Sharking, Gambling, and Drugs: The Dark Side of Pool

What sharking is, people think of pool shark as being someone who's like really good at pool. That's not what we call sharking. Sharking for the people that don't know is like if you were about to shoot and I moved and distracted you on purpose. Like I wait until you're right about to move and I'll drop my cue. Or I'll spill a drink. I'll make some noise. People do things on purpose to try to distract people. Yep, that happens a lot. Especially gambling. That's some bitch shit. Oh yeah, they try it all the time too. But it's some bitch shit. When someone does that, that's bitch ass shit. Like what are you doing? Just play. There's a lot of moves even when it comes to pro players too. Is there like what? I don't really want to mention names. No, you don't have to mention names. So I was playing the guy along race last year and for example everybody knows like if you win, so we're playing on a race to 100 and every day we're playing on race to 33. So I ended up winning day one and I should be the one breaking the balls next day. So I come in and we're about to begin and he's like are we legging again? So I'm like no bro, it's my break. So there was a lot of different moves like we agreed to play with one Magic Rake and he ended up stealing the Magic Rake and then we were on the break and I broke the balls, make four balls on the break and I was dead out and he's like are you practicing or what are you doing? I'm like no, we're playing. I just asked you a minute ago are you ready to start and he's like I didn't say anything? I was thinking you're practicing. This is a professional who did this? Yeah. I think you should say his name. What is his rhyme with? What is his name rhyme with? Rhyme with? What is it rhyme with? Like Bogan rhymes with Rogan, filler rhymes with Diller. Everybody will understand. He was a Filipinos. Oh okay. So he was, well you know they're probably gambling a lot of money right? We played for 20 grand yeah. Yeah yeah. A big chunk of money. Yeah a big chunk of money and people get, they get a little feisty. Yeah yeah. In gambling do you think that people take drugs when they gamble? Yeah absolutely. Oh yeah. Yeah. What do you think they play, what do they think they take? Adderall. Mmm amphetamines. Yeah. Because you can see if you go to Derby City Classic you will see people play for two, three days straight without any breaks. That's a heart attack special right there. Oh yeah it is. It is and they play some crazy games like that. These aren't the healthiest people in the world either that are taking this Adderall and staying up for days. Like they're a fucking, they're burning it. Oh yeah it's unbelievable. They play some crazy ass games like 15 ball bang game where you just, it's an old man game where you just kind of clip the balls and you're just banging balls around for like 15 minutes. So it's a bank game? Yeah. 15 balls? Yeah but there is a lot of moving part like you just play safety, safety, safety is going over. Right until you have a good bank shot. After 50 minutes of playing safety you have a bank shot most likely you're going to miss it and then it goes over and over and over and they do it for like days and days. So Adderall's the big one? It is a big one. I'm sure people play on cocaine. I would think cocaine would be a problem. I've never done cocaine but for what I understand it doesn't last that long. No but they're taking breaks. One time I've seen the guy was using cocaine instead of the powder for his cue. What? That's an expensive powder right there. He was putting cocaine on his fingers? Yeah and then they're like oh my god. Cocaine for baby powder? Oh my god that's insane. He was fucked up like completely. Was he playing well? He was playing decent. I mean he's a decent player. I don't know his name but he was just an action junkie. Well like I said about that book Buddy Hall I think it's from Rags to Riflemen is the name of the book. I have a copy of it and it's a very old book and the way it was made it looks like it was self-published like the font would be different sizes on different pages. It's a rare book. You'll find it like sometimes on AZ Billiards someone has a copy of it for sale but it's pretty valuable now. But they all played on amphetamines and they would all play for days and days and days but it fucked a lot of people's lives up. Because they all got addicted to that stuff. Of course yeah I mean I've played a lot of matches that lasted more than 10 hours and for me it's really really tough because I never do anything like that. I drink water and maybe I'll drink Pepsi if I feel that I need some energy some sugar. So yeah of course it gives them big advantage in matches like that. Well there's so many Filipinos came over here and robbed everybody. It was amazing and the best version of that is Efren. When Efren first came over here he had a fake name. Oh really? Yeah yeah yeah Efren when he first came over here. God damn it what was his name? It was like a Spanish name. See if you can find it. So he played his very first tournament under a fake name because he is God I can't believe I can't remember it. Generally I can remember it. But he played under a fake name because even though it was like the 1980s he assumed that someone had been to the Philippines and knew that this guy was the king over there. And then can you find it? The Efrens just google Efren played under a fake name. Yeah Caesar Morales. Caesar Morales that's it. So that was his name. So he came over here under Caesar Morales and robbed everybody and then when he came back he was Efren Reyes and everybody was like ahhh we got fucked. There it is. Caesar Morales stuns the field at Reds. This was back when he was playing with a $5 pool cue. He had a pool cue. That looks like a Dennis Harkow on the left. It does look like him and I don't think it is. Because Dennis is quite a bit older. Yeah younger. Younger rather than that guy. But that was in Houston. What year is that? 1985. 