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Your post contains a very offensive comment.
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: Your post contains a very offensive comment. (RobertFontaine)
Date: Wednesday, 22 July 2015, at 4:55 a.m.
Robert, I don't know what you intended, but at the very least it was out of left field.
When I lived in Tucson my gym, while catering to an upper middle class crowd, had some serious body builders and power lifters. They supported themselves by working as personal trainers, so if I were reaching for a stereotype, that's the direction my mind would turn toward.
And that applies to pro game players. In bridge, with hundreds of thousands of players, the awarding of coveted points, and the fact that one must have at least a partner if not a team to compete, pros play as paid partners, write books, and give lessons. The bridge magazines run ads every month for bridge cruises, where a stable of teaching pros give lessons, partner up with cruisers for the daily tournaments, etc.
During the 90's I was a backgammon pro, but by then the easy pickings of the seventies were long gone. I made some money playing in tournaments, two weekly local tournaments, some monthly events, and ten to twelve bigger tournaments such as Vegas, Novi, etc. a year. As one of the top five or ten most successful tournament players of the decade I made about enough money from tournaments to starve. I also wrote articles, mostly gratis, and two books. The income from those would let me starve even quicker. I also taught, and the income from that? There are only a couple of people since about 1980 who made enough from teaching to call it an income. Most of what I made was playing in chouettes anywhere from 20-50 hours a week. The most we played for was $20 a point, and when the stakes finally went up in late 2000-early 2001 I was frozen out of the game by one of the other players who set up the chouettes. (There were some exceptions, Dean Muench, Neil, and Howard Ring were involved in bigger games from time to time, but at least two took some big hits to go with their rare big scores, and only Dean {one of the two taking big hits} played regularly. I am fairly sure I was Chicago's top earner during the nineties.)
Cumulatively I was making around $15,000-$20,000 a year on average from all backgammon sources. Luckily, I was also playing blackjack as a pro.
On the coasts and in Dallas it was different. There used to be closed games in Texas with millionaires playing for high stakes and one or two players cleaning up. Back in the seventies Hugh Hefner had a 24/7/365 chou for fairly high stakes at the Playboy Mansion West. Think of it: you have a bunch of wealthy celebrities with more money than skill, ladies like a pre-fame Vanna White swimming topless in the pool next to the game, and endless flow of food and drink and coke - No wonder World Bridge and Backgammon champion Billy Eisenberg disappeared there one day and wasn't seen for decades. And in New York, of course, you had legendary fish like The Crocodile showing up with suitcases full of money he had an itch to lose.
There are still rumors of big juicy games here and there. But for the most part the backgammon pros do what Neil does: find a day job that pays better.
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