FOR THE WESTBOUND wagon trains, the Nevada desert was a barrier, a destructive element to be suffered and endured. Now, thanks to air conditioning, it is the state's main attraction. Elsewhere in the United States that May, there were cold snaps and sudden thaws; there were tornado warnings in Alabama and hurricanes in Florida. But in Las Vegas the weather was a steady state, as in a controlled experiment. The sun shone, the desert wind blew, the illuminated thermometer at the top of the Mint registered eighty-five to ninety-five degrees day after day.
Then, on the morning of May 15, a minor miracle occurred. When I got out of bed and went to the window, the sun was gone. Beyond the parking lots, the pawnshops, and the railroad tracks, the mountains were shrouded in dark veils, which were vaguely wavering at the edges and moving slowly toward the town. By noon, there was rain. The air was cool, and the rackety streets of Glitter Gulch were pervaded by the faint, musky scent of dust finally laid. Later that afternoon, the little pool at the Mint was empty, fresh, delectable. The following day, it was closed. The air temperature had dropped to a mere seventy-three degrees, which by Vegas's standards is too cold for swimming.
But when the main, and final, event of the 1981 World Series of Poker began, three days later, the heat had clamped down again. Despite the air conditioning, Binion's Horseshoe was sweltering, although the contestants did not seem to notice. Set apart from the journalists, the television crews, and the spectators, who had been packed against the rails since early morning, were seventy-five poker players - two more than the previous year - who had put up $10,000 apiece for the privilege of playing no-limit hold 'em for the title of World Champion.
'That's American democracy,' a journalist from New York said. 'It costs ten Gs to enter, but anyone who's got that kind of money to spare can sit down and take his chances with the best players in the world.'
I had the impression that if he could have written it off against expenses he would have sat down himself. And that is what distinguishes the poker tournament from other sporting events. When Norman Mailer went to Kinshasa in 1974 to cover the Ali-Foreman fight, he may have gone on a training run with Ali, but not even Mailer, who prides himself on his boxing and still works out regularly, would ever have dreamed of going into the ring with the man. In the looming presence of Ali or Foreman, there are limits to the illusions one can have about one's physique and athletic prowess. Not so in poker. The seventy-five entrants in the big event are all mental athletes of exceptional ability, the fine tip of a pyramid of well over fifty million players. But they are not much to look at: mostly middle-aged and overweight, with sallow, pouchy faces, bloodshot eyes, nicotinestained fingers, five-o'clock shadow.
Stu Ungar, the defending champion, is in his middle twenties but looks like a scrawny teenager, loose-jointed and deathly pale, with a nervous, rapid-fire, slurring voice and a slightly simian jaw - 'a dead ringer,' said Jack Straus, who is fond of him, 'for Zira, the doctor in Planet of the Apes.' Johnny Moss and Puggy Pearson never progressed beyond the third grade at school, and another top player, I was told, can barely read or write. Yet all of them know the precise percentages offered by every pot; at any point of the deal they can tell you which cards have already fallen, how many are left in the pack, how many will help them, and the exact odds on their making a hand. They know all this with complete accuracy, but instinctively, through card sense, experience, and innate mathematical ability. Even those who have gone through school often adopt an innocent, aw-shucks, country-boy air to confuse the opposition. That, too, is poker.
So the bright, educated outsider can persuade himself that he is in with a chance, particularly since there is an element of luck in any card game. Chess is a game of pure information - like poker with all the cards exposed where the better player will always win; that is why a computer can be programmed to play it so well. But the only way a computer could be made to play top-level poker would be by introducing a randomizing factor into the program which would correspond both to the element of bluff and to the random way the cards fall. When the cards are particularly kind, even a sucker can beat a really good player. But not for long. That is why the poker tables at Las Vegas are called 'the graveyards of hometown champs.' Poker players who have beaten their local games in all corners of the United States come to Vegas to test their skills, like tennis players converging on Wimbledon. Nearly all of them go home broke.
At midday on Monday, May 18, 1981, seventy-five of the most spectacular survivors in the poker world were milling nervously around the Sombrero Room. Less than a quarter of them had any real hope of walking away with the title, but even those elect few were strung up like racehorses. They seemed to have difficulty staying still. They moved about from group to group, from table to table, chatting briefly and then moving on, hovering, listening to the gossip, getting another perspective, sizing up the opposition, charging themselves up on the excitement.
