Atlantic City Upper Crust
I began my journey in New York City. I found myself wandering the downtrodden complex otherwise known as the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Bus travelers are a distinct breed of people, and the souls on the buses to Atlantic City are arguably some of the sketchiest.
I sat across from a pregnant white girl with hoop earrings. She had the word “HOOD” tattooed on her forearm. A teenage Puerto Rican girl and her portly grandmother took the adjacent row of seats. Within seconds of sitting down, the old woman spilled juice all over the fl oor. That pissed the bus driver off. He screamed and wouldn’t leave until the girl cleaned it up, and she muttered curse words in Spanish underneath her breath. A disheveled middle-aged guy with a copy of The NY Post sat in front of me. He could have used a splash of cologne to mask his foul odor which reminded me of a cross between a wet dog and a sour tuna fi sh sandwich. This degenerate looked like he was a step away from being homeless, yet he was headed down to Atlantic City, which Worm from Rounders described as the place “where the sand turns to gold.” I read a book on the bus as it sped down the Garden State Parkway. I silently prayed that we didn’t have any psychopaths traveling with us. Getting shanked on a Greyhound was not my ideal way to start a 16-day work assignment.
The Borgata stands out like a gem amidst the darkness of Atlantic City. You can see it gleaming against the dust and grime from miles out on the Expressway. But the Greyhound buses don’t go near the resort and judging by the people aboard I was the only Borgata-bound passenger. We were deposited in one of the boardwalk hotels’ dank bus depots and a taxi ride later it was easy to forget that I was in Atlantic City.
The resort attracts a higher-end and sophisticated clientele. That’s where you’ll fi nd the pretty people – including the busty Borgata Babes who serve drinks throughout the casino. Plenty of smoking hot women were packed into mur.mur, the hippest club in Atlantic City, which landed on the paparazzi’s radar when Lindsay Lohan showed up over Labor Day weekend to hang out with her girlfriend, DJ Samantha Ronson. Ronson went to work at mur.mur, busting out the jams for twenty-somethings jacked up on $20 vodka- Red Bulls while Lohan never left her side.
A couple of days after the now-infamous Lohan visit, the Borgata hosted the largest poker tournament on the east coast. The scene inside the events center was a cliché, with hordes of unkempt poker players getting their tournament fi x. A smattering of yuppies and east coast metrosexuals trickled in from New York, Philadelphia, and D.C., fi lling out a fi eld of dead money while several seasoned South Jersey sharks hunted for their next meal.
For most of September, rows upon rows of poker tables were fi lled with unshaven frat boys decked out in hats of their favorite baseball teams. Yankees. Red Sox. Mets. Phillies. Cubs. At any given time, over a dozen white suburban dads in football jerseys (Brett Favre’s #4 Jets jersey was a popular choice, especially on Sundays) were spotted at the tables. Then there were the Borat look-alikes popping up in the satellite area. They were right off the boat in acid-washed jeans and $5 sunglasses, with fake gold crosses dangling from their necks. My favorites were the guys in sweatsuits with pinky rings who were constantly on the phone wheeling and dealing.
One guy who could have walked straight out of a scene from Raging Bull stopped by to offer me a job. “I know you’re bored with poker, Pauly. How about you come work for me? Whadya know about pools and spas?”
I politely declined because I had a job. I had returned to the Borgata for the fi rst time in two years to cover their September tournament series. It had been several years since I’d covered a tournament in Atlantic City. I spent plenty of time in Las Vegas and even more time in Europe or down under in Australia on the tournament circuit. East Coast poker players were a different breed from the Scandis with perfectly messy hair and the crazy Asian gamblers of Southern California.
The stereotypical East Coaster is loud, cocky, brash, and aggressive. That translated over to the poker tables. When a guy took a bad beat, you defi nitely heard it from across the room. And if someone made a terrible play, you were going to get an earful about it.
I covered a dozen or so fi nal tables at the Borgata Poker Open with buy-ins ranging from $300 to $10,000. The smaller buy-in events were stacked with ordinary Joes and wannabe wiseguys. During various interviews with fi nal table players, I often asked about their current form of employment and the standard response was “self-employed.” One guy with a lot of vowels in his last name actually said, “I’m a businessman. I do a little bit of this and a little bit of that.”
Several players fl at-out refused to give me their names or be photographed. Some of them owed money on the thing they needed was publicity about their fi nal table appearance. Backers and broke friends always seem to swoop in when you get a nice score. They didn’t want the hassle. Several other players who went deep declined the spotlight for more selfi sh reasons. They didn’t want word to get out to their bosses that they skipped out on work to play in a poker tournament, or rather, they didn’t want their wives or family to know about their secret addiction.
“This ain’t glitzy, Disneyfi ed Las Vegas. This is New Jersey and if you fuck with the wrong people, you'll end up drowned in the salt marshes.” That was a bit of unsolicited advice I got when I asked one too many questions.
Boris the Blade. Avdo the Albanian. Boca Tony. Sweet Svetlana. They sounded like character names right off the pages of a script from The Sopranos. But those monikers were among the scores of local players that frequented the Borgata. While most of the big online players were glued to their laptops playing in the WCOOP on PokerStars, players like Johnny Bax and Gobboboy made the trek to the Borgata. A few of the events featured a random cameo from actor Robert Iler, best known for his portrayal of A.J. Soprano on The Sopranos. He played in a couple of tournaments but never cashed.
There were Eskimo Clark sightings every day as he wandered around hoping to get chance tournament or a satellite. There was even a Robert Varkonyi sighting. The former WSOP Main Event champion made one fi nal table. Most of the gawkers on the rail knew Varkonyi a former champ but very few casual observers could actually tell you what year that he won.
Another former WSOP champion was spotted at the Borgata. Jamie Gold had a suite in The Water Club. He avoided the tournament area and spent most of his time in the poker room playing in high stakes cash games. I even met one of Jamie's high school buddies. For all you Entourage fans, if Jamie Gold is Vince, well, this guy is Turtle. That’s even his nickname. Turtle was on a mission to get carrot juice for Jamie and asked me where he could fi nd some. Since they were staying in a swanky suite at The Water Club, I suggested that he hit the “butler” button on the phone and have someone named Jeeves make the juice from scratch. Canadian pro Davidson Matthew played in several events. He almost always wore an “Obama for President” hat over his dreadlocks. Canadians don’t get to vote in the upcoming election, but Matthew was not shy in his support for Obama.
Current events might surface inside a casino every now and then but they rarely get circulated around enough to prevent people from gambling. Time? News? Weather? None of that matters aside from the sports scores. All other news dies a slow death.
It wasn’t as though September was void of signifi cant news. The 9/11 anniversary came and went. There was all the election hoopla. And don’t forget about Hurricane Ike that ripped through Houston and Galveston one week, while the next week investors nearly shit their pants as the stock market crapped out with one Wall Street giant declaring bankruptcy and the U.S. Government bailing out a major insurance company. America’s economy was being fl ushed down the toilet, but you wouldn’t know it if you were standing out on the gaming fl oor of the Borgata, where zombie-like gamblers scurried about at all hours.
Casinos are a bubble, an insulated oasis of gambling and action and stimulation. And a place like the Borgata is secluded – miles away from the riff-raff of the boardwalk, the tweaked out degenerates, the blue-haired senior citizens who savagely donk away their social security checks, and all the other lower forms of life that are bused in from all destinations of desperation around the East Coast. Despite a world of chaos swirling around outside, the merriment continued to fl ourish 24 hours a day at the Borgata. After all, it was the place to be in Atlantic City.
