Inside the World Series of Poker
"When you're talking poker, you're talking Texas," bragged one contestant; but the big winner was a man from Tennessee.
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Wills and Binion have known each other for five decades, have been, together with Johnny Moss, the members of a tough-luck-to-gold-dust trio that extends clear back to their mutual service as West Texas paperboys. Moss, of Lubbock and Odessa, is one of the legendary figures of professional gambling, a man who once won five million dollars at cards only to lose it at craps, who another time ran a $1000 stake into a half million playing hard road poker just in time to payoff a debt that had earned him a price on his head, who yet another time dropped a $250,000 pot to one-time mobster Nick "The Greek" Dodario in a fabled game of five-card stud.
He looks like everybody's German grandfather, balding white hair and sparkly blue eyes, but admits to having "knowed maybe 50 thieves and 15 or 20 killers." He ran the card room at Binion's for years, helping to earn its reputation for the world's richest poker pots, the setting for historic games that could climb as high as a half-million dollars in a single hand. He's nearing 70 now and many of the other professionals feel he's past his prime; in the month prior to the World Series, he lost "an easy quarter million" at the Aladdin, home of the second richest poker pots, and, said another player, "I don't care how much money a man has, that's just got to hurt him."
Moss had won the first two World Series, in 1970 and '71. Last year he was eliminated when Adrian "Texas Dolly" Doyle, of Ft. Worth, filled a Heart flush on a 28 to 1 draw. The winner then was Tom "Amarillo Slim" Preston.
Rail-thin and ebullient, Slim has done for professional poker what Bobby Fischer did for chess, pulling it out of back room obscurity and putting it on Johnny Carson. The mass media has "took a hankerin'" to him and he plays it to the hilt, wearing Stetsons and anteater-hide boots, speaking in a sllooowww draawwwull that sounds like Jackie Cooper at 331/3. He is zesty and quotable, with a 10-gallon hatful of one-liners, and he really is from Amarillo ("Jes' a li'le ol' place. Population don't grow much 'cuz ever' time a woman gets pregnant a man leaves town."). Most of his colleagues rate him only a "middlin'" poker player, but they admit he's done a lot for the game.
Slim once phoned Johnny Moss and suggested they fly to London where he'd been "given t'understand there'us a poker game in progress." On arrival they discovered the game to be something called hari-kari.
"How d'ya figure ya play it?" Slim asked.
"Don't know," answered Moss, "but if it's poker, it'll take us about five minutes to figure it out."
Slim and Moss then proceeded, as Slim recalls it, "to do us a little work on thet balance o' payments problem."
The World Series of Poker is to card-sharping what the All-Star Game is to baseball, bringing together at the same kidney-shaped baize table the best poker players in the world. It's about the only time when more than a couple of them can be found in the same game because, as Slim puts it, "Why, it'd be like us takin' in each other's wash fer a livin'. Us fellers got a livin' to make and we surely ain't gonna make much just offen each other."
Nor, though individual pots may go as high as 50 or 60 grand, is it the highest stakes poker game in town; those are saved for more private places where the IRS can't see them.
All it is, says Slim, "is the goddamnest best poker game in the knowed world."
Jack Binion and Jimmy the Greek are scurrying around, getting the tables in place, counting out chips, adjusting lights, deciding who gets passes to cross the rail. Bobby Brazil comes in, longhaired and 25 years old, a last-minute entry. He admits to losing $300,000 in six months and allows as how his parents are fronting him the $10,000 buy-in price. The reporters put him down as a ringer and snicker. Jimmy the Greek, who's seen him play (who's seen them all play) calls him a "helluva little poker player" and puts him down at ten to one.
Slim comes in, hat thrown back on his head and coat over his shoulder ("Le's go, Ah'm ray-deee!"), with a fistful of black $100 chips. "Y'all want some?" he calls to the crowd and, thus prompted, gives his best Juan Marichal high-kicker windup and flings into the greedy cavern of Binion's…dollar chips. The black ones are still in his hand.
"I wish't he'd athrowed them black 'uns," mutters one of the other players, a little annoyed. "Woulda served 'im rahght." Poker is a game of silent courage and sublimated paranoia, where one's "cool" is as important in itself as it is a determinant of success, and Slim's showboating does not go down well with many of the others.
Walter "Pug" (for Puggy-Wuggy) Pearson saunters in, fat cigar in fat mouth, looking like he's between acts as a circus clown. A native Tennesseean, Pug is rated with Straus and Moss as one of the best three all around card players alive, and is the only non-Texan counted as a contender to win the tournament. He's come in second for the last two years ("just like the Dallas Cowboys," says Jimmy the Greek).
