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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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THE HISTORY OF NO-LIMIT TEXAS HOLD’EM
by Crandell Addington
This is the story of how a small band of Texas gamblers unwittingly created
the poker colossus that is currently enjoyed by more than fifty million
professional and amateur players and is seen by millions of people worldwide
on some of the most popular shows on television. Here’s how it all
started.
In the early 1960s, poker was an illegal activity throughout the United
States, with the exception of Nevada and California. But that didn’t
stop Texans like Pinky Rhoden of Lubbock, “Duck” Mallard of
Lockhart, Jesse Alto of Corpus Christi, Jack Straus of Houston, and Tom
Moore of San Antonio from hosting high stakes games all over their state.
Some game operators even disguised their organizations as fraternal organizations,
such as the Redmen and Elks Clubs, hoping to prevent raids from the authorities.
Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t.
These men and more—including the seven Texans who eventually brought
no-limit Texas hold’em to Nevada—traveled from town to town
across Texas and the deep South playing poker. They became known as “outside”
or “road” gamblers, and they specialized in Kansas City lowball
draw and Texas hold’em, then a new game that offered the best platform
for developing multiple strategies and tactically implementing them.
Around this same time, Tom Moore, Slim Lambert, and Red Berry were running
a weekend casino with table games in the heart of Texas. These “Boss
Gamblers of Bexar County” operated their casino in the incorporated
city of Castle Hills, which was entirely surrounded by San Antonio. In
a rambling house attached to the casino on West Avenue, they ran a second
illegal operation: a high stakes poker game six days a week—five
days of no-limit, one day of limit.
In 1963, at the age of twenty-five, I began to play in this game. This
was one of the softest high stakes no-limit games in the state due to
the number of producers it drew, such as John Monfrey, the Falstaff beer
distributor for South Texas; Austin Hemphill, a Ford dealer; and other
oilmen, bankers, ranchers, restaurateurs, contractors, and car dealers.
Because of this, Moore was protective of his game, and the only outside
gamblers welcome to play were those of us who were his personal friends.
However, as soft as this game was, sometimes the fish ate the pelicans.
One night on West Avenue, I witnessed one of the biggest laydowns and
three of the highest hands that can be dealt in Texas hold’em. The
fish was a San Antonio contractor who was a regular at the game, and fortunately
for the two pelicans—Gilbert Hess of Dallas, who would later marry
Felton McCorkindale’s widow, and Doyle Brunson—it occurred
on the one night of the week when the limit game was in session. Otherwise
the pelicans would have had a smooth spot to shuffle on where all their
chips had been.
The limit was $80/$160, cheap by today’s standards, but high enough
back then. There was a round of raises before the flop, then the flop
fell A-4-2. The maximum bets and subsequent raises were made and called
by all three players. At this point, Doyle was holding trip aces, Gilbert
Hess was holding trip deuces, and the fish was holding trip fours.
The turn came a deuce. Doyle led with aces full, but when the double raise
came back to him, he laid down the hand. Since I have already told you
that on this particular night the fish ate the pelicans, you already know
that the river card was the fourth four. So the contractor won the hand
against odds that only some top poker mathematician and theorist, such
as Mike Caro, might be interested in calculating.
Anyway, four years later, Tom invited me to participate in the acquisition
of the Holiday Hotel in Reno, and thanks to my success at his table, I
was able to accept. In 1967, I moved to Nevada with him and his family.
Unfortunately, we ran into trouble securing a gaming license, so the Holiday
Hotel never quite panned out, for me at least.
The original licensees of the Holiday Hotel in Reno became Tom, John Monfrey,
and Austin Hemphill, who would later partner with Red McCombs, owner of
the Minnesota Vikings and former owner of the San Antonio Spurs and Denver
Nuggets.
But, hotel or not, I was playing enough poker to keep me occupied. I had
decided against becoming an inside gambler and instead continued traveling
all over the country and Mexico playing high stakes games. What I didn’t
know—what no one could have known—was how our introduction
of Texas hold’em would end up changing the landscape of poker forever.