Even Doyle Brunson seemed nervous, although his large, comforting presence translated tension into a faint, subliminal gloom. 'The only way you can approach it is to think it's just another poker game,' he said. He shifted uneasily in his chair, like an iceberg settling in the water. 'That's not strictly true, of course. Today is the biggest day of the year for poker players. And every year it gets bigger. Seventy-five contestants means three quarters of a million prize money. Three hundred seventy-five thousand dollars for the winner. Whichever way you reckon it, that's a good payday.'
The local bookmakers had made him the favorite to win the title for the third time - the previous year Stu Ungar had beaten him in the final - but that was an added burden, and he did not want it. When I mentioned it, he shook his head doubtfully and said, 'I'm not playing as well as last year.' The iceberg settled further in the water. 'But I'll play hard and maybe something will happen. You have to get a lot of breaks to come through that many players. In a freeze-out, when you can't reach back and take more chips, the best player won't necessarily win. There's a lot of luck involved. I guess that's what attracts so many players. You have to have the right cards at the right time in order to get down to the last table. Once you're there, then the best player has a good chance. The most important money is your first ten thousand. If you can get your chips up to twenty thousand, where you can lose a pot without crippling yourself, then you're in with a chance. But if I lose the first couple of pots I play, there is not much I can do about it; the next one I put money in I've got to win. That makes you push your hands a little bit when you start getting low on chips. I never was much of a short-stack player. I like to have a lot of money in front of me. If another guy has more, it affects my style of play. Some of the others aren't like that - they just sit there and wait and try to catch a hand and double up. I like to chop around and win small pots and gradually build up my stack. Then if a big pot comes I play it. But the main thing about tournaments is to try to win small pots early, then hope to catch a break or two. Everybody at the last table will have had his share of luck.'
I asked him what he meant by not playing well, since he had been winning steadily in the side games, and Brunson, even when slightly off form, is better than almost any other player.
'The first time I won the tournament, I got lucky in a couple of key pots: I had the worst hand going in but managed to outdraw the guy each time when all my chips were in the center. But the second time I won the title I didn't make a single mistake the whole three days. I never jeopardized my stack unnecessarily, I read my opponents right every time, I threw away strong hands when I sensed I was beaten, and my chips never went down; they just built and built all the way. This year .' He shrugged. The iceberg quaked slightly. 'I dunno. If I can get some soft spots to start with, so I can build up my stack .' He rose majestically to his feet. 'I'm going to go supervise the draw and make sure they don't stick me at the same table as Johnny Moss, Bobby Baldwin, Puggy Pearson, and Jack Straus, the way they do every year.'
Jack Straus was complaining about the prize money. 'I don't reckon it should be divided up - half to the winner, 20 percent to the runner-up, and so on,' he said. 'Nine people - the whole last table - are going to walk away with cash. That's not what a competition is about. The winner should take the whole seven-fifty.'
Today, even Straus seemed to be on edge. He shifted from foot to foot, like a horse sensing bad weather, and peered about, from his enormous height, over the crowded heads. A slim, straight-backed young woman in a mauve jump suit was hesitating at the entrance to the Sombrero Room. Straus signaled to her - half wave, half salute. She waved back and threaded her way through the crowd to join him.
Most of the women poker players have lacquered hair and tired faces, which make even the young ones look middle-aged. Betty Carey, however, is in her midtwenties and looks younger. She has what used to be called 'an outdoor-girl complexion,' a narrow, Cupid's-bow upper lip, a disarming smile, and eyes like curiously carved ice: the upper lids straight, all the curve in the lower half. Her profile is slightly aquiline, like Samuel Beckett's, but is offset by a discreet mass of curls. A Renaissance face, the kind that Piero della Francesca painted in profile - not the kind of face common in Vegas. Yet she is also one of the most formidable poker players in the country, savagely competitive. Not only was she entered in the tournament, but in the side games before the tournament's big event she was sitting down with the fiercest of the tigers - Brunson, Moss, Baldwin, Pearson - and taking their money night after night. Then Straus stopped her in her tracks.
My first sight of her had been at the beginning of that game: a demure and perilously young woman sitting across the table from six professional poker champions, like Chris Evert Lloyd taking on Borg, McEnroe, and Connors. She was very much at her ease, sipping wine, smiling at them over a mountain of black and gray chips so large that she was barely able to encircle it with her arms. Above them, her delicate, quattrocento head and shoulders seemed oddly out of proportion, as though the chips were some late, strange pregnancy. That was at eight o'clock, and she was winning well over $200,000. When the game ended, eight hours later, she was broke; thirty thousand had gone to Brunson, most of the rest to Straus when his full house beat her three eights.
