Ball of Fury
Inside Chicago’s cut throat world of ping pong
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Giamalis estimates that he’s played about 2,000 matches at Happy Village.
Of those, he says, he’s lost only 200. He doesn’t seem to mind the inferior competition. Beating the shit out of bar patrons makes him feel invincible and prepares him to go out and dominate the competition the following day, in a more important arena. Giamalis is an S&P 500 trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He says that if you have any insecurity, you won’t make any money. So playing pong helps him relieve some of that and makes him feel good at work, knowing what he did to his opponents at the bar the night before.
But it works in reverse, too. If Giamalis plays like crap, it keeps him up at night and messes with his head as he trades the next day. It makes him hesitant. A losing night at the pong table could cost him thousands.
“Thankfully,” he says, “I don’t lose much.”
Every Monday through Friday, Giamalis wakes up early, usually with a small hang over, and heads directly downtown to 20 South Wacker Drive and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He likes to wear polo shirts, khaki pants and Asics running shoes. “Something comfortable and easy,” he says. He spends his mornings in a small windowless office with three other guys, all of them staring at multiple computer screens. There is nothing much on the walls, aside from a “Turn computers off!” note tacked to the left of the door. Ripped apart processors and used screens are scattered across the floor. A television set in the back makes noise. It’s set to Fox News channel. Bulk boxes of Corona, Heineken and liters of bottled water are piled in the back. For the next three to four hours, Giamalis glances between four computer screens stacked in front of him. He clicks periodically to make trades on futures and currencies. “It’s kind of like watching paint dry,” he says. But it makes him 200K to 300K a year.
His office is thick with dude-talk. Most of the traders in the room left college before they graduated. But they still have advice on picking schools. “If I were to go back, I’d head to San Diego State,” says one trader, who wears khaki shorts and beat-up sandals with no socks. “It’s the place I wanted to go before I got into this shit. It’s a place to pound pussy.”
Another disagrees, “Naw man, if you want play, you need to head to Arizona State. Chicks take it in the ass at that school.”
“And you know a lot about doing chicks in the ass?” asks Giamalis.
“Hey, if the bitch wants to take it there, I ain’t arguing,” he responds.
The guys in the room shake their heads, smile, and go back to clicking their mice.
After lunch, too often a Red Bull and a cigarette, Giamalis puts on a black, eight-pocketed trader’s jacket made out of jersey material, pins a badge to his chest that reads DAN 888 and heads for the floor.
“The first time I went on the floor I was like: What. The. Fuck?” he says.
The first time anybody gets on the floor is nuts. People run around in different colored trader’s jackets and papers cover the floor. It’s a sea of yellow, lime green, blue, pink, black and pumpkin. Nearly all of the traders and clerks are men and many of these men nervously chew chewing gum. Around the perimeter of the place are screens displayed like banners with loads of colored numbers appearing and changing on them throughout the day. Giamalis is in his element here. It’s a place for alpha-males to duel, talk shit and sweat. It’s a giant locker room without towels, though you get the feeling that if the traders did have towels, they’d snap each other’s butts.
The Merc trades commodities like cattle, milk, pork and lumber on one side of the room and S&P 500 on the other. In between are smaller trading zones, like NASDAQ. The place where the big boys play is the S&P pit. It’s where Giamalis meets his trading partner, Ken Schneider, a veteran trader who bears a slight resemblance to Dustin Hoffman, to talk over the game plan for the day. It’s a brief confab, and once he finishes, Giamalis climbs stairs to a crow’s nest position above the S&P 500 pit. He puts on a headset that makes him look like the pilot of a Cessna and checks to see if his partner can hear him. Once contact is established, he relays information on prices and movements of other traders while his partner stands and trades in the pit, referred to as the “open out cry.”
At 3:15 pm, after a last-second flurry of trades, Giamalis heads for home and immediately crashes. Life as a trader is tough. The hours are short but the work is intense. Whenever he wakes up, he grabs some food and then heads across the street to Happy Village for rounds and rounds of beer and pong. “It helps me get into a different mode that I need a lot. It de-stresses me and gets me out of the market mode,” he says. “I work-out to do the same thing, but I play pong a hell of a lot more than I work-out.”
He says he spent 20 hours a week in the pong room of Happy Village during the winter. He went there almost every night to improve his game.