At the time, Nevada had only one legal poker room, which was located in
the Golden Nugget and operated by Bill Boyd, a master five-card stud player.
It was truly a “sawdust joint,” with red-flocked wallpaper
on the walls and oiled sawdust covering the floors. Nevada and California
players came there to play five-card stud, razz, and California lowball
draw. This would change when a small group of Texans, led by Felton McCorkindale
and including Doyle Brunson, Bryan “Sailor” Roberts, Johnny
Moss, Amarillo Slim, Jack Straus and me, introduced high-stakes no-limit
Texas hold’em to Nevada.
Texas hold’em proved popular among the players, but for years there
was no casino other than the Golden Nugget in which to spread a game.
The Golden Nugget didn’t exactly attract the same number of high
roller casino patrons that the Strip casinos reeled in by the thousands.
This meant there was very little opportunity to catch a drop-in player
or producer at the poker room. But in 1969, Sid Wyman, the boss of the
Dunes Hotel and Casino, today the site of the Bellagio, invited us to
spread a high-stakes no-limit game just outside the entrance to his main
showroom, where we were able to catch lots of drop-ins, including the
late Major Riddle, the majority owner of the Dunes.
Remember, Nevadans and Californians were primarily five-card stud players.
And although he was originally from Lockhart, Texas, Riddle was by now
a transplanted Nevadan. As such, he had no experience playing a game that
required such sublime strategy, and it is fair to say that he and others
new to the game were faced with a steep learning curve. Their inexperience
helped fill the lockboxes of the outside gamblers from Texas who brought
the game west.
One such incident took place at the legendary poker table in the Dunes.
On one hand, all but Texan Johnny Moss and Major Riddle folded, leaving
a huge heads-up pot. Johnny was in the lead and never checked his hand;
Riddle never hesitated to call Johnny’s bets from before the flop
or after the river. When all the cards were out, the board was K-K-9-9-J.
Moss moved in on Riddle, and Riddle called him. Moss rolled a pair of
nines out of the hole for four of a kind. Major Riddle rolled a pair of
deuces out of the hole. See what I mean about the five-card stud players
and their learning curve? Riddle had a wired pair, and he was not about
to lay them down, not realizing that he had the worst hand possible in
this situation and could not even beat the five cards on the board.
One player, Joe Rubino, who was from Alabama and a good Kansas City lowball
player (but not much of a Texas hold’em player), went so far as
to register an objection to Johnny winning the pot. Rubino claimed that
since Riddle could not beat the board with his two deuces, he should be
able to take his last call back. It didn’t take Johnny but a second
to tell him that sometimes the board is the best possible hand in Texas
hold’em and that his comment showed how little he knew about the
game. He also told him a couple of other things about minding his own
business when he was not involved in a pot.
As the game began to catch on in Las Vegas during the late sixties and
early seventies, high stakes no-limit Texas hold’em games ranged
from $10,000 to $100,000 change-in (that’s about $60,000 - $600,000
in terms of today’s dollar).
In 1968, Tom and Lafayne Moore decided to hold a table games tournament
in order to promote the Holiday Hotel in Reno. They designed elaborate
invitations to The First Annual Gaming Fraternity Convention and sent
them to a select group of approximately fifty high rollers. The event
met with limited success, so in 1969 Tom decided to change the format
to a high-stakes poker game and invite all the top players and some of
the biggest bookies in the U.S.
Moore, a good poker player himself, knew that the bookmakers would be
the producers of The Second Annual Gaming Fraternity Convention. This
was the first ever major poker tournament, and it drew twenty or thirty
poker players, bookmakers, and pool hustlers, including myself, Johnny
Moss, Doyle Brunson, James “Longgoodie” Roy, Aubrey Day, Benny
Binion, Amarillo Slim, Puggy Pearson, Jimmy Casella, Minnesota Fats, Bill
Boyd, Jack Straus, Felton “Corky” McCorkindale, George Barnes,
“Sailor” Roberts, Johnny Joseph, and the notorious father
of actor Woody Harrelson, Charles, now serving life for the 1979 assassination
of John H. Wood, a U.S. District Court justice in San Antonio.
