I started playing live poker a year ago, at the Twin River Casino in Lincoln, R.I. It’s been quite the experience. I play pretty competitively and treat it as a side hustle. That being said, it’s lead to me meeting some characters at the table who I never would’ve met if not for all of us deciding to randomly play cards on the same night.

Anyone and everyone can play poker, that’s the beauty of the game. While it’s a skill game it’s not an athletic one where certain people are just automatically behind the curve. When you sit at a table for an extended period of time you tend to start talking to the other people sitting there and the topic of discussion usually starts with, “what do you do for a living?”

Some of the players I’ve played with, do play poker full time. It is their only source of income and they don’t do anything else. However, given that I play at low stakes there aren’t many full-timers.

One guy I played with was an on-site EMT at a ski-resort who had handled some pretty horrific injuries. He told me a story about helping a guy who broke both his legs in a horrific crash after going off of a jump and after that. “We got to him in about five-minutes, made really good time, but the guy was in the worst panic I had ever seen,” he continued, “he was trying to take his pants off while screaming in pain from trying to do it and claimed that they were making the injuries worse, it took a really long time to talk him down to the point that we could help him.” After hearing that story, I told him I didn’t need to hear any more of his work stories.

More recently, I played at a table that had one guy who used to be a pawn shop owner in Mason Square.

Knowing the area I told him that I imagined he had quite a few characters come through his store. His response, “oh yeah, there was this one clan or cult or whatever with these prized jewels and a crown that paid us a ridiculous amount of money to keep these valuables in our safe.”

That wasn’t the best story he had though.

“One time, some guy came in with a shotgun and of course we were all super nervous, thinking, ‘oh boy I guess this is happening today,’ but then he just went up the front counter and said, ‘how much can I get for this?’ the entire store breathed a sigh of relief when he asked that.”

At the same table as the pawn shop worker was a guy named Dan who told me his job was too, “shut off people’s electricity when their payments get too backed up.” I asked him if that pays well and he said, “Surprisingly yes, turns out most people don’t like being paid to be a jerk all the time.”

By the way, Dan committed to this interview even after I took $185 off of him an hour earlier, so he was a pretty good dude.

Most famously though, I played with a man who at the time claimed to be Chip Kelly’s agent.

At that time, Kelly was still an NFL coach so it was pretty interesting but also strange. You’d think that Kelly’s agent would be playing at higher stakes than someone such as myself but to each their own I guess.

He also turned out to be a jerk, like most agents are. I won around $220 off of him in two hands that day and I left shortly after winning the second one and he accused me of hitting and running, which is a term for a poker player who leaves shortly after winning a big pot to secure his winnings.

He had been heckling me all day so I just laughed and said to him, “Sorry man I’m a broke college kid, not a hotshot agent like you, so I have to take what I can get.”

I explained to these players – bar Kelly’s agent since it was last year and that’s mainly just a story to tell – that I was a Communications major at American International College and that I was looking to interview people for an assignment in my journalism class and they were all interested in participating.

It helps that I’m a talkative player in the first place and almost always get along with everyone I play with. Without a doubt, my favorite part of pursuing poker as a side hustle has been meeting all the different people and the stories that it has led too.