Who Dealt This Mess?

Whither Poker?

Glad you put it that way. Poker needs a little classing up from time to time. Roulette can summon an image of exiled duchesses laying slender stacks of chips on rouge as the wheel spins; baccarat may make you think of pale heirs in white tie murmuring "Banco." With poker, thanks mostly to Westerns, you tend to think of a saloon table encircled by lice-ridden, scruffy-looking men, most of whom accompany cattle for a living.

For the record, however, poker turns out to have as fine a pedigree as you could wish for. It's not exactly classy, but it's certainly classless. John Scarne, who never introduces himself without adding "world's foremost gambling authority," says that nearly 50,000,000 Americans play the game either regularly or occasionally; and it is rare to find a guy who hasn't drawn to a four flush at least once in his life. Guys, hell. Scarne claims that nearly half the country's players today are women. More on that later.

What it gets down to is that poker is as American as tacoburgers. "Civilized bushwhacking," Maverick's pappy called it, and he may have had his doubts about the word civilized. The game is as perfect a microcosm as we have of the way a free-enterprise capitalist system is supposed to work, except that the rich don't necessarily get richer. Brass balls will do. In a limit game (no-limit games, where a ridiculously huge bet simply buys a pot, are rare today), a grocery clerk can humiliate an oil tycoon through sheer bravado—the object being, without exception, to bankrupt the bastard across the table.

It all started one stormy night in Persia, about 400 years ago. A group of fellows with a little time on their hands dreamed up a game they called As Nas, which came to be played with 20 cards (the suits were lions, kings, ladies, soldiers and dancing girls), five cards to a Persian. The players would take a look at their hands and immediately commence lying. They could claim to be holding one or two pair, three of a kind, a full house or four of a kind—then back up the claim by betting the family goat. No straights or flushes, no draw.

Late in the 18th Century, French sailors who'd been sent to Persia to win the hearts and minds of the people there eventually ended up in Louisiana with a similar mission and took the game of As Nas with them. It appealed to the French because of another game that had been popular with aristocrats, called Poque, which also relied on bluffing. In time, the French kept the basic structure of As Nas, discarded some of the sillier rules of Poque and ended up with something they called Poque-As. The Deep South's penchant for lousy diction and slurring took it from there—pokah. There's some evidence that the old English game of brag and the German game of Pochen may have influenced poker, but the Persian-French link seems the most likely.

New Orleans and poker deserved each other. Not only did Jefferson acquire Louisiana by outplaying Napoleon in one of the most profitable wheeling-dealing calls in history but about 100 years earlier, (continued on page 224)Who Dealt this Mess?(continued from page 110) the city of New Orleans itself was founded as the result of a bluff. Jean Baptiste Lemoyne, Sieur de Bienville, exploring the Mississippi with five other Frenchmen in a canoe, ran into a British galley whose skipper, Captain Bond, was strong on military matters but weak on geography. Bond shouted to Bienville that he intended to claim the lower Mississippi for England, but he wasn't too sure—this was the Mississippi River he was sailing on, wasn't it? Nope, said Bienville, it's a few miles farther west, and these here waters are French. Also, Bienville lied, we've got this enormous fort filled with soldiers who may not like the idea of a British ship filled with settlers. So Bond hove to, Bienville paddled on and New Orleans was established as a French city in 1718. The bend in the river where Captain Bond was bluffed is called English Turn today.

In those early days, New Orleans was kind of a fun city. One account says that in the first 20 years after 1803, the date of the Louisiana Hornswoggle, New Orleans' permanent population quadrupled—and one third of the increase was composed entirely of "thieves, ruffians, vagabonds and prostitutes." These new citizens of New Orleans would set up shop in flatboats abandoned after the trip down-river, where farmers and boatmen would flock to be fleeced. One of the earliest written references to poker is an 1829 account by a wandering actor named Joe Cowell who visited New Orleans, spotted a funny game going on in the corner and wrote: "The cards ... are dealt out and carefully concealed by the players from one another; old players pack them in their hands and peep at them as if they were afraid to trust even themselves to look."

Enter the steamboats. As traffic jams got heavier (over 500 large riverboats chugged through the waters in the 15 years immediately preceding the Civil War), the boats got bigger and fancier and provisions were made for first-class trade—merchants, bankers, ranchers. They craved a little action and the professional gamblers—enter Tyrone Power—were there to please. Along with three-card monte, poker was the game of preference. And it was there on the side-wheelers that poker became Americanized. Henry Chafetz, author of a history of gambling titled Play the Devil (from which many of the poker stories in this article are taken), writes: "Europeans who traveled on the riverboats were astonished at the equality that existed among traders, plantation owners, the ship's barber, members of Congress.... One man was as good as another if he had enough money to play. Republicanism even extended at times to the cards themselves, where traditional kings, queens and knaves were supplanted by more democratic figures." Depending on the vogue, a king might be portrayed as John Adams ("the President of diamonds"), a queen as Venus and, not surprisingly, considering the carnage then taking place, Indian chiefs substituted for the knaves.

