The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  H. G. Wells once said of chess, “It annihilates a man.” But Falafel wasn’t seeking annihilation; he wanted a way out of his self-made chaos. On a good day, he might win $30, but he lacked the easy duplicity of the more ruthless hustlers. “He does not like deception,” Peter Mikulas, a former NYU employee who used to play in the park, says. “He’s a Big Daddy, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Mendacity, falseness—it bothers him.”

  Some of the men in the park played backgammon, which, Falafel noticed, could be far more lucrative than chess. He once watched Russian Paul beat an NYU student out of $100. Falafel had no real understanding of the game, but he was cocky and insistent, and so he sat down to play Russian Paul, who told me, “I learned how to play backgammon two weeks before him, so I took all his money.” With other players, Falafel lost relentlessly. One told him, “Listen, you just don’t know stuff. For $30 an hour, I’ll teach you.” Falafel insisted on playing him for 50 cents a point. Soon he was 140 points behind.

  Backgammon is sometimes called the cruelest game. In 2008, during a snowy November outside Moscow, two strangers played on a board that one of them had carved in a labor camp. When the match ended, the winner got up, walked out of the room to get a knife, and then made good on their wager: “We had agreed to play backgammon—whoever loses dies,” he explained at the time of his arrest. He was drunk-seeming, and probably a psychopath, but the story has come to serve as a parable in extremis of fortunes lost and won over the board. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in single sessions; one expert player lost his home. Bruegel painted the game into his apocalyptic panorama The Triumph of Death.

  Unlike chess, backgammon is tactile, fast-moving, even loud, with checkers slammed down and tiny dice sounding like rattlesnakes as they traverse the board. Casual players who believe that they are good persist in the illusion because the element of chance obscures their deficits. At its heart, backgammon’s cruelty resides in the dramatic volatility of the dice. Even a player who builds flawless structures on the board can lose to a novice. The good players simply win more often. As a result, backgammon is often played in marathon sessions that reward physical stamina, patience, and emotional equilibrium. One notable match lasted five days, with both players getting up only for bathroom breaks. The loser fell to the floor.

  Like many who have become hooked on the game, Falafel found the omnipresent possibility of winning seductive. After living in the park for half a year, he moved into a tumbledown gaming club near Wall Street, a no-name place run by a gambler called Fat Nick. Stock traders would come. An associate of Vinny “the Chin” Gigante would come. Falafel slept on a recliner, and played whoever would sit with him. He also began turning up at the New York Chess and Backgammon Club, in midtown, where hard men from the Colombo crime family mixed with working stiffs and professional gamblers, and a caged white dove called Squeeze Bird watched over them all. He kibbitzed and tried to hustle opponents into playing “propositions”—arrangements on the board that contain a hidden advantage. When he was not playing, he would collapse into sleep wherever he was, and snore loudly. “You couldn’t tell him, ‘It’s time to go home,’ because he didn’t have one,” a player told me. Falafel lost a lot, but he also improved, and began making a few hundred dollars here and there. When Fat Nick’s shut down, he returned to the street, or he slept at the White House, the last of the Bowery flophouses. One night, he recalled, “I was asleep, and a guy next to me was able to reach into my pocket. He took $1,500, and left me two $50 bills. Maybe he missed it.”

  Falafel’s friends urged him to get off the street. One found him a room, but he could barely pay the rent. Then fortune turned his way, with the arrival of one of the game’s most famous fish, a wealthy French philatelist, Internet entrepreneur, and fraudster known as Marc Armand Rousso, or, in the world of backgammon, as “the Croc.” He was an eccentric—at the board, he would sometimes mutter, “Yum, yum, yum, yum, my little crocodiles,” Falafel recalled—and, more significant, he was a terrible player with satchels of money to lose. “He comes in, and he loses $150,000 cash in half an hour,” one opponent told me. “Then he leaves and comes back two hours later for more—but now, instead of money, he’s come in with 50 pounds of gold!”

  Falafel played the Croc a little, but mostly he bet on the Croc’s opponents, including a skilled player named Abe the Snake. In a few months, Falafel won enough money to buy a small apartment, had he desired one. “I picked up some pants—I wanted to put something in the pocket—and I reach in and I find $4,000,” he told me. “I didn’t even know it existed. That’s how good it was.”