1985. Yeah so he came over, stuns the field. Dave came over here and fucked everybody up. They had no idea that he would go on to be the greatest of all time. Wade Crane. Wade Crane was a bad motherfucker. Dave Matlock. Look at all these guys. Yeah. Mike Gugliasi. Wow. Interesting. Bobby Hunter. Danny DiLiberto. All those names. Yeah Wade Crane also had a fake name. He called himself Billy Johnson. Yeah Billy Johnson was Wade Crane's road name. Well on the internet it wasn't around there was a big thing I think. Yeah. Well that was his, he would go around playing as Billy Johnson because everybody had heard of Wade Crane. And so he would just show up places and you know people had no idea and then he would rob him. That's perfect yeah. Well there was a great book called Playing Off The Rail. Have you ever heard of that book? Playing Off The Rail was a book by this guy David McCumber who at one point in time was Hunter S. Thompson's editor when he was writing for a newspaper. And they took this guy Tony Anagoni who was a really good pro and they went on the road with like $35,000. So they like taped the money to his body and shit in some places and they did it for a book. And the book is still available. You can still find the book somewhere. It's well worth it if you're a pool player, if you're into pool to get this book. Because it's really, David McCumber is a really good writer. It's really well written. And Tony Anagoni became a friend of mine and I actually did commentary with him once on a match back in LA back in the day. And I became friends with him and played with him a bunch of times and tragically I think about a year and a half or so ago he took his own life. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah, very sad. But in that book they went to Chelsea Billiards. They went to all these different places where they hustled and they just set up matches and set up games and played people. But it just gives you this kind of taste, especially because McCumber is such a good writer. It gives you this feeling, this really interesting depiction of what that life is like. These guys that do things like that, like Wade Crane did when he called himself Billy Johnson. That is a whole subset of Americana where these guys would travel around, stay in shitty hotels and gamble. Yeah, it's kind of the same picture nowadays still. Yeah, there's still a lot of that. It's fucking cool. It's a really cool part of this subculture that people don't know about. I've always admired people who did it. I always thought that was a cool way to live your life. It's a crazy, reckless... But the people that did it, they were such fucking characters. They were such interesting people. Yeah, I mean all of them. It's a crazy lifestyle. I don't know if I would recommend it to my kids. No. But it's... I mean, yeah. Maybe you would if pool becomes something really big. If pool does grow to the point where there's million dollar purses. Absolutely, but not the gambling side. I went through a lot of that and it's shady. Did you ever get in a situation where people pulled out guns or people were robbing people? No, but my friend did in Philippines. What happened? He beat the guy out of a small amount of money and the guy didn't want to pay him. He wasn't even pushing him to pay. He was like 100 bucks. But he was the only foreigner in the building and he had a guy with him that took care of him and kind of made games for him. That guy started saying something in Tagalog, in their own language. The guy pulled his gun and started shooting in the air, trying to say that I'm not paying here. He was like an authority or something. For 100 bucks. I mean... Imagine what it'd do for 51,000... Gambling junkies. Yeah, that's the thing. Gambling junkies. It's not about the money for him. Right. And there's so many of those guys that are connected to underworld characters. There's all these wild gamblers that are almost all at least one step removed from criminals. Yeah. If they're not criminals themselves, they might have a criminal who's a backer. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of drug money involved, I think, in gambling. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There was always guys that were backing people back in my day when I was hanging around New York where there were these guys that were drug addicts or drug dealers. They were selling coke. Yeah. And they had that money and that was how they burned the money. They would come in and gamble it. Yeah, they're the same thing tomorrow. Yeah. I remember one time we went to Harlem to play this guy because these pimps, they would have a ton of money and they would play big money one pocket. And so we went down to Harlem and here I am, this dorky, fresh... I was your age. I was like, dude, just hanging around in Harlem in this fucking heavy duty hardcore pool room where these pimps would go and gamble big money. And they'd come in with flashy clothes on and it was just such a scene, man. It was such a scene. It was so cool. It was just to sit there. I mean, I wasn't playing those guys. I sucked. But I was with my friend Johnny and this guy, Mount Vernon Tommy, who was like a real top player from the area. And this guy, Juan, who was also this killer. And we would all go down together. We'd take this drive down together to Harlem. And at the time, the garbage workers were on strike. So all the garbage was stacked outside. So when they would take garbage out to the curb, nobody would throw the garbage out. So there was six foot high piles of garbage that lined the whole street, not bullshitting. So you'd walk down the sidewalk and rats would be everywhere. I mean everywhere. You'd see the garbage bags moving. They would scramble in front of your feet. I'm like, oh my God. Like I grew up in the suburbs of Newton, Massachusetts, right? That's where I went to high school. And this very nice upper middle class neighborhood. I was a fresh faced little cute kid. And I'm wandering around with these degenerate gamblers in a pool hall in Harlem filled with pimps. Wow. But I got out of there. I wouldn't trade those experiences for the world because it was so interesting to see that the subculture of these gamblers and pool players and all they cared about was like, who's the killer? Like who's the guy? They all had these crazy names and everybody had these cool nicknames. Nicknames, yeah. Oh my God. It was such an amazing time. But it's such, that's what scares me about it. I think it's like it has, right now it's got, like we said, this resurgence, but there was a time where I thought this could go away.