Nick Dandolos
#Money #Opportunity #Player “The only difference between a winner and a loser is character.”- Nick Dandolos. #Character #Differences #Gambling “The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing.”- Nick Dandolos. #Winning #Gambling #Next.
- Nick Dandolos: Professional Greek Gambler Nick Dandolos was what one may consider a well-rounded gambler, as he excelled at betting on horses and playing poker throughout the early to mid 1900s. His friends called him, “Nick the Greek,” and his reputation spread across Europe as.
- He was scheduled to star in early 1976 in the move 'Nick the Greek', as famed poker player Nick Dandolos. Donald Wrye was to direct, but the movie was never made. When Savalas was hospitalized at Huntington Memorial Hospital for bladder cancer, it had already spread to his hip bones and pancreas.
- Explore the best of Nick Dandolos Quotes, as voted by the QuoteFancy community. Download free high quality (4K) pictures and wallpapers with Nick Dandolos Quotes. Updated for 2021.
| Born | Nikolaos Andreas Dandolos 27 April 1883 |
|---|---|
| Died | 25 December 1966 (aged 83) Gardena, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Professional gambler |
Nikolaos Andreas Dandolos (Greek: Νικόλαος Ανδρέας Δάνδολος; April 27, 1883 – December 25, 1966), commonly known as Nick the Greek, was a Greek professional gambler and high roller.
Early life[edit]
Dandolos was the son of wealthy parents. He attended the Greek Evangelical College and earned a degree in philosophy. When he was 18 years old, his grandfather sent him to the U.S.A. with an allowance of $150 per week. Although Dandolos settled down in Chicago he eventually moved to Montreal where he began gambling on horse races.
Dandolos was known throughout his life for winning and losing large sums of money. After winning over $500,000 on horse racing, he moved back to Chicago where he lost it all on card and dice games. He quickly became a master of these games, however, and became a prime attraction at casinos when he would play in them.
Poker and gambling[edit]
From January 1949 to May 1949, Dandolos played a two-person 'heads up' poker match against poker legend Johnny Moss where the two played virtually every variation of the game that existed at the time. The game, set up by Benny Binion as a tourist attraction, is widely credited as being the inspiration for the modern day World Series of Poker.
At the end of this five-month poker marathon, down an estimated $2–4 million, Dandolos uttered what has become one of the most famous poker quotes ever: 'Mr. Moss, I have to let you go.'[1]
One urban legend claims that Dandolos once had the opportunity to escort Albert Einstein around Las Vegas. Thinking that his gambling friends may not be familiar with him, Dandolos allegedly introduced Einstein as 'Little Al from Princeton' and stated that he 'controlled a lot of the numbers action around Jersey.'[citation needed] According to Dandolos's own testimony in Gambling Secrets of Nick the Greek, just before the end of World War II, he got a call from a friend at the United States State Department. The caller said that there was someone who was looking for a poker game on a weekend in Manhattan. Dandolos reminded his friend that gambling is illegal in New York, but his friend said that he would see to it that no law enforcement would get involved. At the game, according to Dandolos, he introduced Albert Einstein as 'little Al from Jersey.'
Another urban legend has him winning one million dollars against a Texan. In the early hours of the morning, Nick felt tired and called an end to the game. The Texan accused him of chickening out while the going was good. Nick the Greek then called for a new deck of cards, shuffled them and asked the Texan if he wanted to cut the cards (high card wins) one time, for double or quit. The Texan declined and they went home.[citation needed]
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman also met Nick the Greek, according to the autobiographical Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Nick explains how he wins big not by playing the tables, but by knowing the odds at the tables and betting against others who have superstitious beliefs about the outcome. He then relies on his reputation to bet against others.
In Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out, the author attributes this gambling wisdom to Nick the Greek: 'Never bet on anything that can talk.' [1][permanent dead link]
Later life[edit]
Near the end of his life, Dandolos was near-broke and playing $5 limit draw poker games in Gardena, California. When asked by a fellow player how he could once play for millions and now be playing for such small stakes, Dandolos supposedly replied, 'Hey, it's action, isn't it?'
Death[edit]
He died on Christmas Day in 1966 and was a charter inductee of the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979.
Legacy[edit]
It's estimated[by whom?] that he won and lost over $500 million in his lifetime. He himself claimed that he went from rags to riches over 73 times. He donated over $20 million to education and charity.[2]
A book by Ted Thackrey was published in 1968 titled Gambling Secrets of Nick the Greek.
A novel about Nick's life was written by Harry Mark Petrakis in 1978 titled Nick the Greek.
