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In the
Texas Holdem poker world, the name Andrew NS Glazer is
synonymous with blue ribbon poker writing. (The S was an
addition he created to honor his stepfather and
distinguish the appearance of his by-lines). He will
write no more. The forty eight year old “Poker Pundit”
died over the Independence Day week end—free to engage
in salons with other writing greats that have reached
the higher plain.
Like
most of Andy’s friends and fans, the rabbi who presided
over his memorial service knew little about Andy’s
various health issues and none of the details of his
death, but the rabbi exhorted the congregation, “Let us
not ask how he died, but rather let us talk about how he
lived.
It
was just four years ago on a
Texas
Holdem
poker
cruise to the Caribbean that I met Andy. During the trip
we hung out in the cocktail lounge talking of Descartes,
Leibnitz , Spinoza, tournament table tennis, and the
world of high stakes poker—among other things. We
attended a toga party in matching sheets and danced on
the last night of the cruise not quite cheek to cheek.
We forged an enduring friendship that put us in touch,
frequently. Often, we critiqued each other’s articles
before the public saw them.
Andy
was the force behind my decision to write a book of
poker adventures. Demonstrating his consistently uncanny
ability to stun others with the obvious, he pointed out
that poker offers the rare opportunity to paint scenes
and tell stories of a subculture that is bigger than
life, not a microcosm of it. No poker writer has done
more than Andy to portray the drama of big ticket
tournaments and the personalities of the giants of the
game.
Andrew Norman Glazer was born December 8, 1966.
Throughout his life he was known as Andrew within his
close-knit family. As a token of his affection he also
invited the “special” women in his life-- beyond his
family unit- to call him Andrew, including Cornelia Cho,
one of his two former fiancées and probably the greatest
romance of his life.
Andy
adored his family. He was inseparably close to his
father, who he particularly admired for his staunch
commitment to integrity in all that he did. His dad died
when Andy was a teenager. Soon after, during a school
break, Andy’s mother took her sixteen year old son and
his younger sister Donna on a horseback riding trip in
Colorado. His mom was a star in the saddle. At the end
of the Colorado sojourn, Shirley rewarded the kids for
their mastery of a regal cantor. She extended their
vacation further west to Las Vegas.
With
a mature –looking six foot frame and a few neighborhood
home games under his belt, Andy wasted no time finding
his way into his first public poker room on the Las
Vegas Strip. His mom looked on, proudly, as he carted
away winnings of $150 from the table. While she cannot
recall his first expedition at the card tables, she
makes a point of telling me about his is initial poker
success in Las Vegas, attributing the initiation that
she had endorsed, to Andy’s later passion for the game.
Back
home in the respectable New York City “burbs” of
Massapequa where he was raised, Andy excelled in his
studies and developed his interest in writing,
especially about sports. He was a Knicks fan, a Fliers
fan, and he stuck it out through thick and thin with the
Amazing Mets.
By
sixth grade he was a walking encyclopedia of sports
statistics and knew the personal histories of the top
figures of the game, inside out. Andy put his writing
skills and his knowledge of sports to work as a
sportswriter/editor of the Plainedge High School
newspaper. In college he moved up to the position of
Managing Sports Editor of the University of Michigan
Daily. He earned a Phi Beta Kappa key along the way.
Then, while at Emory Law School, he filled the shoes of
Editor- in-Chief of the Emory Law School newspaper while
mastering the finer points of contracts.
At
the end of law school, Andy settled in Atlanta, passing
the Bar on the first try and embarking on a legal career
as a trial lawyer. With a prestigious clerkship under
Judge Dorothy Beasley behind him, Andy moved along in
private practice, often taking on high profile criminal
cases. He had courtroom skills aplenty--a deep and
commanding voice, a penchant for thorough preparation
and an intellect that scared the living daylights out of
lame prosecutorial adversaries. But winning cases was
not enough for Andy. He came to realize that
representing defendants in causes that didn’t jibe with
his own personal values couldn’t work for him, no matter
how skillful he might be in protecting their interests.
Andy
gave up the practice of law, after securing an acquittal
for a cocaine dealer he believed should be in jail.
Immediately after the closing of the case, he took down
his law practice shingle, passing on big bucks that
other drug-dealing defendants were trying to throw his
way for representation.
Next, Andy tossed aside his pin stripe suits for more
comfortable duds at backgammon tables, confident that
his gamesmanship would make him a living until he was
ready to settle down to a another “professional”
endeavor. And so it did. The multi-talented,
multi-faceted Andy found profitable backgammon “chouettes.”
He also sidled up to poker tables with a keen sense of
how to turn the odds in his favor. He wrote novellas and
took a crack at screenplay writing—believing that either
or both might lead him to fame and fortune. In passing,
he talked about trying his hand in business; crashing
and then rising proudly from bankruptcy to six figure
contracts during his prolific poker writing career.
It
was at Esalen, the famous educational and spiritual
center in Big Sur California, that Andy determined to
perfect his writing craft. He converted a planned
week-long visit to a long term residence at Esalen,
proceeding down a path of writing and deep self-
discovery. He did so while learning the art and science
of massage and earning his keep as an apprenticing
chef.
