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.
Them Texas fellers, hmmh? Hell. Ah guess they prob'ly made this town, y' know.…
—Ned
THERE'S MAYBE A DOZEN OF them left now, men like Ned, wandering through Vegas like Banquo's ghost in dusty gear, living artifacts of the Pre-Neon Epoch. They were prospectors back then, solitary seekers after Fast Money, picking their way across the Nevada hills in much the same manner as their spiritual descendants plumb the crystal canyons of the Strip in search of the same end.
Las Vegas indulges them fittingly, bestowing on Ned and his cohorts a kind of invisible carte blanche: the freedom to amble in and out, come and go, eat and drink, all on the house, wherever they go. If it's done in atonement for the broken souls, a karmic redemption for those who paid-their-money-and-took-their-chances, then it's done in typical Vegas fashion, brassy and ballsy, shoot the works.
Tom Wolfe once observed that when Monte Carlo made its debut as a gambling resort, a world-renowned architect was retained to design the opera house and Sarah Bernhardt read poetry; when Bugsy Siegel inaugurated gambling in Vegas, he hired Abbott and Costello. That, averred Mr. Wolfe, says it all about Las Vegas.
The coffee shop in Binion's Horseshoe is crowded earlier than normal for a still-dull Vegas afternoon, with prosperous-looking, sports-shorted men milling around, going from table to table to say hello and reminisce, trying to kill time until the four o'clock start of The Game. Just a silver dollar flip away, on the other side of the double row of blackjack tables, the grand finale of the Fourth Annual World Series of Poker is set to take place and gamblers from across the country have homed in on Binion's like art collectors at a Sotheby's auction.
In a corner booth an ominous-looking sort, with a Johnny Cash kind of blocky face, deep cleft chin and wavy dark hair, is furtively scribbling on a placemat, buttonholing passersby to ask their opinion on something. At a small table a few feet away, "Treetop" Jack Straus is drinking milk, chatting amiably with a visiting journalist and whoever else stops by. He'd been declared co-champion of the Kansas City Lo-Ball tournament the day before, one of the preliminaries to the World Series, and he remarked as how he was "feeling great and ready to play. Only problem is I lost my glasses. Got propositioned from the rail last night and couldn't even read the damn note."
The suspicious placemat scribbler calls over, "Hey, Jack, will you take five to one on yourself?"
Straus, without a moment's hesitation, replies tiredly, "Naw, I'm feelin' pretty worn out, give me maybe 12 or 15."
"How about eight to one?" tries the Johnny Cash look-alike, sporting a monster red ruby on one finger.
"Naw, I don't think so," answers Straus, returning to conversation with the much confused journalist. The other man, the suspicious one, arises from his booth and flourishes the placemat while other men crowd around. He is Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, it turns out, protean oddsmaker and Vegas' town crier, and the placemat doodlings are the official line on the Poker World Series; Straus is the favorite at nine to two.
Like most high-stakes professional gamblers, Jack Straus is from Texas, Houston in his case, and he folds his angular six-five frame around a glass of milk while pondering why that is so: "I think Texans just got a lot more guts has a lot to do with it, most other folks just don't take the heat when you start playin' real poker. In Texas you grow up playin' poker, it's a Texas game. Jews are generally better at gin rummy, for example, 'cause they're better at mathematics, but when you get 'round poker, you're talkin' about Texas.
I learned how to play from my daddy and been playin' cards since I was six or seven, just like the rest of these Texas boys. I can remember when I was a kid they'd be shootin' craps out in the woods. They'd lay a four-by-four piece o' plywood on the ground and you'd get 50 or 60 cars pulled up in there, people sittin' round drinkin' beer and throwin' dice. At night they'd turn the car lights on and they'd go all weekend."
Straus is a gambler's gambler, widely thought to be one of the best all-around card players in the world, equally adept at everything from gin rummy to blackjack and a dozen variations of poker. He was a basketball player at Texas A&M and then taught school until he decided teaching couldn't support his penchant for betting, and he's been a professional gambler for the second half of his 42 years. He lives hard, manfully, in the apocryphal tradition of the Texas wheeler-dealer; he has hunted and fished, gambled and gamboled, all over the world, spent his money freely and loosely, generously, win or lose. He has done many of those things that are characteristic of the Texas high-roller, like chartering planes to fly his friends to places like Aruba or Curacao, but he does them without the swagger and bravado that also typify the archetype.
