The Man with the $100000 Breasts

Introduction • 1 1 The Man With the $100,000 Breasts • 4 2 The Cold-Deck Crew • 24 3 A Lot of Crap • 32 4 Count On It! • 41 5 Comp City • 49 6 Out of the Oscars, Into the Pan • 58 7 The $17 Million Man • 64 8 The Andy-capper • 73 9 Go, Greyhound! • 82 10 The World’s Greatest Golf Hustler • 91 11 The Ultimate Comp • 99 12 New, Different, and Unbeatable • 107 13 The Best and the Worst • 115 14 Taking Advantage • 124 15 The Line Maker • 135 16 Living by the Book • 157 17 Risky Business • 166 18 The Biggest Game of the Year • 174 19 1-900-NFL-SCAM • 180 20 Shakin’ Down the Sheiks • 187 21 Trump Cards • 196 22 The Grand Old Man • 205 23 The Mozart of the Poker Table • 212 24 The Adventures of Huckleberry Seed • 224 25 The (New) Biggest Game in Town • 233 26 The Hand You’re Dealt • 240 Las Vegas is a city built on myths. Lies, really. They range from the innocuous (“Certain slot machines are ‘ready’ to pay off”) to the inane (“You can beat keno with the right system”). None of the Vegas myths is bigger, though, than the one that goes like this: “It’s possible to drift into town with only a few bucks and leave a week later with a fortune.” That’s the elemental Vegas myth, the one that turns normally responsible men into fools and pensioners into paupers. Were it not for the gambling public’s unwavering faith in the Big Myth, Las Vegas’ casinos wouldn’t win billions a year. Hotel rooms wouldn’t cost $39. And shrimp cocktails couldn’t be had for 99 cents. With every quarter dropped down a slot machine, every dollar bet on blackjack, every parlay card wagered at the sports book, gamblers harbor an inchoate fantastic hope that their meager plunge might lead to something big. They dream they might be the lucky soul who makes the Vegas myth come true. The fact is, it never happens. Sure, countless suckers have built a piddling bankroll into several thousand dollars, and, yes, the statewide Megabucks progressive slot jackpot gets hit every so often, making someone an instant millionaire—over a 20-year pay-out period. Statistical deviations do happen. But no one, no one, has ever churned mere bus fare into truly big money. Mansion-in-Bel-Air and yacht-in- the-Caribbean money. Mythic money. No one, that is, until Archie Karas. If not for the John Gotti hairstyle and two demure gold-and-diamond pinkie rings, you might think he was some sort of businessman, an executive at a respectable corporation, not an inveterate gambler. Archie Karas dresses stylishly but unprepossessingly, foregoing the loud track suits and ostentatious gold-nugget bracelets many of his colleagues favor. (He’s got $20,000 watches, but most days he wears a Seiko.) His clean-cut grooming is impeccable, far from the haggard visage of someone who spends entirely too much time in the stale environs of a casino. His nails are always clean. But his domain is not the boardroom. It’s the cardroom. Some consider him a hopeless degenerate. Some think he’s a hero. Others think he’s insane. Archie Karas, 43, likes to be referred to as the Un- disputed Champion of Gambling. “I’ve gambled more money than anyone in the history of the planet,” he claims. “What most gamblers make in their whole life, I gamble in one roll of the dice. Unless the casinos decide to raise their limits after I’m gone, I don’t think anyone will ever gamble more than I have. I’m the biggest ever.” Prior to 1992 Archie was similar to hundreds of other gamblers: He’d win; he’d lose; one day he’d be driving a Mercedes-Benz, the next he’d be sleeping in it. When he went broke, he’d borrow a grubstake and start over. The usual. His career, if you can call it that, has been a series of phenomenal successes and abject failures—and not much in between. “I’ve been a millionaire over fifty times and dead broke more than I can count. Probably a thousand times in my life,” Archie recalls. “But I sleep the same whether I have ten or ten million dollars in my pocket.” After immigrating to America from Greece at 17— working on a freighter for $60 a month, he jumped ship in Portland, Oregon—Archie got a job as a waiter in a Los Angeles restaurant. The restaurant was next door to a bowling alley. In that bowling alley were several pool tables. Around those pool tables were dozens of marks ready to be fleeced. A hustler was born. Still a teenager, new to the Land of Opportunity, Ar- chie learned to play pool