In popular culture[edit]
In the Damon Runyon short story, 'Romance in the Roaring Forties,' Nick the Greek is mentioned by name, as a guest at the Prohibition-era New York wedding of Miss Billy Perry. Other guests are Waldo Winchester (a thinly-disguised Walter Winchell), Skeets Boliver, Feet Samuels, and Good Time Charley Bernstein, showing Nick as part of the louche guys-and-dolls culture of Broadway in the Roaring Twenties.
He also appears in Runyon’s short story “Blood Pressure,' playing at Nathan Detroit’s floating crap game in New York. The unnamed narrator has been dragged into the game by a gangster, and notes that it is more than somewhat full of very tough guys indeed, there with some of the towns highest rollers:“...there they are wedged up against the table with Nick the Greek, Big Nig, Grey John, Okay Okun, and many other high shots, and they all have big coarse G notes [thousand dollar bills] in their hands which they are tossing around back and forth as if these G notes are nothing but pieces of waste paper.'
A brief appearance is made by Nick at a party in Runyon’s short story “Madame La Gimp,' where he impersonates Heywood Broun.
See also[edit]
- Nick the Greek named as unindicted co-conspirator in Ray Ryan’s attempted kidnapping/extortion[3]
References[edit]
Nick Dandalos
- ^Moe, Albert Woods.: Nevada's Golden Age of Gambling, Puget Sound Books, 2001, ISBN0-9715019-0-4
- ^Jon Bradshaw, Fast Company p219
- ^https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/270558/john-marshall-and-charles-del-monico-v-united-states/
Welcome to Card Player’s new series, Men of Action, which will explore the lives of some of history’s greatest gamblers and sportsmen.
Nick the Greek, reigning King of the Gamblers, tosses another $5 chip into the pot. At this point in his life, he’s playing as high as he can. Most of his once-thick black hair has gone the same way as his money — down the drain.
It doesn’t matter to the Greek. The stakes were always relative for him and so this is as good as calling $20,000 against Johnny Moss. It’s a great, final test of his philosophy. It’s a way to make sure he’s being exactly who he is, Nicholas Andrea Dandolos, celebrated gambler and gentlemen extraordinaire.
“I play for the risk, not for the money,” he once said. “A trout fisherman fishes for sport, not for meat. This attitude creates mystery in the mind of the opposition. Nobody wants to put a mystery out of action. They want to see how it comes out.”
Soon he would be dead, the perfect end to a perfect story, about as broke as a street urchin, mourned by American royalty and buried in a golden casket. Rock bottom, broke for the last time, and lowered into the ground at Woodlawn Cemetery in, where else, but Las Vegas.
“Death is a sound sleep undisturbed by foolish dreams,” he said a decade earlier to an exhausted dealer who only wanted to sleep.
“Death is a chute to hell,” groaned the dealer.
“Nothing of the kind. Hell dies with you,” Dandolos said.
This is how Dandolos entered American consciousness as the “King of All Gamblers” when Collier’s Magazine published a three-part article describing the millions and millions of dollars the Greek won and lost living the life of a philosopher-gambler.
Written by Collier’s writer Richard Donovan and Hank Greenspun, the work painted the picture of Nick the Greek as a man who flits on the surface of the mysterious gambling world with a dignity never before seen.
He’s not only the King of the Gamblers, but he’s the “Fabulous” King, dressed in a bow tie and blazer, his dark hair shoved back away his face, a cigar as close by as a philosophical quip on the stupidity of superstition or the meaning of money to a man like himself.
“What came went,” he said, addressing why he could only be even, as he claimed. “I have been rich and busted 73 times in my life. The exhilaration of this form of economic existence is beyond my power to describe.”
Where the money came from was a bit of a mystery. Born in 1883 in Crete, he came to the United States as a young man with an allowance, a well-off college grad with a degree in Philosophy and love of poetry. A man who spoke five languages and recited Socrates.
The Collier’s article claims he ran his modest stake up to $500,000 betting horses in Canada with the help of a jockey who may or may not have been fixing the races. The next 30 years of his life was spent living off his family’s fortune gambling whatever money he could get his hands on in Chicago, New York, New Orleans, gambling in the highest stratospheres in places run by gangsters until he eventually landed in a then cow-poke town called Las Vegas.
He sustained his lifestyle, according to Collier’s, by one of four ways: A small group of wealthy Greeks, a large poor group of Greeks, a wealthy New York widow, or various out-of-state mobsters. Collier’s also said that Dandolos gave away more than $20 million to charities and each morning, he handed out cash to people who lined up to ask for it.
The series followed Dandolos around Vegas for a few days, watching him blow $90,000
here, $60,000 there, all the while remaining upright and civilized, an example of how to be a gentleman, a man with such a disregard for money that he’s sent at least $100,000 to the cleaners in a pair of pants and left a hat hanging on a rack in a restaurant with $80,000 stuck in the band.
