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Poker has a long and storied history in the State of New York. Now, as lawmakers consider opening up a legal and regulated online poker market in New York, it’s worth taking a look at just how intertwined the game is with Empire State culture.

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Stu Ungar and the Ghoulies

In New York City, the popularity of the modern game of poker was born in the Ghoulash Joints, or Ghoulies, of the 1960s and 1970s. These Eastern European run back room and underground card games were the place where one of the greatest poker players in the history of the game got his start.

In fact, for three-time World Series of PokerMain Event ChampionStu Ungar, the Ghoulies were the family business.

Ungar was born and raised in Manhattan.His father Isidore Ungar ran a bar and social club called Foxes Corner that was essentially a Ghoulash Joint where illegal gambling was prevalent. Ungar learned the game of Gin Rummy there. When his father died in 1967, he dropped out of school to play professionally. It wasn’t long before he developed a reputation as one of the best players in the city. In fact, Ungar was practically unbeatable at the game.

Gin may have been Ungar’s game of choice, but most Ghoulies also spread poker as well.

From NYC to Las Vegas

Ten years after the death of his father, Ungar moved out to Las Vegas and his reputation followed him. In fact, he couldn’t get a game of Gin in Las Vegas because of it. Ungar soon turned to poker. By 1980, he’d become one of the best poker player on the planet, winning the 1980 WSOP Main Event. A year later he won his second bracelet in the $10,000 Deuce to Seven Draw event. He ultimately went on to repeat as WSOP Main Event Champion, capturing his third. Ungar won a fourth WSOP bracelet in the 1983 $5,000 Seven Card Stud event.

In the meantime, back in New York City, Ungar’s growing reputation helped drive poker’s popularity at the Ghoulash Joints where he got his start. In fact, New York City’s underground poker scene flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. It ultimately became the setting for cult hit film Rounders.

Back in Las Vegas, New York’s most famous card player struggled with drug addiction and gambling leaks for more than a decade. In 1997, Ungar cleaned up long enough to come back and win a third WSOP Main Event title. This cemented his status as one of the greatest poker players of all time. However, a little over a year later, he died at the age of 45 almost penniless in a motel at the end of the Las Vegas Strip.

From the Trop to the Taj and the Mayfair to the Chesterfield

Collusion ran rampant in the New York City Goulash Joint poker games of the 1970s. These places were filled with more than just chips, cards and Eastern European delicacies. They regularly housed gangsters, hustlers and a real criminal element. So it came as little surprise that a lot of the action moved South to Atlantic City, New Jersey once legal and regulated poker games became a reality there.

But that didn’t happen until The New Jersey State Legislature made live poker legal in the summer of 1993. This is when the Trump Taj Mahal opened a 50-table room and became the center of the poker Universe on the East Coast. The Taj was regularly filled with players from across New York State until some competition emerged in neighboring states. In 1995, Foxwoods opened a 35-table poker room in the middle of Massachusetts forest. Mohegan Sun soon followed suit. By 1998 a 40-table poker room at the Tropicana in Atlantic City opened up. This made the fight to draw New York City poker players to Atlantic City a two-horse race between the Trop and the Taj.

But even before then, a new and more sophisticated type of underground poker club emerged as a threat to the Ghoulash Joints inside the city.

The Mayfair Club

New York City’s Mayfair Club began as a bridge and backgammon club in the 1940s. Sometime in the early 1980s they traded checkers for chips and began playing poker. Games at the Mayfair ran thanks to wealthy financiers with a penchant for going on tilt and a group of increasingly savvy players taking a more scientific and cerebral approach to poker. Some of these players went on to become the most successful in the history of the game. Even to this day.

In fact, coming out of the Mayfair Club were players including Erik Seidel, who famously finished runner-up in the 1988 WSOP Main Event to Johnny Chan. Seidel went on to win eight WSOP bracelets and earn more than $31 million in tournament cashes, battling for the top spot on poker’s all-time leading money winners list to this day.

The list of Mayfair players who found global poker success also includes 1995 WSOP Main Event winner Dan Harrington and two-time WSOP bracelet winner, two-time World Poker Tour title holder and former Full Tilt Poker founder Howard Lederer.

The Mayfair Club started out in the basement of a Gramercy Park high rise and ultimately moved to a larger space on East 25th Street. Security at Mayfair, and other clubs of that ilk in the city, including the Diamond Club, was certainly a step up from the Ghoulies. Mayfair Club employees wore medallions allowing them to call the police with the touch of a button should a problem arise. Few did and New York City’s underground poker clubs ran with impunity from the law for the better part of 20 years.

Shining the spotlight on the underground

Sometime in the early 1990s, writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien discovered the scene and ultimately went on to immortalize it in the 1998 film Rounders. The Chesterfield Club in the film was modeled after the Mayfair Club and several characters were based on players from there.

The spotlight the film shined on the New York City scene may have been good for the growth of poker overall, but not the clubs.

Ultimately, underground card rooms like the Mayfair Club became victims to Mayor Rudy Giuliani‘s law and order campaign and a broken windows approach to law enforcement. In 2000, New York police raided the Mayfair Club and shut it down.

But, while high-profile spots like the Mayfair Club were shuttered, others popped up in it’s place. In fact, the New York city underground poker scene continued to flourish as poker’s popularity soon reached new heights around the world.

NYC underground unfazed by poker’s boom

With underground card rooms like the Mayfair Club shut down, some New York City players flocked to Atlantic City casinos and the huge poker rooms at the Trop and Taj. Others simply went across the street.

Manhattan-based underground card rooms like Union Square‘s Playstation and the Upper West Side‘s Players’ Club picked up the slack in the wake of Mayfair’s demise.

Players were well aware of the law. Running a poker game was illegal in New York, but playing in one wasn’t. So even when these new clubs got busted, the players walked away unscathed. Those running the games looked at a bust as the cost of doing business, and if players were forced to walk away with money left on the table, they often covered that as well.

New York City’s underground scene only grew when a Tennessee accountant named Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 WSOP Main Event.Rounders video rentals went through the roof, the WPT implemented the use of hole-card cameras bringing TV poker into the homes of millions of Americans and the game’s popularit

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