Underground poker clubs are the new hot spots of New York City. Like finding a trendy back alley bar in L.A., being seen at a seedy card room is a rite of passage among today's celebrities.
Several high profile celebrities have been spotted playing poker around Manhattan's poker joints, including Alex Rodriguez, Phil Hellmuth, Tony Soprano Jr., Macaulay Culkin, and Hank Azaria.
''It is a place where they know they can just play and be themselves,'' said a Jeremy, a frequent patron of the Players' Club, one of the hottest poker dens in New York.
According to Jeremy, the media is only aware of a small percentage of the celebrities who frequent NYC card rooms. ''No one is going to bust out an autograph, you know, and ask for a signature. Poker here is intense, but the people are low key,'' Jeremy explained.
''We want people to respect our privacy and we in turn respected other people's privacy,'' he adds.
Authorities have already seized $100,000 in cash and arrested 39 employees of the Players' Club and the Play Station. While the employees may face as many as four years in prison, the poker players were checked against outstanding warrants and eventually released without being charged.
The Players' Club and the Play Station are two of the largest clubs in New York. However, cracking down on them had little effect on the underground poker scene. If anything, these well publicized raids only added to the poker scene's allure.
''This is a yuppie thing, people having fun, not degenerate gamblers,'' said one police source.
For many years, the established poker clubs are an open secret among law enforcement officials. The Mayfair Club, for example, occupied an entire basement floor of a luxury hi-rise building in midtown. With the recent crackdowns, however, many of the old established clubs have closed their doors, only be replaced by many smaller clubs in ever harder to find locations.
This growth is inevitable, given that a ten-table card room can generate as much as $35,000 of revenue per night. And with the free advertising from the celebrity-obsessed New York media, filling up the poker tables should be relatively easy.
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