My contribution to this week’s list of favorite Jewish spots in Los Angeles was a short piece about Hollywood Park. That’s right: the casino where I play poker each week.
You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, with how many of my fellow poker players are Jewish. Sometimes I look around my table and think that we’d have a minyan if only the dealer and I were Jewish too:
With so much money-changing and passing poker chips back and forth, the scene at Hollywood Park is not generally a place for the pious — though the occasional Chasid can be found playing no-limit during the week. And Inglewood hasn’t been a place that large numbers of Jews have called home in half a century.
But every Friday night, the casino that now accompanies the old Hollywood Turf Club, founded by Jack Warner and a handful of other Jewish Hollywood heavy hitters, bustles with Jews more comfortable with playing poker than lighting Shabbat candles.
Poker, of course, has a proud tradition of Jewish superstars. None more so than Stu Ungar. But there have been many others: Howard Lederer and his sister Annie Duke, Gabe Kaplan and Barry Greenstein, Mike “The Mouth” Matusow.
Bradford R. Pilcher profiled a few of them in this article for the now defunct American Jewish Life magazine:
The question is begged, not only by Stu Ungar but the litany of Jewish notables in the poker stratosphere, what the hell a bunch of Hebrew tribesmen – and women – are doing foregoing med school for the green felt?
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Jewish Big Brothers charity tourneyNevertheless, if ever there was a world perfectly crafted for Jewish competitors, it’s high-stakes poker. Seriously. Not that plenty of members of the tribe have made their way in professional athletics, but it’d be foolish to pretend the Jewish community has rewarded athletic achievement as much as cerebral exploits. When you sit down with a stack of clay chips and a couple of hole cards, nobody’s going to make you run the hundred-yard dash, but you better have a little skill with numbers and an eye for behavioral science.
I once played in a charity poker tournament for Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters at Hollywood Park. But that was on a Tuesday, I believe. Tell me that isn’t a Jewy looking table.
