By Chuck Darrow
As we entered Hard Rock Live at Etess Arena for Smokey Robinson’s recent performance, I only half-sarcastically suggested to my friend, Howard, that we were standing on hallowed ground. That’s because the large vestibule/security checkpoint area was, for 23 years, the poker room of the Trump Taj Mahal Casino-Resort.
On June 25, 1993, Atlantic City’s legal- gaming industry entered a new era with the introduction of poker. On that day, for the first time since the state’s founding as a British colony in 1664, people over the age of 21 could play a legally sanctioned hand of America’s favorite card game.
Since the debut of legal casino gaming in May, 1978, poker had been shut out of local gambling dens by the state law that prevented casino customers from touching cards, regardless of which game they played. But in 1992, that prohibition was rescinded, and on the last Friday of June ’93, the cards were, as they say, in the air.
That day, three casinos—the long-gone Sands Hotel & Casino, Resorts Atlantic City (now Resorts Casino-Hotel) and the Taj Mahal (now Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City) were the first properties to offer the game. While the Sands was, by a few hours, the first to deal a “live” game, the Taj quickly became the local poker capital.
The main reason was its size: While Resorts and the Sands each had less than tables, the Taj opened with 65, which meant it could “spread” a wider variety of games and offer more seats (thus providing less waiting time for customers).
As noted, the space was located where today stands the reception area/lobby of Hard Rock’s 7,000-seat arena. It was sprawling, bordering on cavernous, and, in keeping with the somewhat exaggerated sense of opulence and “class” claimed by the Taj’s then-owner, the area was given a patina of ostentatiousness by its ridiculously ornate chandeliers. But the room almost always hummed with the indecipherable murmuring of scores of players and the cricket-chirping of chips being shuffled and stacked. Most weeknights and weekends—especially during the warm-weather months–there was a palpable energy there that simply wasn’t found in any other local card emporium.
Given the size of its poker room, and the fact that Atlantic City was, until 1995, the only jurisdiction east of the Mississippi River offering the game, the Taj quickly established itself as a poker mecca. Top-line pros began to visit, thus giving the card room even more cachet, and attracting players who either wanted to sit at a table with folks they’d eyeballed on television, or merely to watch said stalwarts play.
“It was the place that you could go play without violating any laws and where, if you were someone who wanted to get better at poker and study the best players, you were there,” Brian Koppelman told the Associated Press in 2016. “If you were someone who wanted to hustle people, you could go there and find tourists to hustle.”
Koppelman was so impressed by the Taj’s poker parlor that he and his partner, David Levien, set two separate scenes there in their screenplay for “Rounders,” the 1998 film that starred Matt Damon and Edward Norton as two young men immersed in New York City’s infamous “underground” poker demimonde.
In the first segment, the characters played by Damon and Norton join several fellow New York “rounders” at a Texas Hold ‘Em table where they proceed to feast on gullible and naïve Taj visitors.
In the second sequence, Damon’s Mike McDermott goes head-to-head in a hand with poker superstar Johnny Chan. Both scenes included shots of actual Taj staffers, including Tom Gitto, then the casino’s director of poker operations, and its public relations director, Steve Sless.
Before that, however, the room’s popularity and notoriety received a huge boost in 1996, when it hosted the first of 14 United States Poker Championship tournaments. The multi-day, multi-event competition was devised to be the east-coast equivalent of Las Vegas’ iconic World Series of Poker (in fact, the official announcement of the tournament was made not at the Taj, but at Vegas’ Horseshoe casino, where the annual competition was founded). It stands as the first big-time contest staged outside Vegas.
A number of top pros including Phil Helmuth, Huck Seed, T.J. Clothier, Kassem “Freddie” Deeb and Men “The Master” Nguyen participated in the ESPN-televised event, as did such Hollywood types as Yasmine Bleeth (“Baywatch”) and comedian Gabe Kaplan (“Welcome Back, Kotter”). These folks bestowed upon the Taj and its poker room heaping helpings of publicity and glamor (author’s note: The inaugural year’s media tourney was won by your favorite Shore Local Newsmagazine casino columnist).
As the new century dawned, the Taj continued as the east coast’s poker capital, but that began to change when Borgata Hotel, Casino & Spa opened in July, 2003. Its poker room, which was the only public area located below the main level, started luring players away from the Taj. But the Big B’s more damaging punch came in 2008, when its current, 52-table card room opened in a far-more luxe space adjacent to the casino.
The competition from Borgata accelerated the decline in popularity of the Taj’s poker room, and by the time the sprawling casino-hotel closed its doors in fall, 2016, there were but 24 tables in the card parlor, most of which sat empty on a daily basis.
Today, Borgata is one of three locations in town where poker is dealt (Harrah’s Resort Atlantic City and Tropicana Atlantic City are the others), but it’s the only one with a national profile thanks to the gambling den’s past association with the World Poker Tour and the current multi-million-dollar tournaments staged there throughout the year.
There is no debating Borgata’s status in the poker world as one of the nation’s finest facilities. But there was something about the Taj poker room’s golden era that, to some old-timers at least, will never be equaled, much less surpassed.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
