The Best American Sports Writing 2014(125)

Falafel beat Mattig, but afterward a debate arose over one of his moves: was it mathematically correct, or had luck aided him?

“I would be happy to bet on this, Falafel,” Mattig said.

The stakes were set at $50. The position was entered into a computer, and players crowded around the screen.

“Oh, the move is right!” Falafel called out. “You owe me!”

“Wait, where is the move right?” Mattig said.

“Right here,” Falafel said. “It’s significant. It’s like 1 percent.”

Falafel called Kageyama over, showed him the position, and asked him what he would do. Kageyama gave the same answer that Mattig had, and Falafel nodded, smiled, and told him, “That’s a mistake.”





Falafel was slowly making his way upward in the brackets. He had an easy time against Gary Oleson, a Walgreens pharmacist, who had come dressed in a black nylon shirt featuring a dragon strangling a tiger. While Falafel was up, 2–1, it was announced that the tournament would break for dinner. He stood and stretched, which emphasized his hemispherical belly.

“So is it true you have a bet to lose weight?” O’Laughlin asked him.

“Yeah,” Falafel said.

At any given time, Falafel has more bets going than he can keep track of. He has bet on his abilities at tennis, on his dancing skills, on whether he can win an argument about Islam. (Many bets are for $1,000—a “ruble,” in Falafel’s lexicon—or much more.) When he was 38, Falafel bet five rubles that he would be married in two years. (He lost.) In San Antonio, he told Perry Gartner that he had a long-standing bet: for every day he did not have a child before turning 50 he owed someone $5. Gartner, perplexed, asked how that was even a bet. “Right,” Falafel said. “My downside is unlimited. But it is going to happen.” Lately, it seems, Falafel has been trying to bend a vice into a virtue—and no bet has more potential in this regard than his weight bet.

“So what is it?” O’Laughlin asked. “A lot of money?”

A woman walking by answered: “It’s for a ton of money!”

“Thanks,” Falafel said.

“Well, what is it?” O’Laughlin said. “A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?”

Falafel, who has a gambler’s habit of speaking evasively, cradled his belly. “It’s for money,” he said.

The weight bet originated last October, when Falafel flew to Tokyo to play in the Japanese Open. One night, he and several other backgammon players were crammed into Sushi Saito, a three-star Michelin restaurant that seats only seven people. A question was posed: could Falafel and his ex-roommate Genius achieve the same weight in a year’s time? By then, Falafel, who was enduring a difficult stretch of sports betting, had reached 310 pounds. Genius, who has a slight frame and is four inches shorter, weighed only 138. The question began to take on the contours of a wager, and the next day a taker emerged willing to give them 50-to-1 odds. The taker is a legendary backgammon hustler, perhaps the must successful in the game’s history. He hustled me into referring to him only as Mr. Joseph—even though anyone on the backgammon circuit will immediately recognize him. He has played Saudi royalty, and he claims to have won as much as $300,000 in a match. He once told another gambler, “I used to say I’d like to have a $100,000 day. I’ve had those, both winning and losing, many times since then. Now I say I want a million-dollar losing day, which means I am wealthy enough to have a million-dollar winning day.” His bet with Falafel might help him lose tremendously. No one involved is keen to see its magnitude documented, so just imagine the contents of a large armored suitcase in a James Bond movie.

Mr. Joseph was in San Antonio too. An enormous man, he was dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, and, when Falafel and The Bone walked over, he and Genius were playing a variant of backgammon involving only three checkers, for $500 a point. He told Falafel, “You never win in tournaments. The Bone wins. He knows how to win. You find a way to lose to the worst players.”

“I want to win too,” Falafel said. “But sometimes I get into a spot.”

The Bone interjected, “It’s going to change now that he is losing weight.”

“I play better if I am in better shape,” Falafel said. Since Sushi Saito, he had lost about 60 pounds, and Genius had gained 20. Just about any time I ran into Genius, he was eating a J.J. Gargantuan Unwich sandwich (739 calories), from Jimmy John’s. Mr. Joseph was unconcerned; he seemed to take pleasure in the bet’s manipulative aspects. In 1996, he told another player, Brian Zembic, that he would give him $100,000 if he got breast implants and kept them in for a year. Months later, Zembic got them, size 38C, and, to everyone’s surprise, he liked them. They helped him meet women, and he ended up marrying one of them. A year came and went—and $100,000 was wired to a Swiss bank account—but still he kept the implants in. Once, when Falafel came to visit, Zembic unbuttoned his shirt and danced. Falafel smiled and blushed.