"It really is amazing what life can do," Mori Eskandani was saying. The Las Vegas-based poker professional says it again, punctuating the thought with a soft chuckle and a raised eyebrow look that seems to say, you just never know. "It really is amazing, when I think about where I was, and where I ended up . . ."
And the acquaintance for whom he is in the process of poking through a collection of life-altering experiences, waits to see where he is going to go with it.
Eskandani spent years as a young man moving in and out of failed business experiences, always discovering he could make up those losses at the poker table.
Surprise, surprise.
Then he discovered poker as something more than a hobby and went through this period where it seemed the real money was in tournaments. Big tournaments, little tournaments, he's cashed in too many to count over the years beginning in the mid 1980s, including events associated with the Horseshoe - both its old Hall of Fame event and the World Series, Caesars Palace, the Bellagio and the LA area's Bicycle Casino, to name a few.
But he would eventually learn "the hard way," as he puts it, over time that the real money, the consistent money was not tournaments.
"The money is in the every day grind that has you going to work every day an making what you need to pay the bills."
Bottom line, he has played poker successfully in the best-known casinos of Las Vegas and California for years, doing well enough to keep his attention from drifting. As Daniel Negreanu has written, Eskandani is one of the pros who could always be counted on to have an appreciation for the nuances associated with his trade, winning all the money he could while not indulging in the kind of over-the-top boorishness that has been known to drive newcomers and amateurs away.
But back before he was a poker player . . .
Eskandani had come to the U.S. in 1975 as an exchange student from Iran studying business, soaking up the learning that would enable him to be a benefit to his father's business back home. But Iran's war with Iraq changed all this. The Persian Gulf port of Abadan through which much of his father's business flowed was destroyed and the business that he expected to one day help run disappeared.
"Basically, the life that I had known was over."
What to do, what to do? He could not work because he was in the U.S. as a student but, interestingly, he did not have to have a permit to play poker. The powers that, the creators of immigration red tape, did not consider poker work. It was just, uh, playing poker.
His good friend and business school classmate was another poker buff named Yosh Nakano who had moved to Las Vegas to play poker.
Not Eskandani.
He couldn't think of poker than as a way of making a living. It wasn't a career. It did not feel like an "acceptable profession," not in those days. So he tried to find a business venture of some kind, something that would have a real job feel to it.
"I was always trying to start a business, but every time I did it ended being something that cost me money."
Poker was his kind of fallback position, a place, if you will, to go to when nothing else was working right.
There was a pickle business. "But it went sour," Eskandani grins, "and then there was a frozen meat pie business." A kind of halfbaked venture, as it turned out.
"The reason for each of these and others was I wanted to find something that I could get my family involved in. They had all immigrated here, 14 of them."
The failure of the meat pie business was enough to convince him in about 1985 that the time had come to give Las Vega and the poker business a try. It was time for Plan B and that always successful fallback strategy.
Let's see now . . . where had he put Yosh Nakano's phone number?
Mori set up shop at the Stardust, the biggest poker room on the Strip at that time. Good buddy Yosh staked him and Eskandai played eighty-something hours over about five days and won about six-thousand in the 3-6 and 10-20 hold 'em games.
The fallback plan still worked admirably and his week at the Stardust was enough to convince him after a couple years of not making any money elsewhere that perhaps he should take a different view of this game called poker. Within a matter of weeks he had his wife and family settled in Las Vegas. Which was about the time he met the man whose friendship would eventually help access opportunities that were beyond everyone's ability to imagine in the 1980s.
The combination of poker and television as a relationship everyone would be talking about was still years away, but some of the important pieces in a life-changing strategy were beginning to fall into place.
Eskandani met Eric Drache, the poker room manager at the Golden Nugget on a day in 1986 when he was leaving the Nugget after a good day at the table that had put something like $18,000 in his pocket. He had just finished near the top in a stud tournament there.
He was on his way out of the casino and remembers a floorman hurrying up to him asking if he was sure he wanted to leave because they were just starting what had the makings of a good 1,500- 3,000 dollar stud game.
Eskandani remmbers how he gave Drache's strategy an approving nod and a smile - "Eric wanted to keep the money I had won in the cardroom" - but on that day Mori was taking it home.
His triendship with Drache has grown over the years and today they are business partners, doing much of the heavy lifting and moving associated with televised poker productions that include titles familiar to poker buffs everywhere - the National Heads-up Championship, the Poker Superstars Invitational and the Intercontinental Poker Championship that was won this past year by Yosh Nakano. Eskandani and Drache have worked as consultants on the Mansion poker production that he characterizes as a "huge project."
"The thing I discovered about Eric," Eskandani says, remembering how it was when they were still getting to know each other, was that people trusted him 100 percent."
He would eventually go to work at a floorman at the Mirage - Drache opened that room - and stayed on, eventually moving to the Bellagio in a similar position as Drache left the company. Eskandani began to play less poker several years ago as opportunities related to poker on television began to blossom and he found that there are only so many hours in the day.
So he views the explosion of Internet poker over the last couple of years as a bit of an abstraction, a view from a distance. His interest continues to be in the live action that doesn't exist for people staring at computer screens.
"If I were indulging my old ways, I doubt that I would be one of the people spending a lot of time on the Internet. I understand its appeal for some people and I know there have been a lot of people making money at it.
"But I'm just from the old school. I want to look you in the eye. I want to be able to grab my chips and see how the guy in gonna react to it. The poker I prefer is more than just working your way through a series of mathematical equations."
The list of televised poker projects that keep he and Drache busy began several years ago with what Eskandani thinks of as "The dream of Henry Orenstein," the poker-playing visionary and inventor responsible for the technology that enables home viewers to see the hole cards of each players as they are sitting at the table trying to figure each other out.
Eskandani and Drache knew all the right people in Las Vegas but it was Orenstein's technological expertise that eventually had television viewers everywhere deciding that they liked what they were seeing. How has Las Vegas poker changed in the last 20 years or so?
The importance of the friendly hustle has diminished to the point that it had almost no role, according to Eskandani.
"It used to be that we had to be sure the tourist bringing new money into the game was having a satisfactory experience, something that would bring him back."
Other areas of the casino had their carefully structured promotions of one kind or another, but the success of the poker rooms rested heavily on the images that players projected.
"That was a very big part of the business. You almost had to be an entertainer . . "You don't see much of that kind of attitude any more because the tournaments are so huge, they're attracting people who are just fighting to get in the door."
Thinking about what this means, "To me it is a good time to be a professional poker player. A man does not have to work so hard."
