Mario Salvatore still finds fun, friends, and catharsis playing seven-card stud. But much like Salvatore himself, the game is suffering the passage of time.
The 85-year-old, a South Philadelphia native who now lives a spitting distance from the Atlantic City Boardwalk, is one of a fiercely loyal but shrinking group of stud poker players, mostly senior citizens, who hold court almost daily in the poker room at the Trump Taj Mahal.
These days the Casino caters mostly to players of Texas Hold ‘em. The stud games that used to take up more than 50 of the Taj’s 70 poker tables now occupy only eight or nine tables on weekdays and 12 to 14 on weekends.
Besides for this, you will be hard pressed to find a game of stud poker in Atlantic City casinos. But the stud-faithful are not there JUST for the winnings:
“I play to be with the people because they are like a family to me. I don’t care about the money,” says Salvatore.
Stud aficionados hold that their game requires more mastery and affords more social interaction because stud tends to attract the same people.
At the Taj Mahal, the stakes are always much smaller at the stud tables then the Omaha or Texas Hold ‘em tables.
For Salvatore, poker has been his salvation. The retired building inspector and former tile business owner lost his wife of 45 years in 1992. And in 2009, his significant other of 15 years died, and before that, in a four year span, he lost two sons, ages 42 and 54, a 29-year-old grandson, and his sole brother – all to illness. Lonely and depressed, he found that Playing Poker soothed his aching heart. His poker buddies fill the emptiness.
