Poker Articles

High Times and Misdemeaners - The Marvelous Marv Story
By Dave Cinch
(All Rights Reserved)

The Marvelous Marv story, as I'll recount here, is one of the unfortunate type of gambling stories that can happen when a player just doesn't know when to say when. Marv had it all; looks, money, brains - you name it - but in the end, he lost everything. It was a textbook case in how not to manage your money. I'll have to own up to my part of it. We were partners, and I blew off my share of the chips. But nothing - nothing - like Marvelous Marv.

It all started with me painting houses for Marv back home in Kentucky, fixing them up some, and selling them at a big markup before they fell over. You know, the real estate racket. I was giving Marv some bargain basement bids, and in return, he was giving me a piece of the action. We started to get tight. We ran our stake up fast and decided it was time for a new hustle. We decided we were probably the kind of guys who ought to be living in Vegas. "Not so fast" is the advice we needed to hear, but nobody offered it. So away we went one summer, on sabbatical from our old Kentucky home.

We had a million dollars behind us, we moved in to the Mirage, and we became regulars in their $75-$150 seven card stud game. I still remember the first day. We won $10,000 early in the day, and over dinner we marveled at how rosy everything was. We had an invincible partnership, so it seemed. Well, the bliss lasted exactly one day. On day two we started losing, on day three we started bickering, and on day 365 we were busted. We lost 364 straight days in a row, which isn't a record, but is one hell of a percentage - even for Vegas. The room at the Mirage was $200 a day, Marv was squelching money on showgirls left and right, we couldn't win a hand, and the million was in the archives (or actually, in the lock boxes of the Mirage regulars). We went all in for the ante on our last hand and made none of the above - no pair. I'll tell you how sweet it was: When we were through, Marvelous Marv was sleeping in Sunset Park, and I was back dealing poker at the Grand Victoria, in Rising Sun, Indiana, near Cincinnati. What went wrong? It was a simple case of thinking there was no hell for kittens.

Marv was dating three showgirls when he had the million, but none of them even came by to visit him when he was living in the park. It's cold, this gambling. "Where's the love, man?" he would ask me, and I'd just shake my head. I never had the heart to tell him it that love was never even a factor. It was about the million. No million, no dice with showgirls. They were gone with the hot Vegas wind.

But that was the least of his worries. There were more pressing concerns when he was lying out busted on a park bench. They weren't passing out any buffet comps in the park, and Marv's belly was aching. Nobody loves a loser, and he was down on his luck. I had gone back to work and begun plotting my comeback, but he had fallen from too high. It was harder for him to catch himself. Marvelous Marv a.k.a. "The Mouthpiece" (he was a lawyer) went splat, as Vegas has a way of doing to gamblers, unfortunately.

In case you're wondering, the "misdemeanor" part of the title comes in because in his life as an esteemed counselor, Marvelous Marv, wouldn't take on a felony case, but restricted his practice to misdemeanors only. He didn't want to be tied in to a lot of preparation in any serious cases, so as not to take time away from his poker pursuits. That didn't stop him from having a $10,000 minimum retainer, though. He dared you to hire him, and it worked. "Maximum Marv" his clients called him, because they always seemed to get the maximum fine AND the maximum sentence. That's not easy to do. But his clients loved him anyway because he was "one of them." As god is my witness, he had once stolen a police cruiser himself. (In his defense, he was more than a little under the influence at the time.) That escapade made him a legend on the old cellblock. The main reason he didn't close up the law practice altogether and gamble full time was that he had a new photo of himself in a legal ad that showed how trim he was after losing nearly 100 pounds on a milkshake diet. Don't worry, when we got to Vegas - land of the buffet - he gained TWO HUNDRED back. But that extra weight served him well when he started hibernating in the park, after we went busted.

The point is - you gotta be careful. All the stuff you think could never happen to you probably will when you get to Vegas. In other words, THERE IS hell for little kittens - and for big kittens too. If you can shoot 64 playing golf…congratulations. There is always going to be someone who can shoot 63 left-handed, while throwing off on the front nine. And guess where they live? Vegas! What I'm saying is YOUR DAY WILL COME. Every time you've got the best of it, you're just biding time until the day when YOU are the live one.

Me and Marv were the cat's meow - or so we thought - and we couldn't imagine what could possibly go wrong. Vegas was going to be our big, tasty oyster. That's just the kind of cluelessness that usually precipitates a fall. (Isn't that in Proverbs or something?) You're better off feeling lucky to have breath in your lungs and blood in your veins than you are thinking you're bulletproof, cause you ain't.

Remember that when you're planning that big move to Vegas. They've been burying bulletproof people in the desert out there, both literally and figuratively, since they legalized gambling in 1931. That's why they done it - legalized gambling, that is - to fetch suckers. Those cowpokes out there that ramrodded the legalized gaming through might have been a little sharper than we've been giving them credit for. They knew that upon legalization, half the suckers in the world would move to Nevada, start calling themselves "professional gamblers," and go busted. You can build an economy on something like that. You don't even need state income taxes. There'll be money to burn. They went from a couple of thousand cowpokes in town and some tumbleweeds blowing around, to a Neon Empire.

Now I ask you: With cowboys like that around, who needs gangsters? I'm not trying to besmirch anybody's reputation, but we're getting down to brass tacks here. Bugsy Siegal was all right; I don't have a problem with him. But you seen what the cowboys done to him. Cowboys is behind the whole Vegas Conspiracy. It's not the much-maligned Italians. Nope. All clad in their dusters and saddle pants, the cowboys have been pulling the strings on the Vegas conspiracy all along. They even suckered the mob into coming out to Nevada and kicked their ass too! Cowboys is tough, I'm telling you. Don't mess with them.

What a plan they had, though. What a trap. I admit, it looked goood; legalized gambling 24 hours a day, with meals and booze on the house. How could it get any sweeter than that? "Marvelous Marv" and I went for it, hook, line, and sinker. We had it all until we became professional gamblers in Vegas, and we wound up getting evicted from skid row. Put that in your stack the next time you're daydreaming about how cool it would be to be a professional gambler in Vegas.

The bottom line is there's cowboys and there's suckers in Vegas, and you ain't no cowboy. But if you feel you have to make the move to Vegas, in particular watch out for any cowboys from Amarillo by way of Johnson, Arkansas. You're not gonna like his action even a little bit. With cowboys like this guy around, hustlers could go extinct. Sure, he's likeable enough, but he'll put a rattlesnake in your pillowcase and then tuck you in nice as can be. It's that Arkansas culture, apparently, that breeds an especially shrewd brand of hustler. Whether it's Amarillo Slim, Titanic Thompson, or Slick Willie himself - there's no way you can outmaneuver them. If you know that going in, you've got a shot. If you don't, they'll bust you without even breaking a sweat.

Be forewarned: there's not only a hell for little kittens, but there's a hell for tigers, lions, panthers, leopards, jaguars, cheetahs, and any other strays that might be roaming around. There's a hell for them all right - and it's called Sin City. You start out thinking it's a rose garden, and you end up with a rattlesnake in your pillowcase, flat busted. If that doesn't scare you off, go ahead and take your shot at good old Las Vegas. You know where it's at, just make sure you know where YOU'RE AT when you get there.