002. All the effort and expense has been worth it, he says.
“Hosting this game is the best decision I’ve ever made,” says Prince. “I’ve made more friends through this than I have through everything else in my life. One guy’s a trumpet player, another’s a heart surgeon and there are lots of bankers. A couple met at the game and got married. We had Miss World [2003] in the game for a while.”
Despite all the fancy trappings, Prince intentionally keeps his buy-in low to keep things fun.
“You come here, see your friends, and the most you can drop is $60,” says regular Shai Markowicz, 38, who works in banking and lives in Brooklyn. “This game is 60 percent social.”
As fresh cards get dealt, Jake Krayn, a 38-year-old finance guy from Manhattan, fights the figure as if he’s going after a big pot. “You think 60 percent? It’s all social.”
Elsewhere in the city, the stakes run considerably higher. Aaron Brown, 57, an investment banker and the author of “The Poker Face of Wall Street,” regularly plays in a secretive game frequented by titans from Wall Street and tech. It’s played inside a Manhattan townhouse with a dedicated wood-paneled card room, and the typical buy-in is $10,000. In pre-bubble days, it used to be much higher.
“It got really crazy. You had guys buying in for $50,000, and there would be half a million on the table,” Brown recalls. “I don’t know if they were action junkies or if the market got everybody wound up, but now things are more sensible.”
Still, it’s alluring enough that one Master of the Universe couldn’t stand to let his corporate globetrotting get in the way of a game. “He phoned in from Switzerland and had somebody there to read him his cards,” Brown says. “You give up a lot [of atmosphere] by playing that way, but he valued the social connection.”
When it comes to great stories and long runs, Herbie Kallenberg, a 76-year-old retired sales rep who lives in Manhattan, may have everyone beaten. He probably has the longest-running poker game in New York City. It started in 1962,
situated itself at the Friars Club for a spell and currently takes place on a hefty, $6,000 beaut of a table planted in Kallenberg’s living room. At one point, Liza Minnelli’s former husband Mark Gero was in the game, so it was held at chez Gero-Minnelli. As cards were divvied, players heard Liza practicing with Marvin Hamlisch. “I remember a guy losing a lot of money,” says Kallenberg, “and he said he didn’t mind because he was getting a free concert.”
As that sinks in, Kallenberg brings up another poker memory, one that sounds worthy of a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” subplot. “We had a guy in the game [a big TV producer] who was going through a divorce that looked like it would cost him $3 [million] or $4 million,” recounts Kallenberg. “Just before the case was due to close, his ex got run over in her driveway and died. Two nights later, he played poker with us and got upset over losing $500. I said to him, ‘Buddy, on balance, you didn’t have a bad week.’ ”
Neither did the guys who won his $500. And, best of all, everyone returned for the next go-round. “Once you get into a good home poker game,” says Kallenberg, “you don’t get out.”
A World Series of Poker Primer
■ The World Series of Poker is a massive poker tournament held every year. It begins with a 10-week-long summer series of 65 poker tournaments in Las Vegas and culminates with the Main Event final in November. The initial round of tournaments finished on July 24 and just started airing on ESPN. The finals will be held Nov. 9 to 11.
■ This year, 82,360 people from 110 countries played in the tournament at the Rio All-Suite Hotel in Las Vegas. Anyone can enter — so long as they’re willing to exchange at least $500 (and as much as $1 million) for chips to get in the game. Pros compete alongisde amateurs, and players are in the series until they’re out of chips.
■ Celebs regularly play in the tournament. Jennifer Tilly, Ray Romano and Brooklyn Net Paul Pierce were all in on the game this year. Previous years have seen appearances from James Woods, Matt Damon, Toby Maguire, Ben Affleck, Shannon Elizabeth and Michael Phelps.
■ William Pappaconstantinou, a 29-year-old from Lowell, Mass., is the card shark to watch this year. It’s his first World Series of Poker and he made the final table, and is now angling for $10 million. He’s the only amateur to make it so far, and he’s already a world champion foosball player.