Not long before, Straus had given her an ivory pendant as a present - an eighteenth-century Chinese gambling chip inscribed with two words, Love and Dread. He had said, 'It means you're going to love playing with those suckers, Betty, but you're going to dread playing with me.' Now the prophecy had been fulfilled.
'You watch,' Straus muttered as she joined us. 'She's the only person who thinks the way do.' He touched her arm and smiled amiably down at her. 'Betty,' he said, 'how do you reckon the prize money should be divided?' She did not hesitate: 'Winner take all.'
'I told you so,' Straus said triumphantly.
She smiled at him, and then glanced vaguely around the packed room. 'Full house,' she said.
'Here's hoping,' Straus said.
The conversation languished.
Betty Carey is from Wyoming, and her mother still lives there. Her father was a war veteran, badly wounded in one leg, and the Wyoming cold was bad for his circulation. So during the winters he moved down to Las Vegas, where he set up as an importer of seafood for some of the downtown restaurants. Eleven years ago, when Betty was in her teens, he was killed in a road accident out in the Clark County desert.
'Blowout?' I asked when I first met her, with Straus.
'Murdered.' She spoke the word with no particular emphasis, as though it were 'coronary' or 'cancer.' His car, she explained, had been forced off the road three times. Twice, he had managed to fight it back onto the pavement; the third time, it had overturned, killing him. I asked what had happened to the other driver. 'He disappeared,' she said laconically. 'Case unsolved.' But the episode gave her, at least, the measure of male aggression. Four years ago, she graduated to high-stakes poker, and since then, Straus said, she has become 'boss gambler down there in Houston,' where she now lives. Boss gambler also in Vegas until she found herself head to head with the charming but relentless Jack Straus. After that disaster, she disappeared from the Horseshoe for a few days, presumably to raise the cash to pay her debts. The evening she returned, she was standing with him in the Sombrero Room when a gambler to whom Straus owed money came up. Straus pulled out a gigantic wad of bills and began counting them out.
Betty smiled at him. 'I just bet that's money you got from some po' li'l gal,' she said.
'Sure is.' Straus returned the roll to his back trouser pocket. 'And I keep it right here, honey, next to my heart.'
Now they were standing with Straus's teenage son - a beardless double of his father, equally tall- and Straus's gofer, Larry Morrell, who looks uncannily like the old movie comic Jerry Colonna: bald as a billiard ball, big black mustache, and an apparently unlimited supply of enthusiasm for everything. But on this occasion even Larry seemed to have run out of things to say.
'What's the time?' Straus asked fretfully.
Most of the Vegas gamblers are festooned with jewelry: gold rings stuck with outsize diamonds, heavy gold chains and bracelets, some with their names studded on them in diamonds, and every variant of the world's most expensive wrist watches. Even Doyle Brunson, who is not otherwise given to ostentation, wears an AudemarsPiguet with diamond numerals and a platinum chain bracelet. But Straus wears no ornaments at all. 'When I was a kid, I wanted a five-dollar watch, then a tendollar watch, then a hundred dollar watch,' he said. 'When I made money, I wanted a Rolex, then a PatekPhilippe. Now I realize that the real luxury is not to know the time.' But in the few minutes before the world hold 'em championship began he seemed to be regretting that luxury.
'Ten of one,' Betty Carey said.
'Let's go,' Straus said.
For weeks, the poker players had been dressed as though for a back-room game in a Texas pool hall: jeans and soiled T-shirts or cheap cotton plaid cowboy shirts from South Korea with imitation-mother-of-pearl buttons. Now the poker room was like a fashion parade. Perhaps the presence of the television cameras had inspired the change, or perhaps it was the arrival, two nights before, of Crandall Addington, a millionaire in oil and Texas real estate, who is an amateur, and who invariably sets the standard of elegance at the Horseshoe. Addington once played for five consecutive days and nights without loosening his Dior tie. Last year, he appeared in a mink Stetson. This year, his Stetson matched his white linen suit, white silk shirt, and white silk tie. His beard was glossy and was barbered with care.
