Contract bridge is too complicated. Poker can be too expensive. And pinochle involves a weird deck. By default, though there are no definitive numbers to prove it, gin rummy may be America’s most widely played card game.
Whether gathered in basement rec-rooms or country-club dining rooms, millions of us—25 million to 40 million, according to some estimates—derive a disproportionate amount of pleasure from making melds, “knocking,” and “going out.” Like backgammon or checkers, gin rummy is a simple game to learn—my great-grandmother taught me how to play when I was six—but a difficult one to master. So although most amateurs know the basics (get rid of unmatched high cards, don’t give your opponent two cards of the same rank or suit, etc.), few of us would be willing to stake our reputations, or much of our money, on our gin rummy expertise.
But some people would.
They are salesmen and plumbing contractors, car dealers and liquor-store owners. They are regular fellows from all walks of life and every part of America. And they play the game of gin rummy with a sophistication, flair, and insight that could send a stubborn opponent into Chapter 11.
Top gin rummy players, like John Hainline, a greeting-card distributor from San Francisco who has won more than 30 gin rummy tournaments and is widely considered one of the two or three best players on the planet, say that there’s less luck in gin rummy than poker. “Sometimes a sucker can end up with all the money in a poker game,” Hainline comments. “In gin, the good players tend to separate themselves from the field pretty quickly.”
Hainline, who many years ago played on the PGA Tour, learned the game in the early ‘60s, after a practice round at Colonial Country Club in Forth Worth, Texas. “I lost about a hundred dollars to a couple of elderly gentlemen,” Hainline recalls. “That was a lot of money to me back then, and I figured I better learn enough to get it back.”
The floundering golf pro spent his night on Tour dealing out gin hands to himself, memorizing the percentages, and recognizing the recurring patterns in something like 66,000 different kinds of hands. That was the first step in making himself into a master.
Today, Hainline won’t reveal his secrets, but he hints that he plays “differently” than his opponents, who, he says, can be easily categorized into “passive” and “aggressive” types. “I try to work all my hands in combinations,” Hainline says, “low, medium, and high.” He smiles slightly. “If I said any more, I’d be giving away too much.”
Up until the late ’80s, gin rummy tournaments around America flourished, attracting as many as 400 competitors. But as poker tournaments became more popular, gin rummy lost the influx of eager new players who, as in all gambling ventures, must replace those that consistently lose and, therefore, eventually fade away. Even non-gamblers have heard of the World Series of Poker. But almost no one outside of the gin rummy community knows that there are currently annual gin tournaments that award hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.
Several years ago at the Maxim Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, about a hundred of the world’s best players competed in the largest and most lucrative gin rummy tournament ever, the International Gin Rummy Tournament of Champions, which offered more than $250,000 in prize money. Enough lawyers, doctors, builders, bankers, investors, retirees, and professional gamblers entered the tournament to instantly make it the world’s richest gin game. After four days of drawing, discarding, and laying down, Bill Ingram, 62, a real-estate broker from Rockwall, Texas, was awarded the biggest first place check in the history of the game: $100,000.
Similar, albeit smaller, gin rummy tournaments pop up around Las Vegas several times a year. These congregations tend to attract a core group of competitors, the same hundred or so sharpies who play the game a wee bit better than everyone else in the world. If this recurring group of sharpies is any indication, the typical gin rummy maven is male, middle- to retirement-aged, balding, bespectacled, pudgy to corpulent, and possessed of an impassive tabula rasa of a face, worthy of … well, a world-class poker player. And like the poker champ, these mnemonically gifted expert gin players know the percentages for every combination of hands; they can recall exactly what cards have been discarded and plucked; they have an eerie ability to predict when their opponent is about to knock or when he is going for gin; and they even extrapolate information based on how an opponent arranges his cards. As one pro told me at a recent gin tournament, “When I’m playing gin rummy, it’s like my opponent is drawing me a picture of his hand.”
Not surprisingly, the man long considered the greatest gin rummy player in the world, Stu Ungar, also won the world championship of poker, the World Series of Poker, three times. Blessed with what many claim was an authentic photographic memory, Ungar’s standard gin rummy proposition was this: Play him for any amount of money; when you were done you got back 10% of your losses. He had very few takers.
Due to a debilitating drug addiction, Ungar’s legendary powers gradually faded, and he died several years ago in a squalid Vegas motel room. (Though registered for the Tournament of Champions and the 1998 World Series of Poker, he failed to show up for either event.) Now the title of Greatest Gin Rummy Player in the World, which once was seldom contested, could be fairly applied to a handful of consistent gin rummy winners, such as Hainline and Nevada’s Norman La Pere. It’s a mythical title, since there isn’t really an organized world championship of gin rummy. But capturing the Tournament of Champions or, for that matter, any of the other smaller gin rummy tournaments, bolsters a player’s claim to the honorific.
The man behind most of America’s big-money gin tournaments is named Glenn Abney, though he’s widely known simply as Mr. Gin. “I’ve been involved in the biggest, most prestigious, gin rummy events for the past four decades,” he says, smiling contentedly. Abney, 72, has won more than 20 gin tournaments in his career, including the International, a 1,000-player extravaganza that flourished in the ‘60s. At one time, before Stu Ungar, he was recognized as the game’s most fearsome and visible player. (His belt buckle and license plate say MR GIN; his wife’s, MRS GIN.) Abney learned gin rummy from his mother, who, he claims, left a poker game to give birth to him. “I was literally born with card sense,” Abney says.
