In order to meet Falafel, the highest ranked backgammon player in the world, I took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, and then hopped a jitney to the Borgata Hotel. Falafel’s real name is Matvey Natanzon, but no one calls him that, not even his mother, who calls him Mike, the name that he adopted when they emigrated from Israel to Buffalo—one leg in a long journey that began in Soviet Russia. Now even Falafel calls himself Falafel.

Falafel was in Atlantic City to support a friend he calls The Bone, a professional poker player who was registered in a tournament at the Borgata. The Bone, who is from Ukraine by way of Brooklyn, used to play backgammon, but he switched to poker because there is more money in it. Falafel is either a purist, or unable to master poker, or too lazy to really try, or all of the above. He is committed to backgammon, which is his main source of income—to the extent that he can find wealthy people who want to lose to him in cash-only private games. There are more of these than one might expect, but not a lot. Finding them and hanging on to them is a skill.

The jitney that travels between the Atlantic City hotels is run-down and slow, a horrible way to travel. Falafel would never take it. He can make ten thousand dollars in half an hour playing backgammon; he can make many times that in an evening—and he can lose it all just as easily. The money comes and goes. Currently, he has no home. He has no driver’s license. Until just a few months ago, he had no cell phone, no bank account, and no credit card. Pretty much everything that he owns can fit into a large black suitcase. Still, he allows himself certain luxuries, and one of them is to hire a car rather than sit in a jitney.

Falafel had promised that he would be in the Borgata’s poker ballroom, and when I arrived, at four-thirty on a gray January afternoon, the ballroom was half empty. To the non-gambler, the interior of an Atlantic City casino is in no way a place of obvious joy. For Falafel, who wanted to dabble in a few quick hands while he waited for The Bone, the atmosphere was energizing. He is a big man, both in the tall way and in the overweight way, and he was dressed to relax: a soccer jersey with the logo of a Turkish cell-phone company on the front, and on the back the number seven and “FALAFEL.” Propped up on his head was a yellow knitted cap, giving him the appearance of an oversized garden gnome. Nylon shorts extended below his knees. Fiddling with a dumpy black cell phone, he looked up, smiling, and asked, “How did you recognize me?”

Falafel is typically unshaven, but the stubble is not forbidding, and his face easily fills with warmth. In 2005, an Israeli filmmaker made a documentary about him, called “Falafel’s Game.” In a scene filmed late one night in his hotel, Falafel says, “I’m like a kid inside. I feel like a kid—in my principles, the way I think about things.” He is forty-four. He has known hardship: he once lived on a park bench. Pickpockets have stolen from him. Lowlifes have taken advantage of him. He has learned to be streetwise, but something kidlike remains. He lives life as if it were a game.

Falafel bought three hundred dollars in chips and sat at a table. Soon the piles before him were getting taller. He attributed this not to his skill at poker but to his gambling instincts, which are formidable in some circumstances (backgammon, mainly) and horrendous in others (sports betting, mainly). As he played, he glanced at the cards occasionally, but mostly he jabbered. When an elderly man in a leather jacket sat down and, by coincidence, began to talk about backgammon, Falafel could not contain himself. “Oh, you play?” he said. “I like to play, too.” The man nodded. A round of cards was dealt. “You know,” Falafel said, “I’m the No. 1 backgammon player in the world.” He glanced at a card. “None of you could beat me.”

A skeptical player wearing a Miami Dolphins cap picked up his smartphone to verify. To his left, another old man asked, “Is it in the Google?”

“I’m checking,” the skeptic said. “I’m just getting a lot of restaurants.”

The dealer slowed play, so that the matter could be resolved—which it quickly was, generating a wave of smiles. Suddenly, a celebrity was among them. “O.K., Mr. Falafel,” the dealer said. “What will it be?”

In two hours, Falafel was sitting behind five hundred dollars. Things were looking up. “A year ago, if you found me then, my life would have been so much different,” he said. For a time, Falafel was living in Las Vegas, with a roommate—a young backgammon whiz whom he calls Genius or Lobster, depending on his mood—but he rarely left the couch, where he watched sports, and watched the money that he bet on sports disappear. Now he saw opportunity. “This year, I am travelling a lot, playing more backgammon,” he said. From Atlantic City, Falafel was planning to go to a tournament in San Antonio, and then there were trips to Los Angeles, Israel, Denmark, and, in August, Monte Carlo, for the world championships. In each place, the prospect of cash side games lay in wait. An Internet gaming site was interested in coöperating with him. He had taken on a student. Falafel was filled with a sense of purpose. He was ready, he told his friends, to turn his fortunes around.

“We should go now,” Falafel said, as he cashed out; he needed to find The Bone, who was finishing a round in his tournament. The two men met in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when Falafel was in New York, living in Washington Square Park, and playing chess. The Bone, whose real name is Arkadiy Tsinis, is tall and thin. He is a disciplined gambler; recruiters from Wall Street have tried to bring him into their game. “That’s him,” Falafel said, pointing to a man wearing a floppy leather hat and sunglasses perched on an aquiline nose. The Bone was locked in a stare-down with another player. The visible portions of his face were impassive. Eventually, with only a few chips left, he folded. Falafel tried to cheer him up as they walked over to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Falafel’s homelessness was of his own making. In 1972, when he was four, his mother, Larissa, fled Soviet Russia (and Falafel’s father), moving to the Israeli town of Azor, near Tel Aviv. In Falafel’s memory, Azor is ever warm and sunlit, filled with soccer matches and schoolyard friends. Larissa worked long hours at the airport, and so Falafel was often free to do as he liked—until he was fourteen, when she told him that she was marrying an Israeli-American biophysicist, and that they were moving to Buffalo, to live with him. Falafel resented the move. Buffalo was cold and foreign. He didn’t know the language. His stepfather, a Holocaust survivor, was caring but stern, and pushed him to think of life in pragmatic terms. Falafel rebelled. He did little but play chess; he drank, and even went to school a little tipsy. He went to college halfheartedly, and after graduating he lost his savings by betting on sports. Larissa refused to help him unless he found a job, and so, instead, in the winter of 1994, he hitched a ride with a friend to Manhattan, to hustle chess. “I just went through the motions,” Falafel says. “My only thing was to make a bit of money so that I could survive.”