When I heard about the Feb. 10 passing of John Cernuto, at age 81, I was bummed to see another poker legend biting the dust. I also realized that I had always thought of him purely as ‘Miami’ John and would be hard-pressed to come up with his last name off the top of my head.
Of course, that got me thinking about poker nicknames, who has them, how they got them, and why they are important. In the case of Cernuto – who held the record for tournament cashes with nearly 600 – I’m not sure how much the guy had to do with Miami, having been born in New Jersey. (He did grow up in Miami and worked as an air traffic controller before moving to Las Vegas for poker.)
He told Card Player that his nickname originated via a young lady, with whom he had been partying at Sam’s Town, paging him in the Stardust poker room. Pre-cellphone, it came over the loudspeaker thusly: “Line 1 phone call for Miami John Baby Doll.”
As he put it to our writer, “I dropped the Baby Doll.”
Apparently, I’m in good company having not remembered the last name of the man who used his nickname when he entered Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker in 1988. ‘Miami’ John aced the tournament, reportedly losing only two pots, marking his first of many big wins.
“It was like magic,” he said. “So I kept the name. I didn’t want to tempt fate.”
It seems like every old school poker player worth his salt had a nickname. Some for good reason – Mike ‘The Mouth’ Matusow and Phil ‘Poker Brat’ Hellmuth both earned their monikers via explosive behavior at the table.
Some because they stuck themselves with the handles playing online poker – Durrr, OMG Clay Aiken, and good2cu were online identifiers for teenaged Tom Dwan, Phil Galfond, and Andrew Robl, respectively.
Though Thomas Preston, better known as Amarillo Slim, would eventually become infamous for doing the wrong thing – late in life, he faced a charge of indecency – he did have the right explanation for his nickname.
“I’m so skinny that I look like the advance man for a famine,” he said.
My recollection is that the great writer Nik Cohn penned that term to describe his title character in the compelling book King Death. Ever the angle-shooter, Slim likely nicked it from Nik.
I always dug Isabelle ‘No Mercy’ Mercier, John ‘Luckbox’ Juanda, and Phil ‘The Unabomber’ Laak.
Laak scored his nickname for a trademark tendency to wear shades and hide his face under a hoodie. Norm Macdonald tried to popularize ‘Unabombshell’ for Phil’s shapely girlfriend Jennifer Tilly, but it never stuck.
Making a nickname stick is tough. I once attempted it via a story I did for the old UK magazine Poker Player. I had a whole raft of nicknames to put on players – my favorite was Leo ‘Spanish Fly’ Margets – and ran them past Norman ‘Chatty’ Chad, hoping for his blessing. Playing along, the WSOP commentator trashed them all and refused to help me popularize them. It made for a fun article.
As for myself, I can’t say that I personally have a poker nickname (though I did play on FullTilt as Stung2; Stung, without a number, was coined/taken by my brother and designed to make people think of Stu Ungar).
But I do have something of a casino advantage play nickname.
Following my brief stint playing with the master AP James Grosjean (it was a gambit in Oklahoma, where the casino used cards instead of dice for the playing of craps), one of his partners, Bobby “Bullet” Sanchez, took to calling me ‘Kappy.’ The nickname stuck and Grosjean named one of his top-secret plays after me.
I have no idea what the play is, but that’s okay. When it comes to nicknames, we take what we can get and embrace them.
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of five books (“The Advantage Players” out soon) and has worked for publications that include Wired, GQ and the New York Post. He has written extensively on technology, gambling, and business — with a particular interest in spots where all three intersect. His article on Kelly “Baccarat Machine” Sun and Phil Ivey is currently in development as a feature film.