Andy Bellin became a journalist by writing about what he knows,
and what he knows best is poker. His first articles about his experiences in the
semi-underground poker circuit attracted the attention of editors at other
magazines, who would be so intrigued that they'd call him up and ask him to
teach them how to play. "It's not like they were banging down my door," he
demurs when I bring it up over lunch at an Upper East Side diner near his
apartment. "That only happened a couple times. But I did find that I was doing
a lot more business at the table just by spending that much time with the
editors, talking to them and getting assigned stories." He eventually landed a
job as an editor at the prestigious Paris Review, and built on his
magazine journalism experience to write Poker Nation, which is a
memoir of his experiences at the table, a guide for aspiring players that
includes tips on figuring the odds on drawing the hand you need and assessing
what your opponents are holding, and a portrait of the subculture that's
grown up around the game over the last century. Bellin is currently
researching his next book for HarperCollins, which involves a foray into the
world of horse racing.
RH: When you started playing as a teenager, did you ever think you'd be
earning a living by writing about poker someday?
AB: The last English class I took was in 1984, and I think I got a D. I'm wildly
dyslexic. I've had so many struggles with spelling and grammar, with anything related to
the English language. [Writing] just never crossed my mind. To end up where I am is just
out of the blue. I never even thought about it.
RH: Who are some of your favorite writers?
AB: George Plimpton. Even though our writing styles are so completely
different, he puts so much of himself in every one of his books, and he does such a good
job of expressing his shortcomings that I did my best to learn what I could from him while
I knew him [at the Paris Review]. And A. Alvarez wrote an amazing poker book
called The Biggest Game in Town that takes you through a writer's experience of
the World Series of Poker in the 1970s, when it wasn't very glamorous, still gritty. It's an
amazing, amazing book.
RH: You're very upfront about how poker has supplied an emotional
foundation for you at various points in your life, which has inspired many
reviewers to take the opportunity to psychoanalyze you...
AB: Just about every reviewer has been attracted to the same specific areas of the
book. Everybody asks me, "Do you think you're a gambling addict?" When I was playing
six nights a week, I really didn't think of myself as an addict. I just felt like I loved my job.
I was passionate about it, good at it. When you look back and realize I was playing six
days a week, six hours a day, talking about poker, writing about it, dreaming about it, it
probably does sound pretty compulsive.
It's funny how everybody asks me that question. I don't have a proper question for it other
than that I love poker. It's the perfect game for me. I could have majored in barroom games
in collee. I was an amazing foozball player, a good pool player, and I could throw darts
over my left shoulder with my right hand. If I studied half the time I spent playing games,
I'd be fluent in seven languages. But the only game I stuck with is poker. It's the perfect
combination of everything that I love: it's math, competition, money...
RH: But you've seen people who could much more obviously be
defined as gambling addicts.
AB: You don't see it coming. They don't see it happening, either. They're just
guys who had ordinary lives until they walked into their first casino or poker room or met
their first bookie, and then their lives come apart like the Nixon administration, just one
disaster after another. One kid I knew had a JD and an MBA, a wife and mortgage; within
six months he was broke, his wife left him, he'd lost his job, and was thousands of dollars
in the hole to every shylock in New York. It's a terrible problem and it's very easy to
mask, because you don't show up slurring your words. You just look tired and confused
most of the time.
RH: What would you consider the difference between a semi-pro
player, as you call yourself, and a pro?
AB: I tried to create that term out of respect for the guys who are true
professionals. I know plenty of guys who when they don't play well, they don't eat well. I
was never in that position. My dad's a great plastic surgeon, makes a really good living, so
I always had the safety net of falling back on him. I wasn't going to starve.
RH: So do you consider yourself a journalist first now?
AB: There are times when you're at a poker table, and you know you've made a
bad call, and yet you end up winning the hand. It's like you're being rewarded for being
stupid. I've seen people apologize for that, feel guilty for it. I think when that happens, you
should just thank God and get on with your day, and I feel that way about my career. I got
lucky in pursuing this "degenerate addiction" and managed somehow to carve a writing
career out of it. I don't want to lose that. I totally respect the profession, I consider myself
a journalist, and I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to sit down with respectable
journalists who want to talk about me. It's over the moon.
RH: How do your poker buddies feel about appearing in the book?
AB: I've had a mixed response. I'd say about seventy-five percent of them get a
kick out of it. They appreciate what I was doing and get a kick out of the writing. A couple
of people...well, successful poker players have tremendous egos, and some of them
complained that I didn't make them seem as great as they are, that they wouldn't make the
mistakes I wrote about. Well, they did make those mistakes, they just don't want to fess up
to it.
I wrote a chapter about my friend, David, who's a terrible card player. I let him read it, and
I told him, "I'll change your name if you want, change your occupation." He asked me, "Is
this really how bad I am?" I told him it was, and he said, "Leave my name there." He was a
very good sport about it, and has since become a better card player.
RH: You touch upon the severe crackdown on the poker clubs in New
York towards the end of the book. Have things eased up?
AB: They did for a while, but the Midtown Club, the best one around, closed just
a few weeks ago, so there's not so much going on in the city these days. I go to Atlantic
City a lot now, or to Foxwoods, and I play in a couple of home games. I don't think it'll
ever go back to the way it was, when you could walk outside your house and have four
good clubs within blocks of you. It's a shame. These guys were paying their taxes,
running safe, straight poker communities. It was good for the city, and good for the game.
People weren't getting robbed outside grocery stores at four in the morning, you know?
RH: Is it possible for a serious player like yourself to ever play just
for the hell of it?
AB: It is now. It wasn't for a long time. You lose a lot of the pleasure when you
start thinking about it as your job. You'll never sit down and have a beer, you'll never do
something on a whim. You don't get to enjoy the process of playing because you're so
concerned about concentrating, picking up tells, reading other players. You just sit for five
hours and take no pleasure in it.
I started to hate poker, and then I got back into my college game, a small group of friends
with a three dollar max, and I began to remember how much I loved the game. Now that I
don't play every day, I really enjoy it. I mostly play those games now, and I'll only go
down to Atlantic City to play a big game maybe twice a month. And now that's fun,
too.
When you get to be my age, you don't get huge chunks of time to hang out with
your friends anymore, where you get together with another guy and compare
your lives, see how you stack up against people around you. It's great to have a
four-hour block where you can just sit with your friends.
