Chapter 2

That was then and this is now. I got good grades in high school and good grades in college. Of course I had to go to college or end up shooting people I wasn't even mad at in Vietnam. I even stayed around for a masters to make sure they had the war shit all wrapped up.

When I graduated I went right back home and advised my dad about his business. For the size town it was he had a giant retail business, a lumberyard, a grocery store, feed store, hardware, dry goods, ready to wear, shoe store, furniture, and appliances. He even had three other lumberyards in other towns.

He had paid for my education and he thought I should take a little time to study his business and tell him how to improve his profits. I did and I was almost sure of the answer before I checked his books.

After going over them for three weeks, I told him the same thing his longtime, in house, accountant had been telling him for years.

Sell it. Sell everything you can and give away the rest. The town was too small to support the kind of inventory he was carrying, and bigger things were coming. Wal-Mart was just being born and one of its forerunners, in our part of the state anyway, Howard's, already had a store in our town.

I was pretty sure he wasn't going to listen to me or his own accountant. He thought he was bullet proof because he was getting around 250k a year in cash from the sale of a giant tract of land down by Houston.

It was land his father and his father's brother had accumulated when they'd had sawmills down there in the thirties. The people who bought it put a planned city there. Maybe you've heard of Woodlands Texas. But the note was going to be paid off in the next year, and the cash he'd had available to waste keeping his little kingdom alive was about to dry up.

I won't say it could ever be called beneficial for someone to have a heart attack, but it damned sure didn't hurt my dad, much. Of course he was rushed to the emergency room and then put in an ambulance to be transferred to the nearest big town, Texarkana USA, where he was placed in their ICU.

That was about it for heart attacks back then. No one had even thought of bypass surgery or stents or any such thing at the time. They put you in an ICU and watched you carefully to see if you lived or died. Well, he lived.

While he was in the hospital, his sisters and brothers - they were all on his board of directors for IRS purposes - held a board meeting and sold his little empire, lock stock and barrel.

When my dad came home from the hospital - people could actually stay in the hospital until they were nearly well back then - all he had left was a little over a million bucks in cash. That was still a hell of a lot of money in 1971 though.

He bought a used bank building for an office and started studying for a Real Estate Broker's License. What the hell, he needed something to do.

Another little quirk of fate hit me about then. Before I even needed to start looking for a job with my Marketing degree, one of my dad's cousins died. It wasn't a shattering loss for our family, but I'd known the guy all my life and most of us went down to Conroe for the funeral.

Of course us kids called him Uncle Jake, even though he was dad's cousin. It just isn't right to call someone so much older than you cous.

He didn't have any wife or kids and he hadn't pissed away his part of the land deal trying to keep up a small town retail empire, so when his will split up the money and royalties, I wound up with seventy-five thousand bucks. Luckily I was just old enough to miss out on the trust fund deal my two younger brothers got caught up in.

When I got my check, I looked around and found a 1963 Corvette Split Window Coupe. It was really the only model Corvette I ever liked, before or since.

I had the engine redone, the paint too, bought a new set of tires, filled up the thirty-six gallon tank, packed a grip, and hauled my ass for Las Vegas. I'd played enough cards in college to know there isn't much to poker. If you can figure out what people are thinking when they really don't want you to.

Sure there's math and odds and probabilities, but that's really small time in the scheme of a poker game. In the first place, you don't get enough information to make a real calculated estimation of your chances. The math helps you a little, with the simple part, but it isn't critical.

Probabilities are all well and good, but every hand of poker is an individual trial. It isn't even like blackjack where you can remember past hands to boost your chances on the next one. They shuffle the deck after every hand of poker.

I got a room at Binion's as soon as I hit town and spent the first night mainly just looking around. I played a few slots, a little blackjack, rolled some dice, and even threw away a few bucks on roulette. I only wanted to get into the mood though.

The next night I played some poker.

I know, I know. Binion's is the home of the World Series of Poker and it's famous now, it's even on tv. It wasn't back then and I didn't want to be famous anyway. Even if I didn't get rich at it, I wanted to see if I could make a living playing cards. I could, hell, it was a cinch.

I won money the first night. It wasn't a lot of money but it was a couple of thousands bucks. It already paid more than an entry-level job in Marketing. Plus, it was mostly tax-free.

I wasn't interested in poker tournaments - I was interested in cash. It is a little funny after you get known as someone who wins most of the time. Other people who are trying to make a living playing poker will stop, or at least slow way down on playing with you.

The good thing is the rich people who think they know how to play poker want to play you if you're good. It's almost comical really. They want to try their hand against the pros, and they pay out the ass to do it.

Early on, I let a rich Arab take a ten thousand dollar pot. He was so happy about it that he spent a hundred thousand trying to do it again, and was happy to. Not two months later another one showed up looking for me and after I let him win twelve thousand he dropped over two hundred k on me.