Amarillo Slim Preston specializes in another kind of chic. He is tall, long-faced, and startlingly thin - someone once called him 'the advance man for a famine' - and he dresses in a kind of cowboy baroque. His suit was bilious yellow with brown suede shoulders and trimming; on the sides of his lizardskin boots were the letters SLIM in white leather; the crown of his Stetson was encircled by a rattlesnake's skin, the creature's mouth gaping forward toward the brim, its rattle vertical on one side, like a feather.
None of the others even tried to compete with Addington or Slim, although several had chosen a part and were dressed for it. Gene Fisher, another amateur from Texas, wore a battered Stetson and a scarlet United States Cavalry shirt, buttoned diagonally from waist to shoulder. With his silver hair and full, silver mustache, he looked like a reincarnation of Kit Carson. One young cowboy was wearing a bright blue Stetson and a black shirt embroidered with black silk curlicues. Ken Smith, who is also a chess master and was Bobby Fischer's second in the Reykjavik marathon with Boris Spassky, wore what he always wears at competitions - a frock coat and a decrepit top hat, which he claims was found in the Ford Theatre the night Lincoln was assassinated. Smith has a ragged beard, a squeaky voice, and a girth like that of Swinburne's giant slumbering boar: 'the blind bulk of the immeasurable beast.' Each time he wins a pot, he lumbers to his feet, doffs his topper to the audience, and pipes, 'What a player!'
The others were less fashion-conscious, although, like the oysters in Through the Looking-Glass, 'Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, / Their shoes were clean and neat.' Brunson and Straus wore pale blue suede jackets over navy blue shirts and trousers. Chip Reese had abandoned his velour track suits and reverted to his Ivy League origins: gray flannel trousers and a gray shirt with blue pinstripes. Bobby Baldwin was dressed in gray trousers and a gray Lacoste tennis shirt, at once sporting and sober, to suit his image. Even Mickey Appleman was wearing a neat beige corduroy jacket over his black Tshirt, and Stu Ungar wore a clean bowling shirt.
As the tournament organizer, Eric Drache seated the seventy-five players at eight tables by mixing their names in a plastic bowl and drawing lots. They took their places slowly as he called their names, joking nervously among themselves about the unfairness of the draw, the relative strength of each table, their own lack of form. The spectators jostled for position at the rails, the lights blazed, the cameras whirred, the monotonous voice of the switch-board operator over the intercom - 'Telephone call for Jack Binion,' or 'Telephone call for Eric Drache' - was temporarily stilled.
Jack Binion climbed onto a chair at the back of the room, directly under the banner announcing BINION'S HORSESHOE PRESENTS THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER 1981. He beamed down on the crowd, looking dignified in a three-piece gray flannel suit and a free but discreet variation of the Old Etonian tie. He motioned for quiet, did not get it, then introduced the players over the babble of the casino: name, place of origin, a word or so of praise. His favorite description was 'plenty tough.' The players rose in turn from their seats, glanced furtively at the audience, avoided looking at the cameras, and sat down again quickly. The railbirds applauded each onethe local heroes enthusiastically, the rest politely.
There was a noisy pause, and then Frank Cutrona, the floor manager, and his assistants bustled around the tables distributing ten-thousand dollar racks of chips. Another pause while the players counted them and arranged them on the baize, each according to his own private architectural plan: neatly by colors or mixed in apparently haphazard ways; in tens, in twenties, in tall unstable-looking towers of yellow-and-green twentyfives, black hundreds, gray five hundreds. The dealers pulled back their cuffs to display the gold at their wrists, fanned out each pack of cards in an arc to check that it was complete, flipped it over face down, mixed it flat on the table, according to the Vegas formula, shuffled, cut, and began to deal. The crowd behind the rails craned solemnly forward, chomping gum, like cows at a gate.
The first player was eliminated an hour and a half later. There was a brief rattle of applause as he got to his feet and nodded to his companions at the table. He looked sheepish. Ten thousand dollars is a great deal of money to spend on ninety minutes' entertainment. 'Hunnerd an' eleven bucks a minute,' muttered someone in the crowd, adding pedantically, 'More or less.'
By the time play stopped for early dinner, at five-thirty, fourteen more had gone, including several of the 'plenty tough' players who had made it to the final table in other tournaments: Milo Jacobson, who lost to Brunson in the 1977 final; Charlie Dunwoody, fifth placed in 1980; the actor Gabe Kaplan, sixth placed in 1980 and winner of the 1979 Poker Classic in Reno; Bones Berland, a formidable young player who was runner-up in 1977.
