How a Basement Card Club in New York Shaped Modern Poker

New York has produced clusters of talent in finance, law, publishing and advertising, for the most part because a small group of skilled people ended up in the same room together frequently enough to learn from one another. For nearly two decades, one such room was a low-profile card club (The Mayfair Club) located in Manhattan’s sub-basement. It also turned out a generation of players who changed how competitive poker is perceived today in the United States.

Inside a Basement Study Group

Mayfair did not start as a poker room. It started as a bridge and backgammon club and its early reputation was based on card theory rather than gambling. Poker arrived at the club later and spread through head-to-head matches before it became the main event.

It was the operating model that made this room unique. Games and tournament deals were done by the players themselves rather than by professional dealers, which removed the house from the game and placed responsibility within the membership to ensure standards of play and conduct. High stakes and small fields made it difficult for weak players to hide for long.

What resulted was more like a study group than a casino floor. Members of the club had been involved in years of games that are based on probability, position and readings of an opponent’s constraints. Those skills transferred directly. The club functioned as a knowledge cluster: shared analysis, immediate feedback and peer support without incentive to flatter anyone else.

The history of membership for the club also helps explain much. Al Roth (one of the leading bridge theorists of his time) played a big role in the club when it focused on bridge; Paul Magriel (the well-known backgammon player), who had been part of the club as it transitioned to backgammon, brought these skills along to poker.

Reputation as the Only Distribution Channel

Because the club could not market itself, everything was based on reputation. Access to the club came via personal vouching. Information about who was worth playing against, what games were scheduled when, and who settled debts promptly moved between members within their closed network. That network served as the entire quality control system and worked only because it was so small.

This is the part of the Mayfair story that translates best to today. When card rooms moved online in the 2000s, the private reputation network stopped scaling and that job shifted to public information. Directories and review sites that rate top poker sites by traffic, number of games available, software quality and payout history now do in the open what Mayfair members used to learn after spending a year in the room. Therefore, the underlying question that each player tries to answer hasn’t changed; they just get their answer from a source that posts the information publicly rather than whispering it.

The change also eliminated the club’s primary obstacle. Entry into these types of rooms no longer relies on knowing someone, but it also removes the free vetting process provided by a closed room.

The Record the Club Left Behind

Mayfair’s influence is easiest to measure at the World Series of Poker. In the 1987 Main Event, four club regulars finished near the top: Howard Lederer in fifth, Dan Harrington in sixth, Mickey Appleman in eighth and Jay Heimowitz in eleventh. The following year Erik Seidel finished second and Heimowitz placed fifteenth.

These finishes did not occur solely due to a hot streak of good luck. Harrington would go on to win the 1995 Main Event and reach another final table in both 2003 and 2004. Another member, Wendeen Eolis, would become the first female player to cash in the Main Event in 1986. Many members of the Mayfair would later write books or publish column articles that would become standard references for poker strategy in tournament settings.

Recognition for the Mayfair came long after those achievements. The movie Rounders depicted a poker room called “Chesterfield” based upon the Mayfair.

Television finally caught up with this story in 2008 when a week of programming on Poker After Dark was dedicated to six players who were all out of the Mayfair Club. They used it as much to share stories about the old room as they did to compete, and it introduced the Mayfair to a national audience that had never entered the premises.

Why New York Pushed the Game Underground

Although the club operated in violation of state statutes, there was a very distinct reason why this was possible. According to New York State statute, games are defined by their nature as either “games of skill” or “games of chance.” As such, poker falls into this category.

Under these laws, participating in a game of chance is permitted as long as you do not take any rake. However, operating a room and taking a rake is illegal. While authorities often turned a blind eye to this distinction while it was being practiced in several well-established clubs throughout New York City, they eventually began shutting down those rooms once they started to attract additional crime. The last major crackdown occurred in 2000, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s quality of life enforcement campaign closed the Mayfair along with many other cardrooms throughout the city.

What the Model Left Behind

In addition to its legend, the Mayfair is important because it exemplifies how experts emerge. High-stakes competition, constant feedback, and no built-in edge allowed a handful of players to develop skills at a rate that could not be replicated in traditional institutions. And although today’s model is much larger, far more transparent, and accessible to a wider audience than ever before, whether it will allow for similar rates of skill acquisition remains an unanswered question.