The Biggest Game in Town

INTRODUCTION

Fifty years ago, when I started playing poker, it was considered a disreputable game, officially illegal in Britain before the Gaming Act of 1960, and played mostly by shady characters in the back rooms of Greek and Chinese restaurants. Not that I dared to try my luck in those places—the opposition was far too fierce—but even in the amateur social games where I learned to play, part of the appeal was in the macho thrill of risking money I couldn’t afford in an illicit game I knew mainly through Westerns. It was as near as a nice English boy without a horse could get to being a cowboy. I took to the game with a passion and have been playing it ever since.

Now I’m an old man, my powers of concentration are not what they were, and I need my sleep, so I don’t get out to the poker rooms in casinos as often as I used to. I also avoid social games because they tend to go on all night and it’s considered unsporting to refuse one more round for the losers. Luckily for me, the Internet has turned poker into an international craze, played online by millions of hopefuls every hour of the day and night, all over the globe. I play along with them when I need a break from work (which is often) and I watch it on television whenever I can.

I love it, of course, because I love the game, but somehow it doesn’t feel right. Like all computer games, poker online is a lonely, two-dimensional pastime and I miss the social interplay—the chance to mix with people I might otherwise not meet, see how they behave under pressure, and watch them for those little telltale gestures that indicate strength or weakness. But the main reason Internet poker dissatisfies me is because it’s in color and, for me, poker is a game strictly in black and white.

I realized this the first time I went to Binion’s Horseshoe, in 1981. By then, the World Series of Poker had been running for a dozen years but was still scarcely known to anyone who wasn’t seriously addicted to the game. It had begun in 1970, when Benny Binion invited a handful of his poker-playing cronies—some were professionals and some were amateurs, but all of them were high rollers and most were Texans—to get together at the Horseshoe to compete against each other for the crazy sums of money they preferred. They came because Benny Binion was their friend and had been the boss of gambling in Dallas until 1946 when, as he said, my sheriff got beat in the election and he had to leave town in a hurry. So supporting him now that he had set up shop in Las Vegas was a patriotic thing for high-rolling Texans to do.

Binion called the occasion the World Series of Poker because the world’s best players showed up and the title sounded appropriately grand, but in fact that first occasion wasn’t even a competition. The guys just played what were then the popular forms of poker—Texas hold ’em, seven- and five-card stud, draw, lowball, high-low split, etc.—then voted democratically for who should be nominated champion of champions. The man they elected, by unanimous decision, was Benny’s old friend Johnny Moss.

About three dozen gamblers showed up for that first occasion. By the time I went, in 1981, the numbers had grown steadily, though in those days, before you could win a cheap entry through a satellite tournament, most of the players were there for the less-costly preliminary events and only seventy-five high rollers were willing to ante up ten thousand of their own dollars to enter the No-Limit Hold ’em World Championship itself. Although the winner that year was a New Yorker, Stu Ungar, relatively few players from the East or West Coasts bothered to enter. Since the game was Texas hold ’em, they left it to the Texans. And because the Texans mostly knew each other and had played together for years, the atmosphere was relaxed and convivial, despite the fortunes casually changing hands. It’s like one of those old trappers’ rendezvous, said the witty and stylish Jack Straus, who won the world title the following year. We just meet up here every year, play some cards, and have some fun.

In those days, Texas hold ’em was rarely played north of the Mason-Dixon Line and the World Series of Poker was still virtually unknown, but word of it had somehow reached the game I played in each Tuesday night in London, so I told my American agent that I’d like to write about it. She, being an imaginative woman, phoned William Shawn, who was then editor of The New Yorker. I’ve got this crazy English poet, she told him, who wants to go to Las Vegas and write about some weirdo poker tournament. Shawn was a shy, timid man who didn’t play poker and rarely left New York, but he was a great editor and the idea of an English poet writing about poker in Las Vegas was precisely the kind of off-the-wall combination that appealed to him. He agreed to pay my airfare and pick up some of my expenses.