For the first time, the conversation in the Sombrero Room was muted, and the wives and girlfriends seemed, also for the first time, to have a role to play - listening and shaking their heads while their men muttered to them about bad beats and dead cards. Johnny and Virgie Moss sat together in a far corner, heads close, her hand consolingly over his, like young marrieds. Near them, Louise Brunson watched anxiously while Doyle demolished a double helping of chocolate cake. Jack Straus, his mouth drawn down at the corners, sat hunched over a cup of coffee with his son and Larry. For the tournament, he had drawn a seat at a table with an elderly woman with red-dyed hair and more diamonds than Harry Winston's shopwindow: diamonds at her throat and bosom, diamonds around both wrists, diamonds on every finger. Not only was she an amateur; she had only recently started to play hold 'em. But all day she had been hitting card after miracle card, and no one at the table could contain her. Straus's stack was already down to $2000, and his mood was black. 'If he loses to her, he'll be in a bad temper for a year,' his son said.
All poker is a form of social Darwinism: the fit survive, the weak go broke. Walter Matthau once said, 'The game exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great.' Since Las Vegas provides continuous action at the highest level and for the highest stakes, most of the fittest eventually find their way there and discover, with startling rapidity, whether or not they really are survivors. 'It's like an experiment in evolution in which you have speeded up time,' said David Sklanskyo But in freeze-out no-limit poker, where there are no second chances and any mistake may be terminal, the evolutionary process is not only accelerated but also distorted. Because in the early stages luck plays as large a part as skill, the professionals know they are at a disadvantage, and only the amateurs, who have nothing to lose but their stakes, seem to enjoy themselves. All month, the World Series had been building to this grand climax, but now, when play resumed, the atmosphere was gloomy, the expressions were morose, the play was monotonous.
The professionals continued to fall: Johnny Moss, Junior Whited, and Tony Salinas, the big Texan who had been formally sentenced to five years in Vegas. Betty Carey was eliminated at eight-fifteen; Barbara Freer, the other top woman contender, a couple of hours later.
The previous day, I had talked to Barbara Freer, a very small middle-aged woman with a very large pompadour of dark hair, who has played in the big event since 1978. 'When I sat down that first time, I'd never played hold 'em in my life,' she told me. 'But I figured as long as it was cards I'd learn as I went along. There were fifty-four entrants that year and, believe it or not, I finished eighteenth.' She has bright eyes and the pugnacious confidence of a classy flyweight.
'I believe it,' I said.
She nodded contentedly. 'I prefer playing with men,' she said. 'Women tend to be petty - if you beat them, they tell you you were lucky. With men, the aggression is straightforward, and I love it. Instead of frightening me, it goads me on. I have a great desire to win, and I love the competition. One of these days, I'm going to be up there in Binion's Hall of Fame with the other poker greats.'
At ten-thirty the next evening - she was the last player to be eliminated on the first day - she shrugged dismissively when I asked her what happened. 'I had two pairs against his trips,' she said. 'But I had to be there. I'm a gambler, right?' Her voice was still jaunty, but the contagious confidence had leaked away and her large, painted mouth was unsteady. She looked like someone who has been dealt a mortal blow yet is still, in a confused way, ambulatory. It was a look I came to recognize as the big names were knocked out.
'What makes the heroic?' asked Nietzsche, and answered himself, 'To go to meet simultaneously one's greatest sorrow and one's greatest hope.' He also wrote, 'Timid, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has failed: this is how I have often seen you slink aside, you higher men. A throw you made had failed. But what of that, you dice-throwers! If great things you attempted have turned out failures, does that mean you yourselves are - failures?' For the brief period in which the losers came to terms with the fact that their chances of becoming World Champion were over for another year, the answer was unequivocal. 'Hell,' said the crestfallen cowboy in the black shirt embroidered with black silk curlicues, 'they beat me like an ugly stepchild.'
All the next day, the mayhem continued: Jack Straus, Puggy Pearson, Amarillo Slim, Jesse Alto. Straus, in fact, was out within half an hour of the resumption of play. 'There was twenty-eight thousand in the pot,' he said. 'I moved all in with my chips, turned over my cards, and told him I had him beat. Which was true. But he stayed in anyway and outdrew me on Fifth Street.' His eyes were not quite focused, and the expression on his face, like that of all the others who wandered into the Sombrero Room one by one, was stricken.