The event, which lasted one week, featured Texas hold’em, Kansas
City lowball draw, razz, stud, and ace-to-five lowball draw. All the games
were “live” games, that is, players could rebuy chips if they
went broke. This meant that the winner had to be the best player, not
just the luckiest.
At this tournament, I won the “Mr. Outside” trophy, designating
me as the best outside or road gambler at the tournament. Oddly enough,
both Tom Moore and Bill Boyd, who ran their own games and therefore were
thought of as inside gamblers, were under consideration for the award
as well.
Benny and Jack Binion were impressed with the success of the tournament
and acquired the rights to it when Tom Moore sold the Holiday in 1970.
They renamed it the World Series of Poker. For the inaugural tournament,
which was held at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, he retained the multi-game
format of Moore’s Gaming Fraternity Convention, but with the exception
of a few bookmakers, there were no producers. Even though the producers
had not yet found their way to the World Series of Poker, this tournament
was as successful as its predecessor. But unlike Tom Moore’s tournament,
the first World Series of Poker was attended by various representatives
of the print media.
The following year, Los Angeles Times journalist Ted Thackrey suggested
to Binion a new format: a single no-limit Texas hold’em tournament.
Thackrey promised that he and Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder could
get nationwide publicity if the event were billed as a winner-take-all
world championship. That was all Benny Binion needed to hear.
The PR campaign worked and players from far and wide flocked to the World
Series of Poker. Interestingly enough, the principal attraction of the
tournament was not the tournament itself, but rather the opportunity to
win large sums from the producers in the live games or side games, as
they were sometimes called. In live poker games, players can buy more
chips—as opposed to tournament games, in which players are eliminated
when they lose their original buy-in. Live games need producers; that’s
a cardinal rule of high stakes no-limit poker. Although a group of superior
players might spread a game amongst themselves, as we often did, it is
the producers (bookmakers, oilmen, businessmen, and so on) that make a
no-limit game thrive. Thanks to the excitement generated by Binion’s
PR campaign, there was no shortage of producers at the 1971 World Series
of Poker. In Las Vegas, this was the beginning of the halcyon days of
no-limit poker.
At one such live game in the seventies, Doyle Brunson and I took on a
producer named Rex Cauble, a Texan who owned two exclusive western wear
and tack shops in Dallas and Houston, which he named “Cutter Bill’s”
after a famous cutting horse. As it later turned out, Rex was also importing
certain agricultural products from Mexico that the DEA objected to. Anyway,
Rex liked to play high change in no-limit Texas hold’em, and he
would show up at the Horseshoe during the World Series of Poker with a
sizeable bankroll.
Now, Doyle and I have been friends for over forty years, and we’ve
played in countless games together—but none have ever been as strange
as this one. On this particular evening, Rex wanted to play a $50,000
change-in game. Four or five of us took him up on the challenge. But first,
Doyle was gracious enough to give Rex a thirty-minute crash course on
the finer points of hold’em. Only after Rex was certain he had enough
of the basics to play credibly, did we all sit down.
Less than thirty minutes into the game, an unraised pot came up between
Rex and poker world champion Bobby Baldwin, who beat me in 1978 for the
title and who is now President of the Bellagio and CEO of the Mirage properties.
There came a flop of K-J-2, three suits. Bobby checked in front, and Rex
checked. The turn card was a 6, and both players again checked. The river
showed a 4, with no flush possible. Bobby checked, Rex bet $1,500, and
Bobby raised $30,000.
Rex, with $60,000 in front of him, pondered and pondered, seeming to consider
folding in order to preserve half his stack. Finally, clearly intimidated,
he reluctantly called.