Back then, the Horseshoe was just another shabby little joint in Glitter Gulch, aka downtown Las Vegas, but for an innocent Englishman abroad, it truly was a world apart—and not only because of the surreal sums of money that changed hands in those side-games which, for the big boys, were just part of the fun. What set it apart was the sense of darkness beneath the glitter and the din: the faces like tribal masks, sullen, brooding, and wreathed in cigarette smoke; the ominous towers of chips and thick wads of hundred-dollar bills held together by rubber bands; the hard light over the tables and the shadows beyond; the sudden moments of drama; and behind it all, unceasingly, the voice of the casino operator—Telephone call for Mr. Bloom, Mr. Danny Bloom—and the clicking noise of gamblers playing with their chips, a susurration as persistent as the song of cicadas in the Mediterranean summer. It was like walking into a film noir, the unforgiving black-and-white world of The Hustler, say, but populated by cowboys instead of pool sharks. When I wrote my article for The New Yorker, which was subsequently published as The Biggest Game in Town, that was the atmosphere and romance I tried to evoke.

Repeat, romance, because that was how the poker pros saw themselves: as the last of the gunslingers, ready for a showdown with any stranger who dared to take them on. Many of them dressed the part—in Stetsons, embroidered shirts, and bolo ties, with heavy turquoise rings on their fingers and outsize buckles on their belts—and all of them, even the handful of young ones, had faces with a lot of mileage on them. In those days, when there was still something a little shady about the game of poker, it was as if the ghosts of the old riverboat cardsharps had never quite been exorcised and now they were back again, running their poker chips through their fingers while they sized up the opposition and reincarnated as gnarled, relentless good ol’ boys who knew how to turn on the charm but never gave a sucker an even break. Then as now, Binion’s Horseshoe was not a place for innocents and that, I suppose, is why I love it.

I also love Vegas because I made a lot of friends while I was there. During that first visit, I played only in small games but—in the name of research, of course—I contrived to hang out with the highest-rolling professionals—players like Doyle Brunson, Jack Straus, Eric Drache, and Mickey Appleman. As far as they were concerned, I might have been a creature from outer space: a little guy with a funny (i.e., English) accent, writing for The New Yorker, a magazine few of them had heard of. But among their many other gifts, the top pros have a talent for people—it takes great charm to persuade wealthy amateurs to sit down in games they cannot win—so because they saw I loved the game, admired their skill, and also perhaps because I made them laugh, they took me under their wings and let me sit in as a spectator when they played their huge games.

In Poker Face, Ulvis Alberts’ classic portraits of gamblers in smoke-filled rooms, the picture that best expresses the spirit of the early World Series is not of the pros and their cronies; it is the shot of Hal Fowler, an amateur who won the title in 1979 and was never heard of again, taken from below and from the side, and framed by the immaculate but slightly-out-of-focus thighs of a cocktail waitress. These days, hookers are hard to find at the World Series and smoking is banned. Thanks to the Internet, poker has become a young person’s craze, the rock ’n’ roll of the first decade of the new millennium, and the World Series has changed accordingly. Because Web sites and casinos run satellite tournaments all year round, the $10,000 entry to the Big One is no longer restricted to the professionals and the wealthy. Anyone can get lucky, even amateurs, provided they have the brains and the stamina and the aggression. In 2003, for example, the title was won by an accountant, aptly named Chris Moneymaker, who parlayed a $40 satellite entry into a $2,500,000 fortune; in 2004, a Connecticut lawyer beat a field of 2,576 and won $5 million; in 2005, there were 5,619 contestants and the winner, an Australian chiropractor, earned himself $7.5 million; in 2006, the entry had risen to 8,772, all the players at the final table became millionaires and the winner, a Hollywood agent, walked away with $12 million, the largest prize in the history of any game or sport.

