Poker News

‘Miami’ John Cernuto

The poker pro known as “Miami” John Cernuto shows this little smile, explaining, yes, it’s true, things couldn’t have happened the way they did without Ronald Reagan growling and flexing his presidential muscles.

That’s the way it was during thesummer of ‘81.

Cernuto was living and working in the Miami, Fla., area, an air traffic controller, a traffic cop of the airways who figured he also played a decent game of poker.

The men and women in charge of moving air traffic from here to there across the country walked off their jobs demanding a list of changes that included everything from more pay to improved work environments. Not that any of that matters now.

What the president did was tell controllers they would lose their jobs unless they returned to work. Union leaders did a figurative eye-roll at this kind of rhetoric figuring Reagan was running the equivalent of a big time bluff . . . a guy trying to turn a queenthree into something big.

But he wasn’t.

Talk about life-changing situations.

“Ronald Reagan gave us 48 hours to make a decision that was going to affect us for the rest of our lives. It just wasn’t enough time. We had already been told by our union that the president was going to talk tough, so when he laid down these demands our response was not to go back to work.”

Cernuto found himself sitting in a new house he could no longer afford, wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

And that is when he began to consider the lure of Las Vegas, a city where he had heard there were actually people who made a living playing poker.

Could it possibly be?

He began putting one foot in front of another, giving his house, on which he had not yet made a payment, back to the bank and deciding there was little to be gained by staying where he was.

Cernuto was no stranger to a poker table, he had been playing for years, but mostly in a role that cast him as a sort of durable “home town champion . . . I was always winning the most in the games where played., but I did not have the knowledge that I do now.

“Me and the people I played with were not real skillful,” a smile spreading across his face as he says this; “We’d have nine guys playing and eight of them hanging in there for the flop.”

He did not know about the way poker was played, by the people serious about paying their bills on the basis of what they could do at a Las Vegas poker table.

Cernuto remembers this Miami buddy going to Las Vegas and returning home to talk about a game called Texas hold ‘em. It was the focus of much interest.

“The thing was you always wanted to be in there for the flop. What we had was just a wild game. You had eight or nine guys there for the flop every single hand.”

Cernuto had made only one previous trip to Las Vegas, staying at the Plaza on Fremont street and finding a three-six high-low split hold ‘em game in the card room.

It looked like heaven, but the truth was a bit more grim. “Every one of us on the trip lost our ass playing against those rocks that you found down there at that time.”

But his enthusiasm was all the fuel he needed as he considered a permanent move to the gambling capital of the world. It seemed like fate was pounding away on all eight cylinders.

“I had bought a car about six months before the strike and when I suddenly end up without a job, the friend I had bought it from took the car back and gave me exactlywhat I had paid for it . He even took me and my suit cases to the airport.”

Was God trying to tell him something, or what?

Cernuto didn’t waste any time heading for the poker rooms when he arrived in January 1982.

“I figured I was the home town champ and I could hold my own, but they played Texas hold ‘em - high only - which I had little to no experience in.” He shrugs, “That’s the game everyone was playing at the time and I just sort of learned the game through the school of hard knocks.”

And in the beginning there was no real reason to complain.

“My first couple of years here I made as much as I did working as an air traffic controller and I’m thinking to myself, well, this is great, but the laws of gambling began to catch up with me since I wasn’t exactly playing the game properly, giving all the consideration I should to things like position and so forth.”

He remembers, “I was pretty much a chaser. There wasn’t a hand that I didn’t like. Give me a six-five suited and I was in there.”

Friends warned him, “John, you keep playing some of the hands you do, you’re going to go broke eventually.”

Which is about where he was in 1984 when he found himself “in dire need” of a job. He started dealing at the Stardust.

“The Stardust was pretty much where the action was then; that and the Golden Nugget.”

Cernuto began playing tighter and more aggressively also picking up as few of the right books here and there, books that he studied closely.

“Doyle”s (Brunson) book was probably the biggest help. I started improving my game and I’ve been improving ever since.”

But it was Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker at Lake Tahoe in about 1988 where everything seemed to magically come together.

“I won the seven-stud tournament and the night before I had sat up in my room reading Chip’s (Reese) section on stud in Doyle’s book. The next day it was like I couldn’t hardly lose a hand.”

Cernuto felt a big surge of confidence in his ability to prosper as a tournament player.

The focus on playing smart has since been reflected in the fact he also has three World Series of Poker bracelets to his credit - a seven-stud eight or better tournament in 1996, a no limit hold ‘em tournament in 1997 and an Omaha event in 2002. All told, there have been 34 World Series cashes, including two this year.

His focus on tournaments over the years has helped him earn three best over-all player awards and 50 first place finishes. These include first place in the 2003 Paradise Poker. com Heads Up Poker Championship. The event was played in Vienna and Cernuto outplayed a field of 128 players that included such talents as Phil Hellmuth and Carlos Mortenson, to name a couple.

The first seven or eight months of 2005 have been good to him. He’s earned tournament prize money of close to $400,000 and there is the prospect of other big things.

At the World Series Cernuto jokes that he benefited from the fact he is not yet as visible to the general public as some of the other famous faces of poker who have high recognition factors fed by lots of TV times.

Yeah, sure, the prize money, those two cashes were nice, but it was also nice being able to make his way through the crowds of spectators during one of the brief bathroom breaks without having to deal with the autograph-seeking poker fans who were not always understanding.

“(Chris) Moneymaker (the 2003 WSOP champion who is one of poker’s best known faces) was saying some of the people were almost rude, like they didn’t seem to care he had very little time to do what he had to and get back to the table.”

Ah yes, the inconveniences associated with having a famous face at a time when poker’s popularity has never been higher.

“I’m under the radar,” he grins, “so far as this celebrity thing is concerned. Just haven’t been on television that much yet. A guy like Danny Negreanu will get maybe a hundred autograph requests for every one that comes my way.”

But that may be about to change. He is part of an on camera team filming pilots for a possible gambling oriented series with a special focus on poker that will be shot at one or more of the Station casinos properties. and probably shown on FSN. It’s called Poker Beat.

While Cernuto’s preference is tournaments - and there are enough to keep any poker player busy now - he’ll take a shot at the side games, usually if he gets knocked out during the first four levels of a tournamernt.

“My preference is mixed games in the seventy-five to one-fifty range and up to three- and six-hundred. I like the mixed games format because usually the people there will play one or two well but they are not strong in all the games. I’ve been a winning player now for 12- 13 years. This approach has worked well for me.”

Why the focus on tournaments? “I wouldn’t say that I am a pioneer of tournament poker, but I certainly got enthusiastic about it back in the early 1980s when the Stardust was holding tournaments on a daily basis.

That’s where I really began to develop my expertise. I just really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the competition.” But a guy couldn’t ignore the side games then because, “what better way was there to finance tournament play than with the side games.”

Cernuto has, however, gone with the flow and adopted to changing times, picking up occasional online affiliations that have produced free rides into some of the big money tournaments.

He finds Internet poker “challenging,” explaining, “I can see why some of these kids are coming up and beating a lot of the pros. They can play maybe three or four games at a time, getting three or four times as many hands an hour as you can in a brick and mortar place . . . “It’s amazing. Some of them come to town with as much experience in a few years as one of the resident professionals might get in 20 years. Their learning curve is just extremely high compared to the way I was brought up.

“Now you find yourself going against people you’ve never seen before who have as much experience as any of the big name pros and the trick is trying to weed them out . . .

“You get into a tournament now, you’ve got to do a good job of sizing up your table and you haven’t got a lot of time to do it.”

Filed under: Poker News