Poker-Playing Attorneys
Justice Douglas played poker with FDR, as Justice Scalia noted in his refusal to recuse himself over his duck-hunting trips with Vice President Cheney. Scalia himself has a famous poker game that once included regular attendees Justice Rehnquist and William Bennett. Judge Kozinski often hosts poker nights for law students when he’s on the road. Blogging law professors Stephen Bainbridge, Victor Fleischer, and Josh Wright have admitted to the poker jones. Northwestern professor Steven Lubet tried to cash in on the Father’s Day market with his book Lawyers’ Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players, which is getting recent publicity. And I’m reliably informed that once upon a time before they got cold feet, the DC office of O’Melveny & Myers had a summer-associate program where a bus was chartered to Atlantic City, and attorneys played intense hold ‘em games on the ride using $100-bills as chips.
Other poker-playing attorneys are more noted for their poker-playing. Greg Raymer had a day-job as a patent attorney at Pfizer when he took down the $5,000,000 first place prize at the World Series of Poker main event tournament in 2004; as Evan Schaeffer noted, years earlier, Raymer suggested that attorneys made better poker players.
Another poker-playing attorney is Russell Rosenblum, a former Kirkland & Ellis summer associate. Rosenblum has his own real estate practice in Maryland, owns a handful of Five Guys burger franchises, has enough incriminating photos of Washingtonian magazine editors to get five separate mentions in the magazine (including two profiles) in the last five years, and has a couple of six-digit prizes for final-table finishes in big poker tournaments, including the 2002 World Series of Poker main event.
Know other notable poker-playing law-talking people? And are Republicans really better players than Democrats? Play along in the comments.




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http://www.pokerstars.com/wsop/2005/news/july-12/
Brad Kondracki -- hit top 10 in Poker World Series during his 1L(I think) summer
Dutch Boyd was supposedly a law student. I heard a rumor that an associate at Mayer Brown made the final table at the WSOP Main Event in 2005
Weren't those $100 bills standing in for $1's?? :)
Professor Dan Kahan is a regular at Foxwoods; I hear he also donates a trip with him to the 'woods to be sold at the public interest auction at Yale.
I'm a poker aficionado myself, though I rarely find the time to play these days. Back in law school, I was a part of two regular games, a "low-stakes" and "high-stakes" game (the high-stakes, of course, wouldn't be really considered as such now--but back in the day it was for a student's budget, as a couple of newcomers found out when they had to wait for their scholarship or summer associate checks to come in to pay off their debts). Alas, neither of our games featured the illustrious David Lat, who, when not enjoying Federalist Society soirees with judicial hotties and entertaining us with his witty moot court arguments was presumably squirreling away his spare cash for the eventual Thailand excursion.
Though none of us is yet famous, I am a "law-talker." And some of us might be famous someday: Mark Gerson founded this now-massive company, Mark Megalli and Mike Kaufman are making oodles of money in the hedge fund industry, and Josh Steinglass may be the heir to Robert Morgenthau after years of service in the Manhattan DA's office. And I wouldn't put someday notoriety past our beloved Tom Goldstein, legendary in our circles for his three-day sleepless trips to Foxwoods--even if his current level of fame trails this Tom Goldstein, not to mention this well-known eponymous law-talker.