  When he was homeless, Falafel had promised himself that if he ever made enough money he would return to Israel. “I wanted to get back and feel some love and warmth and affection and some closeness,” he told me. He yearned to be married. But ever since his arrival in Buffalo he had been shy with girls, and while he was living on the street relationships were no easier. For several years, he rented a place in central Tel Aviv, and in 2001 he got in touch with a girl he had known in middle school. But things didn’t work out. Relocating the warmth was not so easy.

  Falafel took to spending 15 hours a day online, playing backgammon, with the shades drawn, determined to master the game. Clothes and trash piled up. He ate and ate and gained weight. Sometimes he played at a dingy backgammon club nearby. “I saw Falafel there, this big fat guy with his baseball hat backwards, playing this big, dark-skinned Israeli guy,” a friend says. “They were playing high stakes, $100 a point, and the room was packed with people. It was a gladiator fight, you know, just alive, in a place you would least expect it. Falafel, with his special looks—he just looks like an idiot, and everybody here was thinking that he’s just a rich American dumbass who is going to donate. And Falafel was teasing everybody. He told them that they are all idiots, and he is going to take all their money. And, the thing is, Falafel cleaned up the club. He just cleaned everybody up, and people were going insane, and the stakes got higher. He had everybody play against him. He said, ‘You can consult, because you’re so bad it doesn’t matter. I want to hear all the stupidity.’ And they would basically want to kill him, because he took their money, he took their pride, and he was really, really cocky.”

  Every two years, the top backgammon players around the world vote to pick the best of their peers, for a roster called the Giants of Backgammon. In 2007, Falafel was number one. “At some point, he woke up and became the best player in the world,” Elliott Winslow, a top player, told me. The title is unscientific, and often debated, but no one could contest that Falafel had achieved greatness. “We can never know for certain who is the best player in a given year, but we can confidently eliminate 99.99 percent,” Jake Jacobs, the roster’s auditor, says. “Falafel survived the cut.”

  Falafel reacted to the news humbly, citing other players he thought were more deserving. “I didn’t end up making a living as a backgammon player by accident,” he said at the time. “I couldn’t function properly in the ‘normal’ world.”

  Falafel is intensely loyal to the people who befriended him in Jurassic Park, and at the Borgata he decided to stay in Atlantic City for as long as The Bone could keep up his run—even if it meant delaying his trip to the backgammon tournament in San Antonio, which was about to begin. When I called Falafel to see if he was going to make it to Texas, the best he could say was, “I rate it a favorite.” Backgammon is a highly probabilistic game, and Falafel’s world is rarely defined by certainties. I booked a ticket not knowing for sure that he would show.

  The tournament was held in the Menger Hotel, a dusty old building just opposite the Alamo. When I arrived, after 11:00 P.M. on the first day of play, Falafel had not yet turned up. In a small conference room, a couple of dozen people were milling about, and a few matches were still under way. One was between a Bulgarian man from South Carolina, Petko Kostadinov, and Ed O’Laughlin, an older player from Virginia. Kostadinov—compact, with neatly parted graying hair—was intentl
y focused on the board. O’Laughlin, a wiry man, was dressed all in black, and his legs were folded up in his chair like crushed origami. He moved his checkers in abrupt jabs, then touched the pieces as if to confirm their solidity.

  In the past half-century, backgammon tournaments—like backgammon itself—have undergone a profound transformation. The game, which has been around in some form since the time of the Pharaohs, is most popular in the Near East, and in the 1920s it became a popular club game in the West. In the sixties, the game acquired a certain glamour. Lucille Ball played, and so did Paul Newman. The world championships were black-tie—though many competitors were mediocre, a condition that soon attracted the attention of genuine gamblers, who set out to unlock the game’s moneymaking potential. Backgammon is far more mathematical than chess, but, while chess has a literature that dates back centuries, backgammon had no real theory until the 1970s, when gamblers at New York’s Mayfair Club began to take the game apart systematically. Chess players can visualize what the board might look like 20 moves ahead, but in backgammon the dice offer 21 random possibilities at each turn. The game must be encountered frame by frame. The players at the Mayfair drew up tables: If one checker is 12 slots from another, there are three ways to attack, and an 8 percent chance of doing so successfully. They rolled out positions, playing every permutation to identify the best move. Rollouts could take hundreds of hours. Players attempted to calculate, at each position, their game “equity”—the more the better. By shaving off any trace of error, they could hedge against the chaos of the dice. To the uninitiated, they undoubtedly seemed astoundingly lucky. The Mayfair denizens won a lot of money, until their skill became too conspicuous.

