Why Hong Kong’s high rollers count on blacklisted blackjack player Michael Board
- Board is a distance runner turned professional gambler turned Wall Street money manager
- He talks about how he came to be a ‘whale’ trainer to Hong Kong and Singapore VIPs
On track I was born in 1976 in northern Indiana, in the United States. My mom was a third-grade teacher and my dad worked 15-hour days and didn’t sleep much. I’m not one of those people who can do things the way they’re supposed to be done back home – go to school, get a job, wear a tie. I was always a little bit out of that box.
I had a talent; I was a distance runner. My uncle was a marathon runner. I’d go stay with him in the summer and he got me running. I went to North Central College (in Illinois) on an academic scholarship and studied international business. The school had a good running programme and I won a couple of national competitions. When I got out of school, I made a couple of US teams and I went to Australia and Japan a few times with them. When I was 24, I ran a 4.02 minute mile.
After college, in the late 1990s, I moved into a training camp run by a Belgian runner in New Mexico. High altitude, no snow and sunny every day – it was a mecca for distance running. You’d wake up, run 10 or 12 miles, then sit by the pool all day and play cards, and then you’d go out in the evening and run another 10 miles. It was super competitive. I was there a couple of years until it got to the point where, unfortunately, a lot of drugs like EPO (erythropoietin, a performance enhancer) came into the sport. I didn’t do drugs. I got out of running in the early 2000s.
Japan bar man My grandparents started asking why I didn’t get a job like my older brother. If I didn’t have a shirt and tie on it wasn’t work. They were from Poland and Croatia and had a strong work ethic, it was about putting the pennies under the bed. When I’d gone to Japan with the running team, I met an American who’d been living in Niigata for 10 years, he was married and fluent in Japanese. He owned a small bar we used to go to.
I called him up and said I was coming over. I opened three small bars with him and taught English. About 18 months into my time in Japan, my grandparents got seriously ill. My parents and brother were working, so I flew home to take care of my grandparents. It was the summer of 2003 and a bunch of boat casinos had opened near Chicago.