There are, in all, 13 players. Each has bought in at $10,000 apiece and the game will go on until one of them has all $130,000 in front of him. Of the 13, eight are Texans.
The game they are playing is Hold 'Em, a variation on seven card stud that has become the big money poker game. Crandall Addington, a San Antonian who is flashy and urbane in the style of the old riverboat gamblers, says "Hold 'Em is to other kinds of poker what chess is to checkers."
Slim, a little less analytical calls it "a real ball-cracker of a game."
There are to be two tables to start off, and the players draw for seats; after three are eliminated, the 10 survivors will redraw and consolidate at one table. The tables break somewhat unevenly. At the smaller one off to the corner, the one with six players, are all three top-ranked (by Jimmy the Greek) favorites, Straus, Moss, and Texas Dolly Doyle, plus Slim, Crandall Addington and Bobby Brazil. Slim offers seven to five that the winner comes from his table and gets no takers.
Jimmy the Greek is giving three to two that the first man out is Sherman Lanier, a quiet, bookish-looking pawn-broker from New Orleans. Lanier's a comparative stranger at Binion's and there are no takers here either.
The game gets started slow and easy, players feeling each other out, the ante set at a paltry $25. It moves through the first evening of what everyone knows will be at least a few days of poker (last year it took five) and they're loose, relaxed, joshing each other. Slim takes the first biggish pot, calling a bluff by Straus with a weak pair of Queens for $5,000.
The kibbitzers who have rail passes, most of them big-stakes players themselves, have finished laying their side bets and are discussing the finer points of poker and the Poker Stars. "Johnny (Moss) ain't gonna do too good early on," says one," "but if he's still there when it gets short-handed, he'll be hell." "Jack's (Straus) an aggressive player," opines another. "He won't be able to take this sittin' for long; he'll start movin' them chips pretty soon."
Straus raises two grand to Texas Dolly and takes the pot with a pair of Jacks. Slim is playing to the crowd and the cameras, allowing as how these movie fellers has been talkin' to'm about this here show called Amarillo Tarzan. At the other table, Bobby "The Wizard" Hoff, of Houston, is running hot, draws to a spade flush and fills it, taking $2,000 from Pug. ("We call him The Wizard," yells Doyle, "'cause he can make whole mountains of black checks just disappear.")
Slim, again to the crowd: "y'all know why this game's a-goin' so slow. It's 'cuz these peckerwoods done read mah book." Slim, needless to say, has written a book about poker ("Six-ninety-five, or 50 dollars fer an autograph't one."). His son Bunky, a West Texas State senior, is hawking them outside.
Jack Straus is the first player to "tap in," to move all his chips into the pot, betting everything on one hand. There's nothing showing on the board but there are no takers; Straus rakes in about 10 grand. "Prob'ly bluffin'," muses a bystander, who had nothing to lose to find out.
Bobby Hoff takes another big pot and sips a Heineken's. His one beer makes him the only player who will drink alcohol for the duration, the rest taking only coffee, iced and hot, orange juice, coke, and mineral water. Slim calls for coffee, "jes' a little sugar an' a dirty cup."
The first break, for 15 minutes, comes at 8 a.m. They're all still in there, though Sherman Lanier is down to $1900. When they return, the ante and minimum bet are doubled (for the second time) and Slim remarks as how "we started in playin' cattleman's poker but this un's get tin' up to an oilman's game now."
Straus, who's down three grand, spent the break grousing about the uneven way the tables broke. "They ought to figure up a way to seed 'em, like in tennis or somethin'. That table o'mine's about twice as tough as that other one."
Virgie Moss, Johnny's wife, a friendly but tough-looking West Texas Lady who wears a gargantuan diamond on one hand, says she "won't let Johnny play poker at all in the house. They just get so nasty when they're playin', droppin' cigarette butts on the rugs and ever'thing.…"
At the first table, Hoff and Pug are beginning a running battle. Hoff is betting and Pug sees him, raises another $2500. There's an Ace showing on the table, otherwise nothing. A stone cold bluff. Pug had an Ace for a pair and pot. Pug swallows, rolls his cigar in his mouth, spins and flips his chips with the practiced hands of the expert gambler. He calls. Hoff shows his card, a 7 and a 4, nothing. A stone cold bluff. Pug had an Ace for a pair pulls down $32,000 while the crowd cheers. Hoff goes again to the ginger ale.
Next hand, Bobby Hoff is right back again, tapping in with only three cards turned up, a 7, an 8, and a 10. Pug calls him, waits through two more cards and turns up a King and a 10, for a pair. Hoff shows two 8's in the hole, for three, and the rail gives him three cheers. Two hands later, Hoff fills a full house, 8's and 4's, to take $23,000 and more cheers.
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