Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas - Hardcover

Kushner, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400064074 ISBN 13: 9781400064076

Publisher: Random House, 2005

Synopsis

If you think a gang of real-life geeks can’t take on the world and win big . . . think again. And whatever you do, don’t sit down across a gaming table from Jon Finkel, better known as Jonny Magic. Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids is his amazing true story: the jaw-dropping, zero-to-hero chronicle of a fat, friendless boy from New Jersey who found his edge in a game of cards–and turned it into a fortune.

The ultimate bully-magnet, Finkel grew up heckled and hazed until destiny came in the form of a trading-card game called Magic: The Gathering. Magic exploded from nerdy obsession to mainstream mania and made the teenage Finkel an ultracool world champion.

Once transformed, this young shark stormed poker rooms from the underground clubs of New York City to the high-stakes tables online, until he landed on the largest card-counting blackjack team in the country. Taking Vegas for millions, Finkel’s squad of brainy gamers became the biggest players in town. Then they took on the town’s biggest game, the World Series of Poker, and walked away with more than $3.5 million.

Thrilling, edgy, and ferociously feel-good, the odyssey of these underdogs-turned-overlords is the stuff of pop-culture legend. And David Kushner, acclaimed author of Masters of Doom, masterfully deals out the outrageous details while bringing to life a cast of characters rife with aces, kings, knaves . . . and more than a few jokers. If you secretly believe every player has his day, you’re right. Here’s the proof.

About this title

About the Author:

David Kushner is the author of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Rolling Stone, Wired, Spin, Salon, and The New York Times. He lives in New Jersey. Visit his website at www.davidkushner.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1. DAWN OF THE DORK

"Yo no soy marinero! Yo no soy marinero! Soy capitan! Soy capitan! Soy capitan! Bamba bamba! Bamba bamba! Bamba bamba!"

Fourteen-year-old Jon Finkel rocked inside his Lilliputian chair in the back of the classroom, singing at the top of his lungs. As his gelatinous body swayed, his bottom roll of stomach fat bulged under the desk's Juicy Fruit stalactites. A black stained Phillies T-shirt flapped over his loose jeans. His long tangled hair curled like a roller coaster into what he affectionately termed his "Jewfro." An enormous pair of square glasses slipped down a long, large nose that bent in the middle like it was perpetually ducking a punch. His eyes were two frantic bugs sealed in novelty ice cubes.

As he hit the last note of the song, he pushed his glasses back into place and raised his flabby arms in the air with a triumphant "Hey!" But no applause came. This wasn't music class. It was geography. And by the looks of the bored, pencil-chewing students around him, this strange and unprovoked burst of song was nothing unusual. Finkel, the biggest loser in school, was just being Finkel again.

In the social hierarchy of eighth grade at Park Middle School in Fanwood, New Jersey, in 1992, Finkel was anything but a high roller. Here, as in most schools, there were two ways for a boy to be an outcast. You could be smart. Or you could be weird. If you were dumb and normal, that was fine, particularly if you could hit a ball far with a stick. Finkel embodied the worst of both worlds: he was both smart and weird.

Naturally, the kids hated him.

Finkel's unique and stubborn smarts ran in the family. His dad, Mark, a computer analyst, was a headstrong and liberal math nerd who made a career out of speaking his mind. While working as a cryptographer for the National Security Agency, he spoke out loudly against the Vietnam war. When he lost his security clearance for smoking pot, he got drafted-only to declare himself a conscientious objector.

While working as a VISTA volunteer, a community service group, in Brockport, New York, Mark met Claire Byrne, an elementary school teacher who had dropped out of a different institution: the convent. After six years studying to be a nun, Claire decided her faith wasn't strong enough to inspire a lifetime vow. She wanted something new. She found it in Mark, an argumentative Jew from Philadelphia. The two married, and two days after their first child was born on May 18, 1978, Claire and the boy converted to Judaism.

After moving to New Jersey, where Mark got a job as a computer analyst with the British Oxygen Company, the Finkels nurtured the exceptional intellects of Jon and his new baby sister, Jenny. When Jon was four, his father taught him to convert numbers into binary code. It became something of a parlor trick.

"Hey Jon, what's four in binary?" his dad would ask on the fly.

"1100!" the curly-haired boy replied.

To improve Jon's math skills, Mark programmed a computer game called Hex Baseball; for the characters to advance, Jon had to correctly answer hexadecimal arithmetic questions. To teach his son to read, Mark designed a modification of a computer game called Colossal Cave Adventure. Every time Jon typed in a directional command-Go, Turn Left-the character on the screen responded accordingly. At bedtime, Mark didn't read to Jon from Hop on Pop, but from his dog-eared collection of science fiction and fantasy novels. The boy would fall asleep dreaming of shiny spaceships and green-skinned Orcs.