and poker, eventually cleaning out the restaurant’s owner. He had the kind of epiphany then that comes to most people upon retirement from a lifetime of labor, or after hitting the lottery: “I knew at eighteen that I’d never have to work.” He also thought if he ever won $10,000 he’d be set forever. That figure was revised upward to $100,000, then $500,000, then $1 million. Now he knows he’ll never stop. In December 1992 Archie lost nearly $2 million in high-stakes card games at the legal Los Angeles-area casinos. For the thousandth-and-first time in his life, he was broke. He drove into Las Vegas with $50. Unlike the Social Security matron with a couple of twenties in her stockings or the drunk with a roll of quarters stuffed in his pocket, Archie knew his dearth of capital wouldn’t prevent him from making a score. No hole was too big for him to climb out of. He headed to the Mirage, where a fellow gambler lent him $10,000 to take a shot at the biggest action in the cardroom, a $200-$400 razz game. (Razz is seven-card stud played for low, the best hand being A-2-3-4-5.) He promptly won $20,000. After returning half the profits to his backer, who was thrilled to realize a 100% gain in only a few hours, Archie had the seeds of a bankroll that would eventually lead to what Vegas cognoscenti now refer to simply as “the Run.” Archie bristles at the suggestion that his streak was anything more than just another series of gambles in a lifetime of wagering, that he momentarily got luckier than anyone else has ever gotten. Even as a kid, he’ll tell you, he always bet everything he had, and he always played the best, only champions. The Run, he insists, was no different. Only bigger. It started, as many of Archie’s adventures have, at a pool table. There, playing against a high-ranking executive of a well-known hotel corporation for stakes that reliable sources say were $10,000 a game and up, Archie won between $1 million and $2 million. For the sake of his opponent’s reputation, Archie refuses to discuss details of the match, saying only, “The pool was no big deal. I played against a lot of people, and I’m not going to confirm or deny any amounts that have been talked about.” Despite his diplomacy, the “facts” of Archie’s pool match were reported in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and are widely known among the gambling community, as is the loser’s identity. This man, call him Mr. B., is a world-class poker player, whose victories over the toughest competition on the planet have been well-documented. Realizing pool was clearly Archie’s kingdom, Mr. B. suggested moving the battle to another green-felt arena, the poker table, where Mr. B. thought he was the odds-on favorite. In early 1993, after a week of heads-up play, Archie beat him out of another million. The reason you or I will never win several million dollars gambling is because we are rational reasonable people. We’d never get to the lofty point where millions of dollars are on the line, because we would quit as soon as we won $50,000 or $20,000 or even $10,000. Archie Karas doesn’t know the word quit. After crushing Mr. B., Archie welcomed all comers, defying anyone to beat him at a one-on-one poker match. In April 1993 during the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe, his first challenger was David “Chip” Reese, one of the few living members of the Poker Hall of Fame and generally considered the best all-around poker player in the world. Reese is a fat man with thinning blond hair, an om- nipresent cellular phone, and a poker pedigree rivaled by few others, living or dead. He and his equally ac- complished pal, two-time World Champ Doyle Brunson, consistently play in the largest games in town and have probably beaten more contenders and pretenders out of the richest pots in Vegas than anyone who’s ever held a full house. Multi-millionaire businessmen, knowing they have little chance of winning, often play with the duo just to say they lost to the best. In the middle of the Horseshoe’s tournament room, where $25-$50 and $50-$100 games are common, Archie, with his newly minted bankroll, and Chip, competing with the financial backing of a famous hotel owner, played razz and seven-card stud for unthinkable stakes: $3,000-$6,000, $4,000-$8,000, and eventually, according to Archie, $8,000-$16,000 limits.

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