OnlyJohnny Moss allowed his anger to show through. He was standing near the reception desk, by a little trestle table on which were spread copies of his authorized biography, published by himself: Champion of Champions: A Portrait of the Greatest Poker Player of Our Time. The price was $15, and trade seemed to be brisk. Virgie Moss sat dourly behind the table, a cigar box full of money at her elbow. Moss jabbed a finger meaningfully at the title and reminded me that he had already won the high-low split competition this year, despite his age. 'But I ain't a-enterin' the champeenship next year. Nine-handed is too many. Seven-handed, like we played it in Texas, that's how it should be. Nine-handed you gotta sit there and wait for the nuts to break the suckers. I don' wanna play with suckers, I wanna play with gamblers. With gamblers, you play a fi-i-ine edge, not the nuts.' He glared truculently down at his wife. 'Ain't that right, baby?' he said.
Her leathery face creased in an indulgent, youthful smile. 'Sure is, honeycakes.'
The game droned on uneventfully through the second afternoon until around four o'clock, when a young player called Ricky Clayton suddenly slumped sidewise and forward across the table, like a puppet whose strings had snapped. As the television cameras zoomed in, Eric Drache bustled up, hands raised as though in surrender. 'O.K., O.K., no trouble,' he said. 'Just stomach cramps. It's happened before. Let's break for an early dinner.'
An hour later, Ricky Clayton was back in his seat, moving his chips around as if nothing had happened.
Not long before play ended for the day, when only twenty of the seventy-five starters were left, a big hand began to build between Chip Reese and a surly Texan, Bill Smith. Smith's face is pitted and blunt-featured, like Karl Malden's, and, almost alone among the serious poker players, he not only drinks while he plays but also seems drunk; he weaves a little in his seat, checking and raising in a thick voice. The cocktail waitresses keep the glass of whiskey at his elbow permanently freshened. But he is what Jack Binion calls a 'plenty tough' player, dangerous and aggressive, and the other contestants treat him warily. This time, however, when he came out betting, Reese raised him $8000. Smith stared at him sullenly while the gamblers who were no longer playing crowded around the table.
'If Bill calls, ol' Chip's gonna have to swim in the lake,' Johnny Moss murmured contentedly.
Smith sipped his whiskey thoughtfully, and then took four gray chips from a stack of twenty and pushed the rest in. He seemed utterly unconcerned, as though he were playing for pennies. The dealer cleared his throat, hitched back his shirt cuffs, burned the top card, and dealt the flop: a jack and a seven of diamonds, and a three of clubs. Reese considered the cards stonily and bet $20,000. Without hesitating, Smith put both hands behind his stack of chips and pushed them all into the center.
The dealer counted them and said, 'Raise nineteen three.' A faint murmur came from the railbirds - a low, solemn sound, like keening.
Reese sat very still for a time, and then called the bet grimly, leaving himself with less than $10,000. There was now about $75,000 in the middle of the table.
With Smith all in, there could be no more betting, so both players turned over their hole cards: Reese had two jacks, giving him three of a kind with the communal jack exposed; Smith had an eight and a ten of diamonds, giving him four cards to a flush and what is called a gutshot draw to both a straight and a straight flush.
The dealer burned the top card and turned the king of spades, which helped neither player. Then he paused dramatically, like an actor who knows the audience is hanging on each gesture, burned another card, and turned over a five of diamonds. Smith had made his flush. Reaching forward unsteadily, he dragged the mountain of chips toward him while Reese watched, mouth drawn tight, eyes pained and astonished.
On May 20, the third day of the championship, the front pages of the local papers were divided equally between a running story about a duck with an arrow through its breast and the election for control of the local culinary union. The duck had been nimble enough to avoid its well-wishers for several days, although the arrow stuck out on each side of it like a clothes hanger. The new secretary of the culinary union, who had been elected on a reformist ticket despite alleged opposition from the mob, seemed likely to need a similarly charmed life. 'No,' he announced at his victory press conference. 'I haven't received any death threats. Yet.'
There were now twenty players left in the event, with three quarters of a million dollars' worth of chips shared among them. The leader, with $81,600, was Perry Green, a tiny, bearded dumpling of a man, who looks like a miniature Henry VIII but is in fact a fur trader from Anchorage and a devout Orthodox Jew. Chip Reese trailed the field, with $7,800.
Doyle Brunson, in sixth place, with $47,800, seemed uneasy and depressed. 'It's been uphill all the way so far,' he said. 'Just cain't seem to hit a card.' He was suffering from toothache and moved in an aura of myrrh.