Hank Greenspun, the co-author, had a very good reason to build Dandolos into a must-see attraction. Greenspun not only owned the Las Vegas Sun, he was a major player in the real estate market in Vegas, owning land that is now Henderson. The chance to give Collier’s two-million readers another reason to visit was priceless. Nick the Greek was gold.
To poker aficionados, Dandolos is most famous for facing off against Johnny Moss in 1951, in a spectacle that is linked to the beginning of the World Series of Poker. The game of mixed poker swelled into a match of five-card stud that supposedly lasted several months and ended with Dandolos uttering his famous line of surrender “Mr. Moss, I have to let you go.”
That match was first mentioned in the January 1971 Sports Illustrated feature article on Moss, but Moss didn’t address the game himself. The author, Edwin Shrake, mentions it as a story the old gamblers like to tell. According to Shrake, the year was 1951.
Moss talked about the game in interviews later and said it was 1949, that he won $4 million and eventually left Vegas several years later $500,000 in debt because he loved to play craps.
There’s a very real possibility the game never took place, or at least didn’t take place as it’s now imagined, with Nick the Greek facing down Moss, hour after hour, railbirds straining over each other’s shoulders to get a better peak at the exposed cards and all those chips and to see what it all looks like, to live the life of a gambler.
There is no record of Dandolos talking about the game, not even in the major feature article published in Collier’s that was as much public relations as it was biography. There is not one newspaper article from either 1949 or ‘51 that mentions the match. Dandolos’ obituaries do not mention anything about poker.
Benny Binion is said to have only agreed to set up the match for Dandolos if he would play it publicly as a sort of side-show. Binion was a master gimmick-man, yet, if this was the case, he failed to generate one news story about the historical match despite his friendship with Hank Greenspun.
Also, in the Collier’s article, a large paragraph lists the many people Dandolos gambled with, and nowhere is Johnny Moss’s name. Of the 20 or so people mentioned, not one is the Texas gambler.
Ray Ryan is there, however, right between Swifty Morgan and Blondie Hall. Twenty-three years later, Ryan got into his car, turned the ignition and then evaporated in an explosion set by a mobster name Marshall Caifano.
That week-long game of low-ball played by the poolside of the Flamingo ended up with Ray Ryan dying in a fireball.
Nick Dandolos
While the details of the Moss-Dandolos game are sketchy, a match of five-card stud lowball between Dandolos and California businessmen and gambler Ryan are a bit more forthcoming because the episode ended up in the courts.
The two played five-card stud lowball for about a week. Dandolos lost a minimum of $323,000, but he claims to have lost more like $550,000 before they called it quits.
Did Ryan have a guy on the roof with a spyglass reading the Greek’s hole card, sending the information through a buzzer connected to his leg via shortwave radio or did he win the pile of cash fair and square?
Nobody really knows if Dandolos suspected this ruse or if Caifano convinced him it was true years later, but in any case, it gave Caifano enough of an excuse to try to shake-down Ryan since the Greek was a friend of the Chicago syndicate and mobster enforcers are usually madmen.
Caifano was a five-foot-nothing pile of evil. He was described by the Feds as an enforcer for the mob and he is tied to – but never convicted – of multiple murders. He allegdely really liked blowing people up.
At the end of April, 1963, Caifano contacted Ryan in Vegas and told him they wanted $60,000 a year and $15,000 for Dandolos to make up for his slight. They hit him in the chest, to make sure he knew they were serious, and left him shaken but determined not to give in.
Caifano and his associates did too good of job scaring Ryan. When they showed up at his hotel room on May 1, he ran, panicked, into the lobby, shouting “Shoot me in the back. That’s the way you do business.” And then he ran to the Feds who charged Caifano and a few of his cohorts with extortion and fraud.
During Caifano’s extortion trail, Dandolos was asked by a U.S. Attorney was his profession was.
“Retired,” said the 81-year-old.
When asked if his former profession would have been gambling, the Greek said, “That
description might fit it.”
Dandolos testified that Ryan owned him $109,000. He said that Ryan made a deal to pay-off Dandolos to save himself embarrassment of being known as a cheat. He also distanced himself from Caifano and the two other men.
“I never authorized anyone to collect any money, because I thought Ryan would pay me, of course,” he said at the extortion trial in 1964.
Caifano got 10 years. Dandolos tried to sue Ryan for $1.5 million, but the case was tossed.
After Caifano got out of jail, Ray Ryan’s car blew up when he tried to start it. That was in 1977. Caifano was never charged and died of natural causes in 2003 at the age of 92. Funny how that worked out.
Dandolos spent his last days in a hotel in Beverly Hills, playing low-stakes poker in Gardenia until he died on Christmas day in 1966. He was 83. He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in its first class in 1979, along with Johnny Moss.
Frank Sinatra cried at his funeral.