The Skinny on Slim

After six decades of trash-talking and bookmaking, card playing and shooting pool, Thomas Austin Preston, Jr., a.k.a. Amarillo Slim, is still the world's greatest living hustler. I am living proof.

by Michael Hall

May 2003

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After marrying Helen Byler in 1949, Slim spent the fifties hustling pool. He, Helen, and their young son, Bunky, would travel the country, with Slim stopping long enough to make a little money in the local pool hall and then move on. Slim's world was a lot like the one in the 1961 movie The Hustler, in which Paul Newman conned his way across fifties America, eventually going up against Jackie Gleason's Minnesota Fats. Indeed, Slim battled the real-life Fats several times and learned some important things from him—the need to be brash and chatty and the need to sell oneself. It paid to have a memorable nickname, so he became Amarillo Slim. The name went well with his outfit—a Stetson hat and handmade boots. Slim played the bumpkin part to the hilt, making his hustle that much easier. "Everybody thought I was lighter than a June frost," he said with a laugh.

Slim eventually gave up pool because everyone knew his reputation and the game required him to spend too much time on the road. He started bookmaking, and in the early sixties, he began seriously playing poker. He honed his craft in Texas, learning and mastering the new game called hold 'em, which Slim remembers playing for the first time in Brenham around 1963. When the first World Series of Poker was played, in Las Vegas in 1970, Slim was there with five other players and hold 'em was the game. Two years later, at age 43, Slim won and took home $80,000. In 1973 his first book was published, a how-to guide called Play Poker to Win, and he became a kind of pop star, a fixture in magazines and on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where he playfully boasted and drawled well-worn lines like, "I'm the fourth-best player from Tulia, Texas."

During Slim's pool-playing days, he had always been interested in what he calls proposition bets—wagering, say, that he could knock a couple of balls into the side pocket using a broom. But as he got famous, he began taking bets on any crazy thing. He challenged tennis pro and hustler Bobby Riggs to play Ping-Pong for $10,000, with Slim having the choice of paddles. He chose skillets. Of course, he had been practicing with them and handily beat Riggs. Seven or eight months later in Knoxville, Tennessee, a guy named Lefty, who had obviously heard about the Riggs hustle, challenged Slim to play a friend, who turned out to be a table-tennis champion. But Slim, after accepting and insisting on his choice of paddles, showed up on the day of the match without the skillets he knew the champ had been preparing with. His choice this time was empty Coke bottles, which he had been practicing with for a month. He won easily. Several times Slim bet he could beat a Thoroughbred racehorse in a one-hundred-yard dash—and then revealed that the course was fifty yards up and fifty back. By the time the jockey had the horse stopped and turned, Slim was nearly home. Once, he said he could drive a golf ball a mile and, after taking bets, led the suckers to a frozen lake and easily won their money. Slim is a smart man; he bets only on what he knows he can win. And for the past thirty years, people have taken him up on it. The key to proposition bets is understanding the nature of one's fellow man, especially his greed and gullibility. To gamble may be human, but to hustle is divine.

SLIM HAS A WAY OF seeing your hand, even when he can't see it. About halfway through our match, the flop showed a jack and two 3's. Slim threw in his cards. "I ain't got nothing," he spat. "I can't beat a queen high, and you had a queen, didn't you?" Well, yeah, I said, but how did you know? "You didn't have an ace or a king at the start, or you'd have raised, and you didn't have a three or a jack going in, or you'd have raised. I guessed about a queen-ten." Actually, it was a queen-9.

Slim calls this intuition; it might be called card sense. "I always know what I got," he told me. "I'm always trying to figure out what you got." He does this by doing the numbers and observing the players. Contrary to popular wisdom, poker isn't so much about luck but about math and psychology—calculating odds and intentions, watching faces and listening to voices. In other words, says Slim, "poker is a people game." The main way to figure people out is to watch their eyes (one reason Slim wears a hat). And talk to them. Slim plays poker the way Michael Jordan plays basketball—aggressively, talking trash the whole time, rattling his opponents, confusing them, manipulating them, trying to figure out what they have. In the biggest hand of our match, he chattered like a crazy uncle. I had a queen in my hand and there were three 3's on the board, so I bet him $10.