Bobby triumphantly rolled 3-5 out of the hole for the nuts. His straight
couldn’t possibly be beat. What do you think Rex rolled out of the
hole? Since Rex was last to act and had $30,000 in chips still in front
of him, you would never guess his holecards to be 3-5, the same as Bobby’s,
but they were. Rex had just smooth called with the nuts.
At this point, Doyle uttered his favorite phrase of astonishment: “I’ll
be a sunburned son of a bitch.” I had to suppress a laugh. But back
in the early days of the World Series of Poker, this kind of thing happened.
The tournament attracted many producers like Rex, and some played with
us for even higher stakes.
The popularity of the World Series was not lost on Sid Wyman, an affable
man and the public relations director for the Dunes and the Aladdin. In
1973, Wyman brought the game of no-limit Texas hold’em across Las
Vegas Boulevard to the Aladdin, which was operated by Sam Diamond. Hosted
by Johnny Moss, this high-stakes no-limit Texas hold’em game attracted
not only the Texas and Nevada gamblers, but also more and more drop-ins.
It was so well attended that games often ran for days at a time, and fortunes
changed hands. Major Riddle was a frequent player at the Aladdin table,
and his poor play led to his losing majority control of the Dunes to parties
represented by Sid Wyman.
Moss eventually moved his game to the oldest casino on the strip, the
Flamingo, which again found itself the subject of debate and criticism.
More than thirty years earlier, in 1946, the Flamingo proved the critics
of the 1940s wrong about the possibility of successful expansion of casinos
from downtown to a dusty, remote location that eventually became known
as the Strip. In 1976, at the same hotel, Johnny Moss would prove the
critics of the 1970s wrong by successfully operating a poker room in a
Strip casino.
At the time, other notable poker players were beginning to see the advantage
of hosting high stakes games, including Chip Reese at the Dunes and Eric
Drache and Doyle Brunson, who partnered up to operate the game at the
Silver Bird, the casino that Major Riddle had acquired after losing control
of the Dunes. The excitement generated by new poker rooms on the Strip
and the World Series of Poker fueled Texas hold’em’s meteoric
rise in nationwide popularity.
These prosperous days lasted until about the middle eighties. By that
time, satellites had become so popular that they were running twenty-four
hours a day and were occupying more and more of the limited floor space
in the Horseshoe. While at first, this was seen as a positive change for
the tournament, it had the ironic effect of crowding out the live games—the
very reason we had started the WSOP in the first place!
Today, the game of no-limit Texas hold’em that we introduced to
Nevada so many years ago has been transformed, thanks to its entertainment
value, to television audiences. Ever increasing participation in major
freeze-out tournaments (more than 2,500 players in the 2004 World Series
of Poker) have forced tournament hosts to impose rapidly increasing ante
and blind structures in order to keep the tournament times manageable.
And this has produced an aberration of the pure form of the game. With
certain notable exceptions, the game of no-limit Texas hold’em is
a game designed to be played after the flop. That’s when the real
play is supposed to begin. However, many hands seen at televised events
today are played before the flop, when the players have received only
their holecards. This style of play, sometimes referred to as “catch
an ace and take a race,” re-introduces a substantial amount of luck
into a game that had always favored the best player over the best card
catcher.
But it appears that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. And
for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of players now active
on the online poker sites around the world, surely the time has come.
In the future, you can expect to see time management problems develop
for the tournament hosts as more and more of the Internet players gain
entries into the major tournaments.
Looking into the future, it’s not hard to imagine the creation of
a professional poker league, with several teams selected by some sort
of draft. In fact, just such a league is in an early investigative stage
today.
The creation of new opportunities to exploit the poker phenomenon is limited
only by the imagination of men like Benny Binion.
So now you know the history of no-limit Texas hold’em—the
story of a small band of Texas gamblers who changed the game of poker
forever and of how the modern poker tournaments are descendants of an
illegal high stakes game in San Antonio that gypsied to Reno, then blossomed
into the World Series of Poker, the progenitor of every poker tournament
played and televised today.
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