What Playing Poker in Amsterdam Taught Me About Making Friends

After I graduated from college, my friends and I got really into poker. Every Sunday night, we would meet at our buddy Joe’s apartment and play for a couple hundred bucks total. It was our weekly ritual. With the HBO show Entourage in the background, we’d order food and, huddled around a small table, catch up before getting ready to go to our boring post-college office jobs the following day.

Joe was the most enthusiastic of us all (to this day, he still plays professionally), and his passion for the game spilled over to me (though not his skills). While I was never a top-tier player, I loved the challenge it provided, and trying to figure out the probability of the cards and how to read people’s tells. I read books on poker and did everything I could to get better. Poker was — and still is — an intellectual challenge to me.

On the US road trip that started my round-the-world adventure in 2006, I stopped frequently at casinos to play — and won enough to pay for a lot of my trip.

Eventually, when I arrived in Amsterdam later that year, I grew bored of the constant weed smoking that was so prominent among my fellow travelers. As much as I loved getting high, I wasn’t traveling to sit in coffee shops all day and get baked. There was a whole city out there to see and explore.

So (slightly stoned) I would often embark on long solitary walks around town. (To this day, I walked more during that visit than I did in all my subsequent ones.)

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

“I wonder if they play poker here,” I said to myself. Though I was on a traveler’s budget and hadn’t played in months, I thought it might be fun to indulge a little bit in a foreign country.

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

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

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

So I told them: Smoking endless amounts of pot had lost its luster, and so I was wandering each day, exploring the districts and museums. And, as a poker lover, I also wanted to do something different.

Two of the players and I really hit it off. Greg was older gentleman with a great sense of fashion who was always cracking jokes. The other, Lennart, was closer to my age and tall, and had a shaved head. He drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney.

Along with the other players at our table, they made me feel like I was part of something more. So I kept coming back. Poker was our bond, and for those brief hours we were together each night, I felt like I too was a local, not just a backpacker getting high in hostel bars and walking around taking pictures of museums. I was a traveler, getting below the surface of the place and getting to know the people who lived there.

After all, I was traveling the world in order to learn about it. As much as I loved seeing museums, taking walking tours, and having short conversations with people I crossed paths with, none of that really gave me a deep understanding of any stop on my journey.

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

As a tourist, you don’t often interact in deep ways with locals. You see them briefly and then off you go to the next destination. Getting to know a place — and the people in it — requires spending a lot of time not traveling.

As the days passed, I kept delaying my departure in order 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 were asking 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 worried they would try to rob me.

So I declined their offers to hang out the first few times. As a natural introvert, this was my first experience with nontravelers, and I was a little cautious.

But, eventually, I agreed, as they wore me down and turned out to be regular people who just wanted to show a visitor some hospitality.

They showed me Oosterpark, on the eastern side of town. It was a small, quiet, and lined with willow trees, featuring small ponds with ducks, which seniors sat around feeding. It was a place locals liked, because they could avoid all the tourists and stoners who litter Vondelpark.

They introduced me to bitterballen, the bite-sized, deep-fried Dutch meatball snack that looks like falafel on the outside but tastes like Sunday pot roast on the inside.

And, when I eventually did go to Spain for a week, I missed Amsterdam so much, I just flew back. They were shocked when I came back 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 routine. I learned basic Dutch phrases from the other players at the casino, slept late, and used my winnings to finance an endless supply of nice meals, museum trips, and cannabis. I walked for hours upon hours, reaching the city’s fringes, trying to get lost on the canals and narrow streets that make Amsterdam so famous — the kind of thing you might do when, in the back of your head, you keep saying, “I could live here,” and you suddenly find yourself comparing neighborhoods.

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

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

They recognized that fact too. They appreciated that Amsterdam is more than the Red Light District and tulips and windmills and coffee shops. That’s all tourists and backpackers think of when they come to Amsterdam, they said.

Though, by their own admission, they were only guessing. They’d never actually met a backpacker, let alone had conversations with one. And why would they have? Backpackers never strayed this far off the beaten path, and locals are busy leading their day-to-day life, which doesn’t create a lot of opportunities to meet tourists.

When we parted ways at the end of the night, they invited me down to Utrecht on my next trip through the continent. Amsterdam is great, they said, but it’s not the real Netherlands. There is so much more to the country than that.

One knows that intellectually. All it takes is one look at a map to know that Amsterdam is just a small part of the Netherlands. But as a traveler, you can often get tunnel vision about a destination, the walls of which are defined by the material in your guidebook and the tips from fellow travelers who came before you.

Only the locals know what the real story is — and until you get to know one, you will never learn it.

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

Because I was so guarded, I almost missed that chance. My newish nature on the road almost cost me two friendships.

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

Especially, because, a few months later, while I was in Vietnam, Lennart called me to tell me Greg had been killed in a robbery. Greg used to have a lot of people over after the casino closed as a way to keep the night going and, when word of this got out, other people came over to rob everyone, knowing that they would have lots of money. In an ensuing scuffle, Greg was shot and died at the scene.

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

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

The answer is always: “He’d say hello.”