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In 2005, an Israeli filmmaker made a documentary about him, called “Falafel’s Game.” In a scene filmed late one night in his hotel, Falafel says, “I’m like a kid inside.
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Fiddling with a dumpy black cell phone, he looked up, smiling, and asked, “How did you recognize me?”įalafel is typically unshaven, but the stubble is not forbidding, and his face easily fills with warmth. He is a big man, both in the tall way and in the overweight way, and he was dressed to relax: a soccer jersey with the logo of a Turkish cell-phone company on the front, and on the back the number seven and “ FALAFEL.” Propped up on his head was a yellow knitted cap, giving him the appearance of an oversized garden gnome. For Falafel, who wanted to dabble in a few quick hands while he waited for The Bone, the atmosphere was energizing. To the non-gambler, the interior of an Atlantic City casino is in no way a place of obvious joy. Still, he allows himself certain luxuries, and one of them is to hire a car rather than sit in a jitney.įalafel had promised that he would be in the Borgata’s poker ballroom, and when I arrived, at four-thirty on a gray January afternoon, the ballroom was half empty. Pretty much everything that he owns can fit into a large black suitcase. Until just a few months ago, he had no cell phone, no bank account, and no credit card. He can make ten thousand dollars in half an hour playing backgammon he can make many times that in an evening-and he can lose it all just as easily. The jitney that travels between the Atlantic City hotels is run-down and slow, a horrible way to travel. Finding them and hanging on to them is a skill. There are more of these than one might expect, but not a lot. He is committed to backgammon, which is his main source of income-to the extent that he can find wealthy people who want to lose to him in cash-only private games. Falafel is either a purist, or unable to master poker, or too lazy to really try, or all of the above. The Bone, who is from Ukraine by way of Brooklyn, used to play backgammon, but he switched to poker because there is more money in it.
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Now even Falafel calls himself Falafel.įalafel was in Atlantic City to support a friend he calls The Bone, a professional poker player who was registered in a tournament at the Borgata. Falafel’s real name is Matvey Natanzon, but no one calls him that, not even his mother, who calls him Mike, the name that he adopted when they emigrated from Israel to Buffalo-one leg in a long journey that began in Soviet Russia. In order to meet Falafel, the highest ranked backgammon player in the world, I took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, and then hopped a jitney to the Borgata Hotel.