Here's a fun fact of which you may not be aware.

Despite the presence of big card rooms such as Commerce, The Bike, Hollywood Park, Hustler, and others, Los Angeles also has a thriving underground poker scene. These got a bit of attention in late 2023 when Nik Airball accused various other poker players of cheating him out of $1m in one of those games.

These underground games charge a (high) rake, tend to be high stakes, and are invite-only. They are fairly good at finding fish to make the games a lot softer than what you'd find at a licensed cardroom, and sometimes top pros are shut out.

A number of these games also hire a number of hookers to double as servers and massage girls, but will also take dudes into the other room and fuck or blow them for the right price.

I have been invited to some of these games over time, some as recently as the 2020s. I've always turned them down, aside from one mid-stakes version of it I attended circa 2007.

Anyway, apparently former NBA player Gilbert Arenas decided that he wanted to spend his retirement running one of these games, and he's just been arrested for it. Arenas got involved with various Israeli mobsters, and they ran the games out of a mansion in Encino. For those unfamiliar, Encino is a mostly-upscale suburb of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, and has been referred to in movies such as "The Karate Kid" and of course "Encino Man".

Here's an article from KABC Los Angeles about it: https://abc7.com/post/former-nba-sta...home/17364852/


The house where the game took place was rented by Arenas, and apparently everyone involved in running the game was working under him, including his Israeli mob partners.


My favorite paragraph is this:

Young women allegedly collected tips to serve drinks, provide massages, and offer companionship to the poker players, prosecutors allege, and were charged a percentage of their earnings from working the games. Chefs, valets and armed security guards also were hired to staff the games, according to the indictment.
LOL "offer companionship". That doesn't mean the girls would just sit next to do the dudes during the game and talk about politics.

The pimp-like arrangement with the girls is standard in these games. The hookers charge the dudes whatever they can manage, and then have to surrender a percentage of that money to the directors of the game before they leave. Hookers tend to like these jobs because the money is good and the environment is safe. Definitely beats meeting randoms from Craigslist who might beat or murder them.

No idea why Arenas got involved in all of this. Did he not make enough money from his NBA career? Did he blow most of it?

The games were said to take place from 2021-2022. It's not clear why it took 3 years to charge Arenas, or why the games ended.