Poker Player Profile: Cyndy Violette
Cyndy Violette
Cyndy Violette prefers working close to home.
“And I’ve got a nice house,” she says, “only about 20 minutes from the Atlantic City casinos.”
Which is why she’s usually content to maintain an office, so to speak, in the high limit area of the Taj Mahal’s poker room.
But sometimes it pays to be on the road.
Like the last couple of months when she might have felt like she had moved back to Las Vegas. That’s where it all began for her, this fascination with poker, a bit more than 20 years ago in the small Strip card rooms.
The 42-year-old poker pro with a look TV cameras like to linger on prefers a regular diet of $75-$150 stud games, often kicking it up a couple of notches on the weekend to the $300-$600 or $400 and $800 levels.
She’ll usually play three to four days a week at the Taj or other Atlantic City card rooms - Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, “If people are sticking around.”
Anyone wanting to turn professional has to play regularly at the $30-$60 level or higher, she says. “All depends on the kind of lifestyle you want for yourself.”
Atlantic City has been her home for more than a decade, since poker was legalized there. She headed east to check it out when poker was legalized, but some of her best recent action has been in Las Vegas.
It’s where she recently saw a dream become reality.
Violette made the trip back to Vegas for the big games associated with the major events in Vegas. These ended up with the Horseshoe’s World Series, poker’s biggest annual party.
Past World Series have usually found Violette content to focus on the cash games rather than tournament action. But this year was going to be different, she decided.
“One thing I always wanted and didn’t have was a World Series bracelet,” she says. “I decided this was going to be the year I would make a big effort to get one.”
And she did, winning the first place prize of $137,000 AND the bracelet in the seven-card stud high-low split tournament.
“Pretty neat, huh?,” she would say several days later showing off the gleaming bracelet to a friend.
Nineteen years earlier she had won the $75,000 first prize in the seven-card stud championship that was then part of the Golden Nugget’s Grand Prix of Poker.
“My win at the Nugget was the most money ever won at that time by a woman in a single tournament.”
But changing times were producing hard times for the Las Vegas poker business. The Nugget was to close its poker room a few years later, becoming one of a number of Las Vegas casinos to lose interest in the game.
But poker’s booming, thanks to its television and Internet exposure. Las Vegas card rooms are being reopened or expanded in every direction, and when the Nugget re-opened its poker room just in time for this year’s World Series, Violette decided she would stay at the Nugget rather than way out on the Strip.
She found some good games at the Nugget and it was closer to the World Series across Fremont at the Horseshoe.
“The last few years,” she says, “I would play at night - they had great games on the strip - and about the only time I would try a tournament was if I got up early enough the next day.”
A year ago she had paid her $10,000 entry in the Horseshoe’s no limit hold ‘em championship, but decided at the last minute to get the money back and invest in cash games elsewhere.
So this year was going to be different. She promised herself that before she left Atlantic City to head for Las Vegas.
“Everything about poker is bigger now. There are so many more people playing.” But where did it begin for Violette, this passion for poker?
Flash back to the early 1980s.
“I was on my pregnancy leave from the Horseshoe where I was a blackjack dealer. My husband and I walked into the (Silver) Slipper. My sister was dealing there. We had stopped in to try the buffet. That was the first time I ever played poker, a $1-$3 stud game. I’ll never forget it. This lady at the table was so mad at me. I was, like, winning every hand and I had no idea what I was doing.”
She thinks about that and gives the memory a big grin. “Let’s face it, I was super lucky when I was pregnant.”
Later, she tried hold ‘em for the first time, the $1-$4 game at the Holiday Casino.
She progressed from dealing blackjack to dealing poker at the Four Queens opposite the Horseshoe on Fremont. She dealt the late Jack Strauss’ tournament at the Frontier and then decided to try her luck as a player in Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker at Lake Tahoe.
That was 1984.
“I did well enough I decided I could make it as a professional and never had another regular job after that.” Was her husband at that time interested in poker? “Not at all,” she laughs. “He liked to go fishing. What we’d do, we’d compromise and go to Laughlin. He’d go fishing and I would play poker.”
Violette remembers having “such a crush” on the late Stu Ungar, a three-time winner of the World Series Championship.
Not that it led to anything. “He was married at the time and he was such a big player and I was . . .” she shrugs, thinking about it, “This young girl. But we were friends and he used to let me watch him play. I just loved his energy and charisma.”
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