An enormous man with enormous appetites, some time ago Abney went on a controversial diet that relied on, among other things, an unapproved supplement. Big Glenn didn’t lose weight. But he did lose a gin rummy player’s most vital tool: a good memory. “My long-term memory is pretty much shot. But I can still remember the cards!”
Despite his travails, Abney can recall gin rummy games from “the good old days,” back when a man like he could find a juicy game in any town at any time. “Most sociable gin games are played for a penny a point, a tenth of a penny a point. When I was a caddie at the Bel-Air Country Club, in the forties, maybe you’d hustle guys for ten dollars a game,” Abney recalls. “Now there are gin games where twenty-thousand is at stake.”
For Bill Ingram, at the International Tournament of Champions, even more than $100,000 was on the line. Throughout a tumultuous 24-year period, the voluble Texan had what he describes as “a terrible compulsive gambling problem, which cost me three wives, a business, and most of my friends.” It was during this tortured phase of his life that Ingram learned to play gin rummy. “I wasn’t much of a player to start. I just liked the action. But after I got my life under control, my game started to improve. For years I didn’t gamble a nickel. Now I try to do it in moderation.”
If Ingram’s triumph at the Tournament of Champions were made into a movie, the critics might dismiss his story as too fantastically improbable. The tournament, like most organized gin rummy competitions, was set up so the cream could eventually rise to the top. The preliminary qualifying rounds saw the card sharps playing 16 games to 200 points (a gin or an under-knock were worth 25), with all 11-game winners advancing to the semifinals. After two days and approximately 10,000 hands of gin rummy, nine players representing nearly every region of the United States had qualified for the money round. Eleven others had 10 wins and had to undergo a one-game playoff.
Bill Ingram had won only seven of his first 13 games. Then, defying the odds, he won his last three matches to squeak into the playoff. Among the 10-game winners, one player, picked at random, got a bye directly into the next round. That was Bill Ingram.
In the quarter-finals he plowed through two tough matches, earning a spot in the final four. There, he narrowly defeated the prohibitive favorite, John Hainline. “I got real lucky against John,” Ingram conceded. “Mathematically, he should have beat me. He’s the best.”
Hainline, incidentally, agrees. “When we sat down to play, he said what most opponents say, ‘Oh, no!’ That should be my nickname: ‘Oh No!’ Most guys tend to play too defensively against me; they get intimidated. But,” Hainline says, shrugging, “you can’t win ’em all.”
Ingram’s unlikely victory propelled him to the $100,000 championship match, a one-game 500-point marathon against Jeff Mervis, a professional card player from Sherman Oaks, California. Mervis was named Best-All-Around Player at the 1993 L.A. Poker Classic and regularly places in the money at major gambling events around the country. But he hadn’t played in a gin rummy tournament for a decade.
The drama that had characterized Ingram’s previous victories was conspicuously absent. To begin the contest, Bill Ingram was dealt a series of what seasoned players call “no-brainers,” decision-less beauties that quickly lead to gin. He won the first nine hands, vaulting to a 351-point lead before Mervis could score a single point. In gin rummy parlance, Ingram had his man “barbecued.”
“My strategy was to play wide-open offense for the fist four or five cards, giving myself a chance to make gin,” according to Ingram. “Then I moved to the defensive, mousing down [reducing the hand’s point total] and knocking. It may have looked like I was getting real lucky, but I like to think luck is just the product of preparation.” Whether because or in spite of his methods, Ingram dispatched Mervis 500-127.
Prior to the tournament, only the 10th he had played in 11 years, Ingram had told his wife he was “going into training” and that he fully expected to win the championship. “I work a hundred hours a week on my business, and I play once or twice a month at the Walnut Creek Country Club in Dallas. The world-class guys at the tournament play every day. The first time I faced competition this tough I made a gazillion mistakes. So I got out all my old books, like Jacobi’s How to Win at Gin Rummy, and I memorized entire passages. Let’s just say I came here very focused. Very ready to win.”
And thanks to the kind of gin rummy skill we amateurs can barely comprehend, he departed Las Vegas $100,000 wealthier.
Bill Ingram subsequently disappeared from the gin rummy scene. “Everyone seems to be vanishing,” Abney remarks wistfully. “You may notice that there aren’t many youngsters playing in this tournament,” he says, surveying the Maxim’s flourescently lighted ballroom. “Most of the really great players are dead—and if they’re not, they need to write down the cards.”
Still, you don’t have to look too hard to find a gin game. Most country clubs in America—particularly those in the two Palms, Springs and Beach—have a game going every day of the week. You’ll find gentlemen like Abney and Hainline there most afternoons. They’ll be sitting beside other aging men, whose graying hair and expanding waistlines conceal a computer-like mind working through the probabilities. Some of these fellows may be the undisputed champion of their golf club, or Moose lodge, or senior-citizen’s center. And if they fancy themselves good and brave enough, they might wind up one day in Las Vegas, playing gin rummy for $100,000.