His attorney, Phil Greene, calls Straus "one of the most honestly generous people you'll ever meet. We used to room together a while back and when I first started practicing law he wanted to help out. I'd just passed my bar exam when he was charged with gambling conspiracy, so he goes out and fires Percy Foreman and hires me! Hell, it was my first trial! When we lost it, I took it pretty hard but you know what old Jack did? He drove me around all night trying to cheer me up. Here was a man who'd just been convicted of a felony and what he was concerned about was how bad I felt."
Another friend, a codefendant in that same trial, remembers it in somewhat more colorful fashion: "Hell, there musta been a thousand people makin' book on that one. We opened the trial at 20 to 1 favorites, jes' runnin' away with it, see? But then every time someone'd get up to testify, we'd get a new line on it. The thing that really killed us was when they brought a bunch of school kids into the courtroom on one of those classroom trips, y' know? The damn prosecutin' attorney gets up an' points at 'em and starts moanin' about how we're responsible for leadin' them kids straight into Hell or somethin', and you could see old ladies on the jury startin' to cry. We finished the trial at 8 to 5 underdogs."
Although Straus' conviction was set aside, his legal difficulties are a persistent worry. "I can't understand why the government spends so much time worryin' about gamblin'," he says, "ain't nobody ever bet a nickel on a football game that didn't decide for himself that he had just as good a chance of winning it."
A strange twist of federal law, one that many constitutional lawyers claim negates the right to due process, is currently pressing hard on Jack Straus. The law allows the Internal Revenue Service to exact a ten percent levy on all bets made, won or lost. While straightforward enough at that point, if somewhat stiff, it then takes a curious turn: The IRS can bill you for just about any amount they can conjure up, making no pretense as to its accuracy, and you have no right to protest until after you pay. The IRS is presently claiming that Straus owes them a million and a half dollars and there is considerable side-betting at Binion's on just how far he win get with his money, should he win, before the IRS swoops in on him.
There's no other place, really, that the World Series of Poker could be fittingly played than at Binion's Horseshoe Casino, the home of the highest stakes gambling in the nation. It's a Texas place, owned and run by Texans, and Benny Binion or his son Jack can always be counted on to cover it if you want to bet some truly outrageous sum on a roll of the dice or flip of the cards. As Jack Straus puts it, " At other places up here they love you if you got money but they won't even let you in the door if you don't. At Binion's they'll always welcome you, it's got Texas hospitality."
Benny Binion came to Vegas in 1951, just five years after Bugsy Siegel brought in gambling (and, sayeth the Justice Department, the Mob). Binion had grown up in northwest Texas, was a cowboy and a hustler who worked hard and minded his own business, came to run game rooms and bootleg liquor in Dallas and Ft. Worth when the latter was still a whiskey and revolver Hard Town. He was well-liked and well-respected, a precarious duality in the world of professional gambling, and when he took over the run-down hotel that became the Horseshoe, it was natural that Texas gamblers would gravitate in that direction.
The Horseshoe was the first casino in Vegas to have wall-to-wall carpeting and, audaciously apt, Binion threw up a million dollars in cash—a hundred $10,000 bills encased in a double sheet of plastic—smack in front of the never-closed main entrance, a welcome mat that would seem loathsomely brash were it laid out by anyone but a Texan. The tourists file past to gawk and drool, to puzzle over who this Chase character is who got his picture on the $10,000 bill, and to sample the odds at the casino that otherwise proffers the prettiest women, the stiffest drinks, and the best Mexican food in town. Chill Wills, who concocted the recipe for the restaurant's chili, is a Horseshoe habitue, regaling the occasional journalist with apocalyptic stories about the Great Beeville Hijacking or Lone Wolf Gonzalez of the Texas Rangers.
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