The one cheerful face in the pervading gloom belonged to Andy Moore, the only surviving outsider in the tournament. Moore is in his midthirties and is raffishlooking. He owns a bar in Sarasota, Florida, where he plays poker twice a week in a small social game, like thousands of others around the country: two-dollar ante, pot limit, win or lose two or three hundred dollars. 'Mostly I lose,' he told me. 'My friend here' - a tall, ebullient man, who seemed as elated as Moore by Moore's success - 'he just beats me like a drum.' The tall friend laughed and slapped Moore's shoulder, then mine: all pals together. 'I could play more often if I wanted,' Moore continued. 'But I've got all the other bad habits in life, too, so I just can't seem to find the time. I like girls and drinking and golf too much, I guess.' The friend laughed knowingly and slapped him on the shoulder again.
In 1977, Moore moved out to Las Vegas to try the gambling life, but left after three months with the money he had come with, having lost at poker and won at golf. 'I love the excitement of gambling, but the coldness of this town leaves a lot to be desired,' he said. 'I've lived in Sarasota for twenty-five years - went to high school there - and although it's grown from maybe twenty-five thousand to a hundred thousand in that time, it's still a fairly small town. It's warm, it's friendly, people know each other, the atmosphere is good. For me, Vegas is like a block of ice. Even if I won the championship, I wouldn't want to come back to this cold life again.'
Meanwhile, he was living out a fairy story. The night before the championship, he and his friend had put up $500 each for him to play nine other players for the tenthousand dollar stake to enter the big event. He won, and by the end of the first day he had parlayed his winnings up to $45,000, which placed him third. Since then, his money had sunk considerably - to $12,900 at the start of Day Three - but that only added to the excitement. 'The point is, it's only cost me five hundred,' he said. 'It's not like I'm blowing ten thousand and trying to protect it. I'm here on a million-to-one shot, and if it hits, it hits.'
Unlike the other players, Moore made no attempt to conceal his pleasure, and he wanted the whole world to share it. Each hand he played, he held the cards up for the railbirds to see. They loved him for that and because he was the underdog. Whenever he won, they applauded loudly, and he twisted around in his chair, beaming at them and shaking his head disbelievingly. When he lost, his loose mouth drooped and his back curved despondently. 'Tough!' cried the railbirds, and 'Keep after 'em, Andy!'
The gigantic Ken Smith, the chess master, was also playing to the crowd, not only doffing his top hat and bleating 'What a player!' but also using the crowd as a sounding board whenever he decided to coffeehouse - or bluff verbally - an opponent. Early in the afternoon, he found himself head to head with a morose-looking man named Don Furrh. As soon as Smith bet, Furrh's hands moved ominously to the back of his chips. Then they hovered while he considered whether or not to move all in.
'I've got a real hand here,' Smith squeaked. 'You gotta be strong, Don.'
A large bleached blonde in cut-off Levi's and a halter shouted from the rail, 'You tell him, Smitty!'
Ken Smith's voice rose another decibel. 'It's a real good hand I'm holding here.'
'Amen!' called the blonde.
Furrh stared contemptuously at Smith, shrugged, and threw in his cards. But the next deal, as though primed and goaded by Smith's performance, he moved all in with a jack and a nine when a jack fell on the flop. He had chosen the wrong moment and the wrong opponent: Jay Heimowitz, one of the few Easterners who can face the Texans as an equal at hold 'em. Heimowitz called Furrh's bet without even pausing, and turned over his hole cards disdainfully: two jacks. Exit Furrh.
Minutes later, Ken Smith was at it again, his 'What a player!' almost drowning out the din of the slot machines. Doyle Brunson, who has known Smith for thirty years, grinned at him benevolently. 'You're all heart, Ken,' he said. 'Heart and belly.' The railbirds applauded. 'You know what I'm gonna do?' Brunson continued. 'I'm gonna raise you on two rags and bluff you right out.'
'Try me,' piped Smith, and he came out betting when the next flop was dealt: king, queen, jack.
'Raise!' said Brunson so loudly that his jowls quivered. He put both hands behind his now depleted stacks of chips and pushed them belligerently into the center. Smith paused, shrugged, and docilely folded. Brunson pulled in the pot, then turned over his hole cards and tossed them, face up, across the table: a six and a five of different suits. He rose majestically to his feet, doffed his Stetson, and cried, basso profundo, 'What a player!' The crowd roared.
