GUNPOINT GAMBLING

GUNPOINT GAMBLING=

by Bob Ciaffone

&n= bsp; A sad fact about gambling is that it sometimes p= uts 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 eithe= r a person on the wrong side of the law that 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 actua= lly 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-sixties, I was making most of my money with a cuestick. This is a good way to meet somewhat unsavory people. I was the be= st poolplayer in Saginaw until this guy Dale showed up. He had lived in my town as a youth, gone to = California, evid= ently 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?R= 21; I asked. Here was his story.

“I was playing poker in an after-hours joi= nt 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 o= ut of the room. A moment later; I saw him in the hallway loading his 22 rifle, coming toward me. There was no other way out of the room, so I wrapped my jacket around my arm, and then dove head-first t= hrough 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.R= 21; I never did find out if Dale had actually been cheating, but my bet is on t= he affirmative. If it had been me, I’d be dead, because I don’t do plate glass windows. One more incentive to be honest; l= et that be a lesson to you.

The closest I ever came to a gunpoint disaster w= as in 1974. A good friend of mine, John Eric “Rick” Fowler, ran a pok= er game once a week in Lansing. I drove up there from Detroit<= /st1:place> regularly to play. The week I couldn’t make it, a fight had broken ou= t at the game. One of the players lost the fight, left the game, and came back w= ith a gun. He killed Rick and two other friends of mine, and left the fourth pl= ayer there for dead. The man lived to tell the story of what happened, and the killer is still serving a life sentence, to the best of my knowledge.<= /o:p>

I have also had some narrow misses on robberies = and raids. Canada has been a scene of particularly close calls. In the early eighties, I drov= e up to a small British Colombian 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. The Mounties shut m= e down two days ago.” Then he told me all about the raid.<= /p>

A few years later, I tried my luck on the east c= oast of Canada, flying up t= o Halifax. The game= I played in had been robbed the week before. Here’s how my Nova Scotia frie= nd described it, “They were real professionals. One guy had a gun levele= d at us, and the other went around collecting the cash. They told us that we cou= ld keep our wedding rings. Either they were kind-hearted, 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. As he described it, “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 in our northern neighb= or. Is Canada really a pea= ceful gun-free place compared to the USA?

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

“During a stretch where I had been running= bad, I entered my home one night to find a couple of r= obbers 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? T= ell us or we are going to light the matches.”

I was thinking whether to start telling them som= e bad beat stories about how my money had disappeared, or what to do. I said, “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 was.” Fortunately, they believed me, and the fire threat was never carried out.

I am sure it is a scary feeling just to have a g= un pointed at you, but let me tell you what one of my Dallas poker friends, a professional player, had to endure one night. 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 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 h= im. He said, “Whatever you’re going to do to me, you are going to h= ave to do it here. You know who I am; that’s why you are robbing me. So y= ou know I’m not going to the police. If you let me go this time, maybe y= ou can rob me again some other time.” They let him go. Once again, IR= 17;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 thi= ng only happened with tough-talking movie heroes.

Unfortunately, guns seem to go with gambling. Gu= ns create unpleasant thoughts, but they do make for some interesting stories.<= o:p>