By the time he got to kindergarten, Jon's exceptional nature and nurture were readily apparent. "He's not only reading," his teacher effused, "he's reading at a third-grade level!" Before long, Finkel was reading his dad's books by himself. One time, after reading his son nightly chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, Mark had to go away on a business trip. When he came back two days later, he picked the book back up, but there was no need. Jon had read two hundred pages ahead on his own. He was seven.

The other side of his brain continued blooming, too. One afternoon, Claire brought him to nearby Kean College, where she was getting a degree in math. Inside a physics classroom, a professor noticed the pudgy boy fidgeting with a ruler. For fun, he asked the boy to compare two measurements. When Finkel quickly calculated the difference in length, the teacher arched his brow. "You should send him to private school," he told Claire.

Hoping to provide their son with a greater range of experience, however, Finkel's parents stuck with public school. They knew their boy was different, but, as Claire said, she wanted him to be "normal." Yet there was nothing normal about him. After finishing his classwork early, Finkel would waddle to his teacher's desk to hand in his work. Along the way, he would tell each student he passed all the wrong stuff they had written down on their papers. To make matters worse, Jon had developed a loud and fast manner of speaking, similar to his mother's. In his mind, he was just pointing out the obvious, but as far as other kids were concerned, Finkel was just being a jerk. And they would make him pay.

The taunts came early: "Jon Jon leprechaun, went to school with nothing on, teacher told him what to wear, polka-dotted underwear." Boys are defined by whatever rhymes with their last names. Some names insulate them from pain. Others invite it. "Finkel," as Jon quickly learned, was a death sentence. His name rhymed with Wrinkle, like the pale rolls of baby fat on his adolescent belly. It rhymed with Stinkel-not even a real word, but a stigma nonetheless, a condemnation: Finkel, he who stinks. And, as they showed him one day, it rhymed with Tinkle, too.

After school, Finkel was walking home when a gang of bullies burst after him. Too slow and heavy to outrun them, Finkel got cornered. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground. Someone's fly unzipped, and warm awful liquid rained down. The bullies left him there dripping in a hapless wet pile. If schools are divided into jocks and nerds, then Finkel had just been drafted as the biggest loser for the losing team.

"Harrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" came the horrific hurling sound from behind the bathroom door. The groan climaxed with a titanic splash. Then it ceased. Silence. Faint gulping of air. And then, again, terribly, the tidal wave recommenced, this time more horrifically fluid than before, a class-six white-water rapid of insides slamming into a porcelain vortex.

Leaning casually against the wall, Finkel stifled a yawn and checked his watch. Then he growled dramatically again. Reaching up high above his head, he poured a bucket of water down into the bowl. Rather than deal with the pain of school, Finkel played sick. But this game required skill. He had to be convincing, subtle. He didn't want to come on too strong. He had to splash just enough liquid in the bowl to arouse compassion. It required analysis, cunning, an ability to size up the moment, to read the barometer of a parent's sympathy meter. Some mornings, all it took to convince his parents was a bit of wailing in bed. Other mornings, such as today, he had to employ the water buckets. He splashed one more bit into the bowl, before concluding with a flush, and a yelp.

For a while, the sick game worked. He spent his days ensconced in his room, devouring books of fantasy and science fiction. Before long, he was up to five books a week. He stormed through all his dad's dusty classics: Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury. And he discovered what would become his own personal bible: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The book detailed the futuristic adventures of Ender Wiggin, a boy genius drafted by the military at age six to save the world from an alien invasion. A master of war games, Ender quickly rises to the top of the army's so-called Battle School-only to discover the price, and pain, of his gift. Finkel could relate.

After one too many water symphonies in the bathroom, his parents knew something serious was paining their gifted son. Though Finkel didn't talk about it, he obviously dreaded going to school. He had no friends. And while his younger sister, Jenny, also smart, was acting like a social butterfly, Jon just seemed to be digging farther into his cocoon.

Soon enough, the truth came out. During parent conferences, his teachers complained about Jon's confrontational attitude. They also mentioned how he was being bullied for acting so smart in front of the other kids. Though Claire and Mark didn't know the extent of the beatings, it was enough to rend their hearts. "Jon's intellectually ahead, but emotionally behind," Mark said. "The combination of the two is deadly." Claire agreed. "Once you get labeled a victim," Mark said, "it builds upon itself." Something had to be done.

Since Mark and Claire were both self-ordained smart weirdos in their day, they pleaded with Jon to keep a low profile.

"Don't raise your hand every time you know the answer," Mark said.

"You can't go down the aisle in class telling the kids how smart you are," Claire said. "They resent it."

"When you do good on a test," Mark added, "keep your mouth shut."

Jon lowered his head and nodded quietly.

"When you get older," Claire said, reassuringly, "you'll see, things will get better." But, deep inside, she hated the hypocrisy of that sentiment. The football games were on the front page of the local paper; the chess club was on page sixtee...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400064074
• ISBN 13: 9781400064076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240