But if you think Tyrone Power in those riverboat-gambler movies was just too pretty to be true, contemporary accounts describing dudes with lace shirts, hand-painted vests and diamond stickpins pretty much bear out the movies' costume designers. Of course, more than likely, ole Tyrone spent a lot of time marking cards and dealing from the bottom of the deck. Cheating was endemic, and many of today's most enduring scams were first developed on the river, ranging from the double team (where a sucker gets caught in a cross fire of raises) to the ever-popular ace up a ruffled sleeve. In Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, published in 1887, the author, George Devol, mentions a game with an Indian chief during which one of the chief's friends kept wandering around the table, muttering "Injun talk." Devol notes that the chief eventually lost, despite the fact that he was being fed information, and concludes that "anyone who has a desire to play poker with 'big Injuns' has my consent, but I would advise them to play a square game and keep their eye skinned for the big buck that talks to the chief."

If there were cheats, there were heroes, too. James Bowie, of utensil fame, became something of a Robin Hood for suckers who were done in by sharpers. Aboard the steamer New Orleans in 1832, he watched a game in which a young man from Natchez was fleeced of $50,000 by a tableful of cheats. Bowie restrained the man from jumping overboard, then joined the game himself. A big hand came up—$70,000 was in the pot—and Bowie saw one of the gamblers' hands flick into his sleeve. Our hero grabbed the man's wrist, drew his famous blade and said, "Show your hand. If it contains more than five cards, I shall kill you." The gambler demurred and Bowie swept the bank notes into his large hat and clapped it onto his head. He gave the man from Natchez $50,000, but only on the condition that he never touch another card. With tears in his eyes, the young man agreed.

Of course, suckers like that were the answer to any gambler's prayer. Perhaps the most generous fish of them all was a wealthy lawyer named Randolph Grymes, who practiced in New Orleans during the 1830s. One of his clients was buccaneer Jean Laffite, who paid Grymes $20,000 for keeping him out of the slammer. Shortly afterward, Laffite suggested they play some cards. The pirate won back the $20,000 fee, plus another $20,000 as a sweetener, but that was standard procedure for Grymes. No one ever saw him walk away from the table a winner, and he is said to have lost over half a million dollars in ten years of poker playing.

It was the river rogues who pepped up the rules of the game. Always eager to lure more fish into their nets, gamblers introduced the (English) 52-card deck to poker in 1837, which opened up the game from a maximum of four players to seven or more, and then kept thinking of new twists in the years that followed: Flushes were allowed in the 1850s (although straights didn't surface for another decade or so), the draw was hailed as revolutionary and some cowperson somewhere came up with the notion of an open-card poker game, which he named after his stud horse.

Because poker was played mostly at the edge of the frontier, the game lacked a certain degree of law and order throughout much of the century. Disagreements over rules and ranking of hands were frequently resolved by death. And it wasn't just cowpokes who drilled each other between the eyes—or tried to. Henry Clay, who usually behaved himself when he went head to head against another poker player, Daniel Webster, once found himself in a high-stakes game with a professional gambler. He was not amused when the gambler laid down a hand with three aces in it at the very moment that Clay held two others. Clay rose from his chair, pulled out a pistol and the gambler ran out the door; frustrated, Clay walked over to the man's empty chair and shot a bullet through the seat.

In those days, no-limit still prevailed and there was a gentleman's agreement that a player be given 24 hours to raise money when he couldn't cover a bet. One familiar story has it that a St. Louis man showed up at a bank clutching a sealed envelope. He went straight to the cashier and requested a $5000 loan. Asked for security, the man handed the cashier the envelope: It contained four kings and an ace—a sure thing, the royal flush then being unrecognized and the ace providing assurance that the hand was unbeatable. The cashier, a prim and uptight fellow, said, "The bank, sir, does not lend on cards." At that moment, the bank's president strolled by, glanced at the man's hand and rushed back to the poker game with him, carrying several bags of double eagles. He returned five minutes later with the bags, threw down another $500 in interest for the bank and yelled at the cashier: "Ever play poker? Well, sir, if you had, you would know better what good collateral is. That hand was good in this institution for our entire assets!"

It was during the Civil War that poker became a truly national pastime, or two national pastimes, as the case may have been. Put quite simply, when soldiers weren't shooting one another, they were playing cards. An investigation at the time showed that 90 percent of the embezzlements of Army paymasters were the result of poker losses. Chaplains complained that gambling tents were filled while religious services went unattended. A description of the routine followed by the Wilson Rangers in Louisiana was provided by a member of that group: "When we were ordered to drill—which was every day—we would mount our fine horses, gallop out back of the city, and the first orders we would receive from our commanding officer would be, 'Dismount! Hitch horses! March! Hunt shade! Begin playing!'"

Confederate General Nathan Forrest, a fierce poker player, became one of the most glamorous figures of the entire four-year tiff when he won several battles on bluff alone. With 400 men under his command, he managed to make his Union counterpart, Colonel Abel Streight, believe a rebel battalion was breathing down his neck. He and his 2500 Union soldiers fled. When Forrest's troops later captured a detachment headed by the selfsame colonel, Forrest walked over to his high-ranking prisoner and remarked, "Cheer up, Colonel, this is not the first time a bluff has beaten a straight." Historians fail to report whether or not Colonel Streight chuckled.