  For players of Falafel’s generation, the early theories were given a tremendous advance in the 1990s, when an engineer at IBM figured out how to apply neural-network computing to the game. The laborious rollouts were no longer necessary. One of the old Mayfair hands, Jersey Jim Pasko, a bodybuilder with a math degree, told me, “I’m spoiled. I want to do a lot of mathematical analysis, and I don’t want to allow anybody else to do any.” He said that many new players came into the game with a single-minded desire to make money, and lacked any sense of style and social grace, so he had dropped out of the circuit.

  In San Antonio, while Kostadinov and O’Laughlin played, an official observer with a laptop computer entered their moves into a program that can roll out thousands of possibilities in seconds and calculate errors to three decimal points. Many younger players assume that its judgment is close enough to perfect. Michihito Kageyama, a former McDonald’s employee from Japan who is now fourth on the Giants of Backgammon list, told me that he had created a database of 10,000 positions. He reviews 30 a day on his Kindle, as a morning exercise.

  Falafel has no patience for memorization. Because he is undisciplined, he regularly makes small mistakes early on, but in the complex middle game—where checkers are spread out in ambiguous arrangements, and the differences between plays can be hard to measure—he excels. “He’s very special,” Kageyama told me. “He doesn’t calculate equity. He’s just seeing it.” Perry Gartner, the president of the United States Backgammon Federation, put it this way: “Truthfully, out of the top 64 players that I know, there isn’t anyone who has his intuitive understanding of the game.”

  I should have bet on Falafel: by the time the main tournament in San Antonio began, he and The Bone had arrived. The event was held in the Menger’s Grand Ballroom, though most of the attendees—130 people—were middle-aged men in T-shirts or casual wear. “Backgammon used to be a lot more glamorous,” one of the few women there told me. Falafel was wearing red Air Jordan sweatpants, a black-and-white plaid shirt, a green hoodie, and his yellow cap. His first opponent was Carter Mattig, a sound engineer from Chicago and a jocular trash-talker. Looking at Falafel, he said, “That’s quite a color combination he’s got today,” and that afternoon he posted a photograph online of Falafel in the ensemble, titled “The Angriest Elf.” Falafel was sore about it for days.

  The two men found an empty spot at one of the folding tables that filled the room. When Falafel plays, his manner is casual but focused—unless he is losing, in which case his head droops as if it were filled with sand, and his body curls over the board. If an inferior player beats him, he might say, “He played horribly.” When Falafel wins, he is not always gracious, and he often seems unaware of his lack of tact. Once, on a backgammon forum, Mattig wrote, “I do vomit a little in my mouth when he speaks of his ‘modesty.’”

  As a few spectators looked on, Falafel played Mattig, who put in earbuds and listened to music—to block out Falafel’s “crying,” he said. The play was brisk, and with each move Falafel, like all the Giants, was looking for fractional advantages. For most people, it is difficult to see the difference between a superlative player and a very good one. Later in the tournament, Jeremy Bagai, who is number 40 on the Giants list, pulled me aside during a game between two competitors who were playing at an exceptionally high level. “I haven’t seen anything like this,” he said. As a computer made clear, each move was just marginally better than the one Bagai would have made, but the aggregate effect was undeniable. Backgammon is a game of nano-distinctions.

  Falafel beat Mattig, but afterward a debate arose over one of his moves: was it mathematically correct, or had luck aided him?

  “I would be happy to bet on this, Falafel,” Mattig said.

  The stakes were set at $50. The position was entered into a computer, and players crowded around the screen.

  “Oh, the move is right!” Falafel called out. “You owe me!”

  “Wait, where is the move right?” Mattig said.