Binion’s Horseshoe was always a pokey little joint, even after it took over the casino next door. That was part of its appeal; everyone was jammed together, whooping it up, having fun. But there was no way a place that small could cope with the flood of new players, and the Binions eventually sold out to Harrahs, who shifted the tournament uptown to their gigantic Rio Casino on the Strip. I myself have not been there—I’m too old to compete in a weeklong marathon—but I follow it faithfully on television, and from what I’ve seen, all that remains of the old World Series is a portrait of Benny Binion, wearing a Stetson and wrapped in his flea-bitten coonskin coat, beaming wistfully down on a vast mountain of $100 bills, banded together in packets of fifty.

There aren’t many other Stetsons around. Amarillo Slim still totes one, but even the great Doyle Brunson, who has inherited the title of Grand Old Man of Poker from the late Johnny Moss, wears a baseball cap decorated with the insignia of a Web site. And that is a clue to the difference between the World Series as it was and as it is now. The old trappers’ rendezvous has become a major television event, with cameras everywhere, commentators chattering into microphones, and packs of journalists reporting back on the action to newspapers all over the world.

Twenty-five years on, most of the players I knew are now dead and the ones who have replaced them, no matter how brilliantly they play the game, seem to be a different breed. Their faces are not only younger and less lived-in, they also seem more sanitized—the faces of clean-living young people who watch their diet, work out in the gym, and never smoke. But here’s the paradox: the battered faces of the older generation were full of character and interest and life, but nobody outside their small world knew who they were; hence their boast, If I don’t know your face and I don’t know your name, I know I can beat you. These days professional poker players—the brash and the ugly as well as the good—have become TV celebrities and every man in the street recognizes them.

I love poker, have played it all my adult life, and am glad that a whole new generation has fallen for its endlessly subtle fascination. But the sheer size of the game’s success is harder to love. The World Series is now held in a conference hall as big as the biggest aircraft hangars and the place seems to have no shadows at all. It is just a great anonymous sea of crowded poker tables crammed together under the hard lights, more like the mess hall of some gigantic prison than the setting of any poker game that I have ever played in.

I am sure the games are as fierce and enthralling as they ever were and I look forward to watching them on television. But I wouldn’t want to go back.

Al Alvarez, 2008

1

Nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning at the end of April 1981, and according to the giant illuminated figures at the top of the Mint Hotel the temperature was already ninety-two degrees. At the entrance of Binion’s Horseshoe Casino stood the famous horseshoe itself, seven feet high, painted gold, and enclosing within its arch a million dollars in ten-thousand-dollar bills. The hundred bills are neatly ranked and held, for whatever foreseeable eternity, in some kind of super-perspex—bulletproof, fireproof, bombproof—the perennial dream of the Las Vegas punter visible to all, although not quite touchable. If you come too close, one of Binion’s giant security guards, leather straps polished and creaking over his beige uniform, gun in his holster, moves quietly forward.

The million-dollar horseshoe reflected the glare of the morning sun on Fremont Street. Behind it were gloom and movement: a long, low, rather shabby room, full of noise and smoke, and, unlike the other casinos at this early hour, full of people. Women in halters and men in cowboy boots and Stetsons jostled each other around the roulette and craps tables, rattled the armies of slot machines, and perched in semicircles before the blackjack dealers; even the seats in the little keno lounge were mostly taken. At the back, there was already a crowd along the rail that separates the casual punters from the area that, for five weeks every year in the last decade, has been set aside for poker.

Fixed to one wall of this makeshift poker room was a large yellow banner, announcing in red, BINION’S HORSESHOE PRESENTS THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER 1981. Opposite was an equally large blackboard, listing across the top the side games being played that day while the official tournament was in progress; Hold ’Em, No Limit—5, 10, 25, Hold ’Em, No Limit—25, 25, 50, 7 STUD—50, 100, 7 STUD—200, 400. Under each set of figures was a column of names and initials. The larger the numbers, the shorter the column