"You must not have nothing," he snorted. Then he asked, "Do you have a heart in your hand?"

I laughed—hearts were a nonissue. The trip treys were the only thing that mattered.

"Well, that's not telling anything," he cried. "Do you have a heart in your hand?"

I ignored him.

"Are either one of your cards a heart?"

I fought back feebly with my own brand of psy-war non sequitur. "Yes," I said nervously, "this coffee is very good."

He was unfazed. "Oh, you don't have a heart in your hand. Okay. I call. I thought you had two 4's. Now you might have made a club flush."

Of course, neither fours nor clubs had anything to do with anything either. Slim had a great hand, a full house (so did I; we split the pot), and he was merely fostering chaos. "It's just psychology," Slim said about his nonstop banter. "I always graciously insult or put down my opponent. If they take it good, fine. But then I cover it up in a minute with either something complimentary or something distracting. If they don't like it, then I overdo it. Because I really and truly don't give a damn what people think, if the truth be known. Deal."

Pop psychologists tell us that the reason gambling addicts always lose in the end isn't just because they're poor players; it is that deep down, they are self-loathing weaklings who want to lose. That may be so with some compulsive types, but it's not true for those who make a living with figures and suckers. "It depends on what you think about yourself," Slim said, explaining the difference between himself and the rest of us. "I like me. I like what I do. I'm a dirty bastard, but my word's good." For Slim, gambling isn't an avocation; it's his profession, one that has allowed him to enjoy the steady financial success of a big-city investment banker. He approaches poker the way speculators do the stock market, which he also plays: Don't worry about short-term loss; look at the big picture, the long haul. Follow certain rules and procedures, bet certain hunches—you may lose on one hand, but you'll win with the same hand the next two times.

Slim continues to play in all the big tournaments, though in some ways, modern poker seems to have passed guys like him by. In the old days, fewer than a dozen would play for the World Series title in Las Vegas, which still had its own small-town sleazy charm. Now Vegas is a huge entertainment complex, and poker is big business. Last year 631 players competed for the championship; thirteen former winners, including Slim, were bounced long before the final rounds. "These new guys learned to play from watching a computer or else from reading books," he complained. "They play like robots." Slim still makes big bets, though, and said that he and some "associates" won more than $500,000 betting on George W. Bush to win the presidency ("One of the first headlines I saw was the Denver Post, which said 'Gore Wins Election.' I couldn't swallow boiled okra."). And he's become royalty in Las Vegas, getting inducted into several halls of fame, including the Horseshoe Casino Hall of Fame and the Legends of Nevada at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino. "My nomination and acceptance were by acclamation," he said about the latter, noting proudly that other inductees include Howard Hughes and Benny Binion, two men who built Las Vegas.

These days, Slim mostly hunts, fishes, or hangs out on one of his ranches with his cattle or dozen prized racehorses, waiting for the phone to ring. "I've served my apprenticeship," he said. "There's nothing anymore I'm trying to prove. I've slowed way down. You get old, wore out, don't have any drive or ambition. I'm at my best now when I'm on a horse and doing something. Everything I could do on a horse I can still do." His famous nose for risk almost got him killed last Labor Day weekend when, riding a trail in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness area in northern Idaho, he fell off his horse, which then fell on him, breaking every one of his ribs. Slim was evacuated by helicopter and spent nine days in an intensive-care unit. "I've always heard you have nine lives," he said, shaking his head at the memory. "I calculated mine up. I've already used up twelve."

IT WAS OF COUSE JUST a matter of time. I had about $30 in chips and two jacks—a pretty good hand. Slim raised, I re-raised, and he raised again. The last communal card gave him a pair of queens (or Siegfried and Roy, as Slim calls them), beating me and leaving me with $2. If I had been more aggressive in my initial betting, he would have folded with his queen high and I would have won the hand. That, says Slim, is why they call it gambling. My last stand lasted maybe another minute. "Ain't that a bitch," he crowed when it was over. "You done throwed the ball plumb over the fence, you're a long way from home, don't know anybody, and probably hungry." I thanked him for the lesson and he took my $100. It was all I could do not to pull another $20 out of my wallet.

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