  “Right here,” Falafel said. “It’s significant. It’s like 1 percent.”

  Falafel called Kageyama over, showed him the position, and asked him what he would do. Kageyama gave the same answer that Mattig had, and Falafel nodded, smiled, and told him, “That’s a mistake.”

  Falafel was slowly making his way upward in the brackets. He had an easy time against Gary Oleson, a Walgreens pharmacist, who had come dressed in a black nylon shirt featuring a dragon strangling a tiger. While Falafel was up, 2–1, it was announced that the tournament would break for dinner. He stood and stretched, which emphasized his hemispherical belly.

  “So is it true you have a bet to lose weight?” O’Laughlin asked him.

  “Yeah,” Falafel said.

  At any given time, Falafel has more bets going than he can keep track of. He has bet on his abilities at tennis, on his dancing skills, on whether he can win an argument about Islam. (Many bets are for $1,000—a “ruble,” in Falafel’s lexicon—or much more.) When he was 38, Falafel bet five rubles that he would be married in two years. (He lost.) In San Antonio, he told Perry Gartner that he had a long-standing bet: for every day he did not have a child before turning 50 he owed someone $5. Gartner, perplexed, asked how that was even a bet. “Right,” Falafel said. “My downside is unlimited. But it is going to happen.” Lately, it seems, Falafel has been trying to bend a vice into a virtue—and no bet has more potential in this regard than his weight bet.

  “So what is it?” O’Laughlin asked. “A lot of money?”

  A woman walking by answered: “It’s for a ton of money!”

  “Thanks,” Falafel said.

  “Well, what is it?” O’Laughlin said. “A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?”

  Falafel, who has a gambler’s habit of speaking evasively, cradled his belly. “It’s for money,” he said.

  The weight bet originated last October, when Falafel flew to Tokyo to play in the Japanese Open. One night, he and several other backgammon players were crammed into Sushi Saito, a three-star Michelin restaurant that seats only seven people. A question was posed: could Falafel and his ex-roommate Genius achieve the same weight in a year’s time? By then, Falafel, who was enduring a difficult stretch of sports betting, had reached 310 pounds. Genius, who has a slight frame and is four inches shorte
r, weighed only 138. The question began to take on the contours of a wager, and the next day a taker emerged willing to give them 50-to-1 odds. The taker is a legendary backgammon hustler, perhaps the must successful in the game’s history. He hustled me into referring to him only as Mr. Joseph—even though anyone on the backgammon circuit will immediately recognize him. He has played Saudi royalty, and he claims to have won as much as $300,000 in a match. He once told another gambler, “I used to say I’d like to have a $100,000 day. I’ve had those, both winning and losing, many times since then. Now I say I want a million-dollar losing day, which means I am wealthy enough to have a million-dollar winning day.” His bet with Falafel might help him lose tremendously. No one involved is keen to see its magnitude documented, so just imagine the contents of a large armored suitcase in a James Bond movie.

  Mr. Joseph was in San Antonio too. An enormous man, he was dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, and, when Falafel and The Bone walked over, he and Genius were playing a variant of backgammon involving only three checkers, for $500 a point. He told Falafel, “You never win in tournaments. The Bone wins. He knows how to win. You find a way to lose to the worst players.”

  “I want to win too,” Falafel said. “But sometimes I get into a spot.”

  The Bone interjected, “It’s going to change now that he is losing weight.”

  “I play better if I am in better shape,” Falafel said. Since Sushi Saito, he had lost about 60 pounds, and Genius had gained 20. Just about any time I ran into Genius, he was eating a J.J. Gargantuan Unwich sandwich (739 calories), from Jimmy John’s. Mr. Joseph was unconcerned; he seemed to take pleasure in the bet’s manipulative aspects. In 1996, he told another player, Brian Zembic, that he would give him $100,000 if he got breast implants and kept them in for a year. Months later, Zembic got them, size 38C, and, to everyone’s surprise, he liked them. They helped him meet women, and he ended up marrying one of them. A year came and went—and $100,000 was wired to a Swiss bank account—but still he kept the implants in. Once, when Falafel came to visit, Zembic unbuttoned his shirt and danced. Falafel smiled and blushed.