What Poker in Amsterdam Taught Me About Making Friends

After graduation, my friends and I got into poker. Every Sunday night we would meet at our friend Joe’s apartment and play for a couple hundred dollars. It was our weekly ritual. With the HBO show Entourage in the background, we ordered food and, sitting around a small table, caught up on things before getting ready to go to our boring office jobs the next day.

Joe was the most enthusiastic of all of us (he still plays professionally to this day) and his passion for the game rubbed off on me (though not on his skills). Although I was never a top-level player, I loved the challenge of trying to understand card odds and how to read people’s tells. I read poker books and did everything I could to improve. Poker was, and still is, an intellectual challenge for me.

During the road trip in the United States that began my world adventure in 2006, I stopped at casinos often to gamble and won enough to pay for most of the trip.

Eventually, when I got to Amsterdam later that year, I grew tired of the constant weed smoking that was so common among my fellow travelers. As much as I enjoyed getting high, I wasn’t traveling to sit in bars all day and get high. There was a whole city out there to see and explore.

So (slightly stoned) I often took long, solitary walks around town. (Even today, I walked more during that visit than on all my subsequent visits.)

One day, I passed by a casino. I didn’t even know there was a casino.

“I wonder if they play poker here,” I said to myself. Even though I was on a traveler’s budget and hadn’t gambled in months, I thought it would be fun to indulge in a little treat in a foreign country.

I sat down at a table full of locals playing 2-5 No Limit (which means the first bets are 2 and 5 EUR). The bets were higher than I wanted, but that was all there was, so I bought the minimum.

When I finally decided to join a hand, the dealer said something to me in Dutch. “Sorry, can you repeat that in English?” I asked.

I had declared myself a foreigner, and this had created a lot of curiosity among the other players. I was young and clearly a backpacker, and they wanted to know how I had ended up at the poker table and not in the bars, where the other tourists seemed to go.

So I told them: Smoking endless amounts of weed had lost its appeal, and so every day I wandered around, exploring neighborhoods and museums. And, as a poker lover, I also wanted to do something different.

Two of the players and I got along very well. Greg was an older gentleman with a great fashion sense who was always cracking jokes. The other, Lennart, was closer to my age and tall, with a shaved head. He drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney.

They and the other players at our table made me feel like I was part of something bigger. So I kept coming back. Poker was our bond, and for those few hours we spent together each night, I felt like a local, too, not just a backpacker getting high in hostel bars and wandering around taking photos of museums. I was a traveler, getting beneath the surface of the place and getting to know the people who lived there.

After all, I was traveling the world to learn something. As much as I enjoyed visiting museums, taking walking tours, and engaging in short conversations with people I passed, none of it gave me a deep understanding of any part of my journey.

But these players were my guides. They told me about life in the city and about the restaurants and bars that tourists didn’t know about that I should go to. I felt like I learned more about Amsterdam in those first few nights than I had in my entire first week in the city.

As a tourist, you don’t often interact deeply with locals. You see them briefly and then move on to the next destination. To get to know a place, and the people who live there, you need to spend a lot of time not traveling.

As the days went by, I kept putting off leaving to go back to the poker table. Greg and Lennart often offered to take me out, but I was naturally suspicious of two guys who wanted to hang out after the casino closed and asked me probing questions. I was young. I was in a place I didn’t know. And the area was always dark and empty when we left. I was afraid they would try to rob me.

So I declined their offers to go out the first few times. Being a natural introvert, this was my first experience with non-travelers, and I was a little wary.

But in the end I accepted, because they tired me and they turned out to be normal people who just wanted to show a little hospitality to a visitor.

They showed me Oosterpark, in the eastern part of the city. It was small, quiet, and lined with willow trees, with little ponds with ducks, around which old men would sit and feed them. It was a place that the locals liked, because it allowed them to avoid all the tourists and stoners that littered Vondelpark.

I was introduced to bitterballen, a Dutch snack of bite-sized, fried meatballs that look like falafel on the outside but taste like a Sunday roast on the inside.

And when I finally went to Spain for a week, I missed Amsterdam so much that I just went back. They were shocked when I returned to the poker table.

“I thought you were gone,” they said.

“I was, but I missed Amsterdam too much, so I came back,” I replied.

Weeks passed. I fell into a rut. I learned basic Dutch phrases from the other casino players, slept late, and used my winnings to fund an endless supply of delicious meals, museum visits, and cannabis. I walked for hours, reaching the edges of the city, trying to get lost in the canals and narrow streets that make Amsterdam so famous, the kind of thing you might do when, in your head, you keep saying, “I could live here,” and suddenly you find yourself comparing neighborhoods.

But all good things must come to an end, including my European visa, and soon it was time to head to Southeast Asia. After almost two months in Amsterdam, I couldn’t stay in Europe any longer.

On our last night in town, my no-longer-new friends and I went out to dinner, played a little poker, and then went for one last round of drinks. I told them where I was headed and how much longer I planned to be on the road. We reminisced, which is something you can’t do when you don’t spend more than a couple days in one place or with a group of people.

They also acknowledged this fact. They appreciated that Amsterdam is more than the Red Light District, tulips, windmills and coffee shops. It’s all that tourists and backpackers think about when they come to Amsterdam, they said.

Although, by their own admission, they were just speculating. They had never met a backpacker, much less had a conversation with one. And why would they? Backpackers have never strayed this far off the beaten path, and locals are busy going about their daily lives, which doesn’t create many opportunities to meet tourists.

When we parted at the end of the evening, they invited me to Utrecht for my next trip to the continent. Amsterdam is great, they said, but it is not the real Holland. There is much more to the country.

You know it intellectually. A glance at a map tells you that Amsterdam is just a small part of the Netherlands. But as a traveler, you can often have tunnel vision about a destination, the walls of which are defined by your guidebook material and the advice of fellow travelers who have come before you.

Only the locals know the real story and until you know one, you will never find out.

But more than anything, Greg and Lennart taught me to trust strangers.

Because I was so cautious, I almost missed that opportunity. My rather new nature on the road almost cost me two friendships.

Since then, I have remembered to give people the benefit of the doubt and trust them more.

Especially since, a few months later, while I was in Vietnam, Lennart called to tell me that Greg had been killed in a robbery. Greg used to have a lot of people over after the casino closed to keep the night going, and when word got around, other people came to rob everyone, knowing they would get a lot of money. In a fight that followed, Greg was shot and died on the spot.

I often think of Greg, especially his warm smile, funny jokes, and sociable nature. He was never afraid to make friends. He taught me not to be.

And it’s because of him that I’ve learned to be more outgoing and confident on the road. Whenever I have doubts, I just think to myself, “What would Greg do here?”

The answer is always: “He would say hello.”