Falafel’s friends urged him to get off the street. One found him a room, but he could barely pay the rent. Then fortune turned his way, with the arrival of one of the game’s most famous fish, a wealthy French philatelist, Internet entrepreneur, and fraudster known as Marc Armand Rousso, or, in the world of backgammon, as “the Croc.” He was an eccentric—at the board, he would sometimes mutter, “Yum, yum, yum, yum, my little crocodiles,” Falafel recalled—and, more significant, he was a terrible player with satchels of money to lose. “He comes in, and he loses $150,000 cash in half an hour,” one opponent told me. “Then he leaves and comes back two hours later for more—but now, instead of money, he’s come in with 50 pounds of gold!”
Falafel played the Croc a little, but mostly he bet on the Croc’s opponents, including a skilled player named Abe the Snake. In a few months, Falafel won enough money to buy a small apartment, had he desired one. “I picked up some pants—I wanted to put something in the pocket—and I reach in and I find $4,000,” he told me. “I didn’t even know it existed. That’s how good it was.”
When he was homeless, Falafel had promised himself that if he ever made enough money he would return to Israel. “I wanted to get back and feel some love and warmth and affection and some closeness,” he told me. He yearned to be married. But ever since his arrival in Buffalo he had been shy with girls, and while he was living on the street relationships were no easier. For several years, he rented a place in central Tel Aviv, and in 2001 he got in touch with a girl he had known in middle school. But things didn’t work out. Relocating the warmth was not so easy.
Falafel took to spending 15 hours a day online, playing backgammon, with the shades drawn, determined to master the game. Clothes and trash piled up. He ate and ate and gained weight. Sometimes he played at a dingy backgammon club nearby. “I saw Falafel there, this big fat guy with his baseball hat backwards, playing this big, dark-skinned Israeli guy,” a friend says. “They were playing high stakes, $100 a point, and the room was packed with people. It was a gladiator fight, you know, just alive, in a place you would least expect it. Falafel, with his special looks—he just looks like an idiot, and everybody here was thinking that he’s just a rich American dumbass who is going to donate. And Falafel was teasing everybody. He told them that they are all idiots, and he is going to take all their money. And, the thing is, Falafel cleaned up the club. He just cleaned everybody up, and people were going insane, and the stakes got higher. He had everybody play against him. He said, ‘You can consult, because you’re so bad it doesn’t matter. I want to hear all the stupidity.’ And they would basically want to kill him, because he took their money, he took their pride, and he was really, really cocky.”
Every two years, the top backgammon players around the world vote to pick the best of their peers, for a roster called the Giants of Backgammon. In 2007, Falafel was number one. “At some point, he woke up and became the best player in the world,” Elliott Winslow, a top player, told me. The title is unscientific, and often debated, but no one could contest that Falafel had achieved greatness. “We can never know for certain who is the best player in a given year, but we can confidently eliminate 99.99 percent,” Jake Jacobs, the roster’s auditor, says. “Falafel survived the cut.”
Falafel reacted to the news humbly, citing other players he thought were more deserving. “I didn’t end up making a living as a backgammon player by accident,” he said at the time. “I couldn’t function properly in the ‘normal’ world.”
Falafel is intensely loyal to the people who befriended him in Jurassic Park, and at the Borgata he decided to stay in Atlantic City for as long as The Bone could keep up his run—even if it meant delaying his trip to the backgammon tournament in San Antonio, which was about to begin. When I called Falafel to see if he was going to make it to Texas, the best he could say was, “I rate it a favorite.” Backgammon is a highly probabilistic game, and Falafel’s world is rarely defined by certainties. I booked a ticket not knowing for sure that he would show.
The tournament was held in the Menger Hotel, a dusty old building just opposite the Alamo. When I arrived, after 11:00 P.M. on the first day of play, Falafel had not yet turned up. In a small conference room, a couple of dozen people were milling about, and a few matches were still under way. One was between a Bulgarian man from South Carolina, Petko Kostadinov, and Ed O’Laughlin, an older player from Virginia. Kostadinov—compact, with neatly parted graying hair—was intently focused on the board. O’Laughlin, a wiry man, was dressed all in black, and his legs were folded up in his chair like crushed origami. He moved his checkers in abrupt jabs, then touched the pieces as if to confirm their solidity.