Gunpoint Gambling

A sad fact about gambling is that it sometimes puts you in a situation where someone points a gun at you. Speaking personally, I have had a lifelong lucky streak so far in avoiding such a scenario. For as much gambling as I have done, this makes me a lot more fortunate than many of my friends.

Who may point a gun at you? Usually, it is either a person on the wrong side of the law who wants to take your cash or someone who is on the "right" side of the law - and thinks you are on the wrong side. (Such a person also might want to take your cash.) But there can be other reasons, as well. Let me tell you some stories about gamblers at gunpoint. Most of these stories were told to me by the person who was actually involved.

One way to get a gun pointed at you is to cheat at cards. ("Amen," says the man with aces and eights and a bullet hole in his back.) Back in the mid-'60s, I was making most of my money with a cue stick. This is a good way to meet somewhat unsavory people. I was the best pool player in Saginaw until this guy Dale showed up. He had lived in my town as a youth, gone to California and evidently played a lot of pool out there, then moved back. He was plenty tough on a bar-size pool table.

One day, I ran into Dale and he looked like the wrath of God, with bandages all over his arms and face. "What happened to you?" I asked. Here was his story:

"I was playing poker in an after-hours joint in a bad section of town. This teenage kid who was the son of the woman who ran the game didn't like me. At one point, he called me a cheat and ran out of the room. A moment later, I saw him in the hallway coming toward me loading his .22-caliber rifle. There was no other way out of the room, so I wrapped my jacket around my arm, and dove headfirst through a plate-glass window with my arm in front of my face trying to shield it. I still got cut up pretty good, but managed to get the hell out of there." I never did find out if Dale had actually been cheating, but my bet is on the affirmative. If it had been me, I'd be dead, because I don't do plate-glass windows. That's one more incentive to be honest; let that be a lesson to you.

The closest I ever came to a gunpoint disaster was in 1974. A good friend of mine, John Eric "Rick" Fowler, ran a poker game once a week in Lansing. I drove up there from Detroit regularly to play. The week I couldn't make it, a fight had broken out at the game. One of the players lost the fight, left the game, and came back with a gun. He killed Rick and two other friends of mine, and left the fourth player there for dead. This player lived to tell the story of what happened, and the killer is still serving a life sentence, to the best of my knowledge.

I have also had some narrow misses with robberies and raids. Canada has been a scene of particularly close calls. In the early '80s, I drove up to a small British Columbia town near Vancouver to play in a game hosted by a friend of mine. When I got there, I asked him, "What time is the game tonight?"

He answered, "No game tonight. The Mounties shut me down two days ago." Then, he told me all about the raid.

A few years later, I tried my luck on the East Coast of Canada, when I flew up to Halifax. The game I played in had been robbed the week before. Here's how my Nova Scotia friend described it: "They were real professionals. One guy had a gun leveled at us, and the other went around collecting the cash. They told us that we could keep our wedding rings. Either they were kindhearted or didn't want to take anything that could be identified."

A week after I played in the game, my Halifax friend called me and told me the Mounties had busted the game. He said, "I was scared a lot more by the police than by the robbers. There were guns all over the place. They were in riot gear, barking orders and talking real tough." So, that makes three near misses for me within our northern neighbor's borders. Is Canada really a peaceful, gun-free place compared to the United States?

Maybe you think that if you don't carry a lot of cash around, your chances of being robbed are reduced. That may be so, but sometimes you are better off if you have a fair amount of money for the robbers to take. Read this story, told to me firsthand by a member of the Poker Hall of Fame:

"During a stretch when I had been running bad, I entered my home one night to find a couple of robbers with guns waiting for me. I gave them all the dough I had, but they thought I must have some more concealed around the house, because it was not the large amount they had expected. So, they tied me up and put some sulfur matches between my toes. 'Where is the rest of your money hidden? Tell us or we are going to light the matches,' they said.

"I was debating whether to start telling them some bad-beat stories about how my money had disappeared, but decided to say, 'Look, men, I can get some more cash, but I can't grow new toes. If I had any more money, I'd be happy to tell you where it is.' Fortunately, they believed me, and the fire threat was never carried out."

I am sure it is a scary feeling just to have a gun pointed at you, but let me tell you what one of my Dallas poker friends, a professional player, once had to endure. When he came home from a game late one night and parked his car, a couple of armed, masked men came out of the shadows. First, they took all of his money; then, they told him to get in their car. My friend assumed they were going to take him out in the country and kill him. He said, "Whatever you're going to do to me, you are going to have to do it here. You know who I am; that's why you are robbing me. So, you know I'm not going to the police. If you let me go this time, maybe you can rob me again some other time." They let him go. Once again, I'd probably have been dead. I lack the courage to tell some robbers with guns pointed at me that I am not going to do what they say. I thought such a thing happened only with tough-talking movie heroes.

Unfortunately, guns seem to go with gambling. Guns create unpleasant thoughts, but they do make for some interesting stories.

Editor's note: Bob Ciaffone's new book Middle Limit Holdem Poker, co-authored with Jim Brier, is available now (332 pages, $25 plus $5 shipping and handling). This work and his other poker books, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Holdem Poker, can be ordered through Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons. E-mail [email protected] or call (989) 792-0884. His website is www.diamondsc.net/~thecoach, where you can download Robert's Rules of Poker for free.