Although Brunson appeared to be enjoying himself, the cards were running steadily against him. He told me later that the only good hand he had been dealt in three days was a pair of kings, and those he had thrown away when Gene Fisher - Kit Carson revisited - reraised him with what Brunson assumed, correctly, to be three nines. 'I never even had a draw to a straight or a flush,' he said. 'Every time I won a pot, it was with the worst hand.' It is an indication of his supreme skill that, despite this, he came in eleventh out of seventy-five players. But little by little his chips were whittled away, and in the middle of the third day he and Andy Moore, each now desperately short of chips, both went all in before the flop. Moore held an ace and a four of spades, Brunson a king and a two of diamonds. The flop helped neither of them, but an ace fell on Fourth Street, and that was the end of Brunson's tournament. The crowd applauded him vigorously, and he replied with an expansive wave of his arm, like visiting royalty. But his eyes were vague, and his mobile face seemed battered.
A couple of hours earlier, the poker players had briefly lost their poker faces when there were still fifteen of them left and Eric Drache announced that the three remaining tables would be amalgamated into two. The seats would be allocated, Drache said, by drawing cards: red for Table One, black for Table Two, one to eight of each color for the seat numbers. Frank, the floor manager, shuffled and dealt while Drache called out the players' names. Suddenly, everybody began protesting at once: the first four cards dealt were all red. Someone shouted 'It's a fix!' and the rest chimed in, demanding a new deal. Patiently, Frank gathered in the cards, shuffled, and dealt again: ace, two, three of clubs.
'Ain't possible!' cried Stu Ungar. 'It's five thousand to one against!'
'I don't care if it's five million to one,' Frank replied. 'That's how the cards came and that's how the seating stays.'
'Right,' said Drache.
'Right,' said Jack Binion, the final authority.
The players moved reluctantly to their new places, muttering to one another darkly. Their problem was not cards but superstition; even the losers were obscurely afraid of what a new seat at a new table might do to them.
Soon after the change, two retired farmers were eliminated: Sam Moon, an elderly stick of a man from Corpus Christi, Texas, who raises tomatoes and plays regularly in all the tournaments, and Milton Butts, whose sister and brother-in-law sat behind him all day long, living each hand with him. Butts wore a cheap blue nylon shirt, a baseball cap, and thick glasses. He has very large hands and no teeth, and he looked, like Moon, as if he would have been more at home in The Grapes of Wrath than in a high-stakes poker game. When Butts lost his last chips, his sister hugged him and wept.
Of the three New Yorkers left, Mickey Appleman went first, rising blank-faced from the table, seemingly unable to speak: Harpo playing King Lear. He disappeared into his room and did not emerge for several hours. Jay Heimowitz, however, was playing with ominous authority, as if he had decided that this, finally, was his year. In comparison, Stu Ungar, the wonder boy who had been the surprise winner the previous year, was living by his wits, ducking and weaving and counterpunching but avoiding any big confrontation.
In contrast, Bill Smith, who continued to confound all the rules by drinking and winning, lost $37,000 to a tough-looking professional named Sam Petrillo, then came out raising on the very next hand, which he won. Soon after that, Stu Ungar moved all in against him with two aces in the hole and a full house on the flop. Again, Smith lost heavily, but still his aggression did not waver. By the end of the day, he seemed very drunk yet was in second place, with $114,800 - only $13,500 less than the leader, Bobby Baldwin. 'If Bill ends up beating all the nice guys, like Bobby, it's going to set the image of poker back ten years,' one of the professionals muttered.
That evening, gold bracelets were distributed to those who had already won the other events, and BillBoyd was formally inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, alongside Edmond Hoyle, Wild Bill Hickok (shot holding two pairs, aces and eights, thereafter known as Dead Man's Hand), Sid Wyman, Nick the Greek Dandalos, Red Winn, Blondie Forbes, and Johnny Moss. Bill Boyd is a sober-suited, gentle old man who looks like a family doctor and manages the card room at the Golden Nugget. He is also the undefeated champion at five-card stud - so good that in the end no one would play against him, and the event lapsed from the World Series.
When all the prizes had been given and the formalities were done, Benny Binion finally spoke. To thunderous applause, he ambled up to the microphone, beamed vaguely around the packed room, and drawled, 'I hope you all get out of here a winner.' End of speech. More thunderous applause.