Esalen became Andy’s home base for development as a
writer. He became engrossed with seminars and courses
that stretched and refined the considerable talent that
he had brought to the table from the start. And it was
at Esalen that fate intervened to enrich his life with
one of the strongest friendships he would ever know, not
to mention the beginning of a dual career as a winning
poker player and writer extraordinaire.
By
fluke happenstance, Andy met Phil Hellmuth at Esalen.
Andy often told the story of their first meeting, and I
read between the lines: Andy, a poker aficionado, was
bragging about his poker abilities to a friend while
lazing in a hot tub, only to be overheard by Phil, a
World Series of Poker Champion. Phil couldn’t help
himself from “educating” Andy. He gave his name
off-handedly and said that he played a bit of
poker--before enlightening Andy about his considerable
poker prowess. Realizing that he had stumbled upon a
poker star, Andy couldn’t help himself from conducting
an “interview” in search of an award winning story. By
both men’s accounts, each did a fine job of “working” in
the nude! The comical introduction turned serious when
Phil’s family invited Andy to move in for a year. The
meeting with Phil also led Andy to plunge into
arrangements as a poker writer. He accepted an offer
from Card Player Magazine as a tournament reporter and
wrote for the magazine, regularly, during the past
several years.
In
his stories, not only for Card Player Magazine but also
for Poker Digest, Gambling Times, Detroit Free Press,
Inside Edge and a multitude of others, Andy brought
player and spectator directly to the action at the
tables, and elsewhere on the poker scene. He mesmerized
his readers; throwing them through a loop into outer
space with Star trek references and grounding them with
insightful analyses of the players and the plays
associated with a poker hand.
In a
story about one of the final tables at the 2004 WSOP,
Andy wrote: "A full forty minutes had passed by the
time we had played just five, count 'em, five hands, and
Savage noted that 'You guys have lost a lot of gamble
lately' on his PA microphone. It was a comical and
dangerous time, not dangerous in the 'I could blow ten
grand-sense' dangerous, but rather in the 'I could get
trampled by an onrushing crowd of ESPN camera people who
raced back and forth across the room much like a group
of Norse Thunder gods wielding maces, flails, axes, boom
mikes, and really, really heavy TV cameras every time a
dealer announced 'All-in and call.'
"You
think Macy's on the Friday after Thanksgiving gets a
little rough, HA, you'd have a better chance surviving
getting hit simultaneously by the entire defensive line
of New England Patriots (a subject this crew should know
something about, since almost every one of them has been
spotted wearing an "NFL Films" clothing article at least
sometime), and at least you'd hear the (allegedly)
steroid-enhanced behemoths coming."
In
an e-mail exchange, shortly after the 2004 World Series
of Poker, Andy wrote to one of his lawyer/poker player
friends "I think you quoted perhaps three or four of my
paragraphs back to me during the WSOP, and one of the
few was, without a doubt, my favorite line....the bit
about the ESPN cameras crews and the Norse gods wielding
axes, maces, flails and boom mikes, and really, really
heavy TV cameras.
Later, reflecting on Andy’s writing career, the same
friend said to Andy, simply, “THAT is writing!” And he
echoed the sentiments of Andy’s readers from around the
world when he said: “Andy was the epitome of accuracy,
readability and, especially, integrity in his body of
work, which I consider to be the highest quality of
any journalist in the field of tournament poker."
Over
the past ten years Andy proved himself far beyond the
pages of his writings--as an accomplished tournament
player and as a valuable poker professor, in columns
designed for beginner and intermediate students. He had
to his credit many small tournament wins, and several
final table appearances in major events, including one
on the World Poker Tour. He also cashed in a TOC
Championship event, and earlier this year he scored a
double header--two first place finishes at the biggest
tournament ever held in Australia. The day before his
death he talked to me about his most recent trip to
Ireland and dreamed, aloud, about his key plans for this
year: to strike it rich on the tournament trail and to
secure a mainstream syndicated poker column in
association with a “celebrity” poker player.
Andy
has written material for nearly every major gambling and
Texas
Holdem
poker
centric magazine, but it was at Final Table Poker.com
that he may have had his most satisfying moment-. The
site’s owners assured him up front that unlike the
constraints he had sometimes faced with other poker
publications, here he would be allowed to present his
views freely and without equivocation.
Last Friday night, Andy looked over his most recent
story; it was about the Dublin tournament. It had just
been published on FinalTablePoker.com. He wrote a
scathing report of “irregularities” he had observed,
without detailing them—not very much like the Andy most
of his friends and colleagues knew. But he also promised
his readers that he would soon serve up a more
documented indictment.
Andy
talked of having completed a draft of the second part of
this story by the time the first one appeared in print.
He confided to his longtime friend, finance man Howard
Ring, that his outrage might better be tempered. And in
a conversation shortly thereafter, he told me that he
was about to hit the computer’s delete button on the
second article. He said that he was going to start
over---to use his recent experience as a platform to
address broad integrity issues that he had pondered for
years while working the
Texas
Holdem
poker
tournament trail. With his death, Andy has left that
task to others. He will be sorely missed by the global
poker community he served with the highest distinction.
Andy is now able to join the Norse Thunder gods and
observe the future of tournament poker!
He
is survived by his mother Shirley Glazer Shafron, his
sister Donna Hall (and husband Ken Hall) and relatives
on both coasts that thought the world of Andy.
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