Sam Grizzle is a Sick Man

Charles Barkley has been getting plenty of unwanted attention in the last couple of days, surrounding his outstanding $400k gambling debt, so I'm not going to focus on that because it's already been done to death, but I'll stay in the same vein with a gambling story.

I thought this was amazing (not in a good way) - though a little off the beaten path, so bear with me.

Sam Grizzle is a Las Vegas gambler, infamous for his degenerate tendencies. Possessed of some amount of talent for poker, Sam is nonetheless constantly broke and having to borrow money from people. He has a perfectly apt last name - seeing as he is a grizzled, leather-assed old gambler who seems miserable ninety percent of the time.

This one particular anecdote I'm about to excerpt - which seems to neatly encapsulate the guy - was from an article written by Todd Brunson for CardPlayer magazine.

"About 14 years ago, I was playing in a $150-$300 hold'em game at Commerce Casino. Early in the morning, Sam Grizzle walks in and starts commenting on how good the game is. When asked why he's not playing, he pulls out his bankroll ($2) and sarcastically asks how much the buy-in is.

He leaves, and after talking to Puggy Pearson, comes back with $10,000 and starts to play. Now, after about an hour, Sam and Puggy get into an argument (about what, I can't remember offhand), and Puggy picks up his $10,000 and half of what Sam was winning, leaving Sam with about $400, far short of the required buy-in. Fortunately for Sam, no one says anything. Sam goes all in five or six times right away, and in about four hours, he is winning around $40,000.

If this isn't amazing enough, Sam quits the game, announcing that he's going to do us a big favor and go play the tournament, allowing us to keep what money we had left. (He also told us how smart he was and dumb we were, of course.) You can guess what happened next: Sam the genius wins the tournament and another $120,000 to go with the $40,000 he won from us earlier that morning; not bad for a guy who showed up at the casino with $2 in his pocket.

It's now 6 a.m. and he's been in the Commerce Casino for exactly 24 hours. It's time to get some sleep; that is, if he were a normal human, but Sam's far from that. He comes up to the top section, where there's a tough $800-$1,600 Razz (lowball) game in progress. Sam stumbles over and bellies up to the table, losing his entire $160,000 in a fairly short period of time.

Instead of becoming upset, Sam simply told everyone how dumb they were, shook his head, and walked out of the casino with the exact same $2 he had showed up with the day before. Just another day in the life of a gambler."

---JohnnyU