Then there was the Union paymaster who was captured by a Confederate band and had to give up the $50,000 in Army funds he was carrying. The rebs let him keep a few hundred dollars of it and then insisted that their prisoner play a little poker with them. Before the afternoon was through, the Union man had won back all of the money. His captors briefly considered shooting him but, being Southern gentlemen, decided he should keep it. Moments later, they heard the sound of a Yankee regiment approaching and fled, leaving the paymaster behind. He joyfully rejoined his own troops, explaining how he'd been attacked and robbed—but neglecting to mention that he'd gotten the$50,000 back. As Chafetz tells the story, the paymaster figured he'd won $50,000 during a private poker game, so the whole thing was his own business and nobody else's.

Finally, the Civil War period can lay claim to the game that resulted in the biggest pot of all time, except for one annoying detail. It seems that Union General Nelson Miles captured a couple of Confederate wagons brimming with hard cash and, before he could stop his troops, they'd helped themselves to the booty and begun to play poker with mad abandon. The year was 1865, the South was crumbling, one of the soldiers raked in a pot amounting to $1,200,000 and, yes, it was worthless Confederate currency.

The only people to rival the poker fanatics in blue and gray were Westerners. Between the California gold rush in 1849 and the turn of the century, billions of dollars were bet in mining camps, frontier settlements and barrooms west of the Mississippi. In Ore City, Colorado, a couple of prospectors who had struck it rich with a huge vein of gold were known to be such heavy gamblers that a saloon was built near the entrance to their mine so they could bet the gold nuggets they'd dug up during the day without walking too far. In Coyoteville, California, three prospecting partners got into a high-stakes game against one another. Two of them lost their shares in a fabulously rich mine to the third partner, who graciously offered his former partners work in the mine for an ounce of gold a day. The games were serious: One miner was said to have spent an entire evening playing cards without taking his eyes off his opponents, stuffing wads of chewing tobacco into his mouth all the while. When another player noticed the stream of tobacco juice trickling down the man's chin and onto the floor, he asked the miner why he didn't spit into a cuspidor behind him. "Not in this game, mister," he replied.

Epitaph on a boot-hill tombstone:

Played Five Aces.

Now Playing a Harp.

It was during this period (the late 1860s and early 1870s) that some of the better-known Western heroes left their markers at poker tables here and there. A young civil engineer from New York was visiting Abilene, Kansas, in 1870, got into a poker game with some locals and had a string of incredible good luck. The engineer later wrote about the episode: "One of the cowboys, Jim Cathcart by name, snarled, 'Well, by hell, you are a crook, ain't you?' and as he spoke, he whipped out the big gun on the right side of his belt. I was blind with terror.... When I opened my eyes a second later, I saw Cathcart staring at the door, his right arm hanging limp at his side.... Standing quietly under the lintel of the door, with his two big guns covering the five of us, was Wild Bill Hickok, Abilene's celebrated marshal. 'Slope for your camp, son,' said Wild Bill to me.... The way I cut out for our camp, eight miles away, was a warning to grasshoppers."

Of course, Wild Bill didn't fare very well himself at a poker game some years later, on August 2, 1876. He was in Dead-wood Gulch, in the Dakota Territory, and had agreed to take a seat at the table without the usual insistence that he be able to see the door. A nasty creature by the name of Broken Nose Jack McCall sneaked into the saloon and shot Wild Bill in the back of the head. The hand he was holding was a queen and two pair, aces and eights, forevermore known as the "dead man's hand."

Law and order was still taking its time moving West, and poker fever occasionally made its way into court records. In one Western courtroom, a lawyer took offense at a court ruling and yelled at the judge, "Yer Honor, that ain't the law!" But the opposing lawyer raised an objection, so the first lawyer pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and shouted, "I'll bet ten dollars it ain't!" Since the second lawyer didn't call the bet, the judge felt constrained to hand down the only possible verdict: "If you ain't got the nerve to cover his ten, I guess you're wrong. The court rules against you."

Lady poker players out West? Yes, indeed. There weren't many, it's true, but numbers are only relative when you consider that a California census in 1850 reported seven women for every 100 men. Most of the ladies, of course, gathered in cities. When Horace Greeley visited a mining camp in Colorado Territory in 1859, he reported there were 4000 men and exactly 12 women. No matter. The few who showed up left a trail: Kitty the Schemer, who screwed and bluffed her way through scores of boom towns in the Seventies and Eighties; Colorado Charlie Utter's mistress, Minnie, four feet tall and the best poker player in El Paso; Big Nose Kate Fisher, Doc Holliday's little sugarplum, who, according to historian Chafetz, "could bet a sick hand to win as though she had a royal flush and never hesitated to look down a man's throat when she had an ace to draw"; and Poker Alice, the product of a Southern finishing school, who made a living at the poker table and smoked long black cigars while she played.

But maybe the reason women have been unfairly branded as hopeless with a poker hand is clearest in the story that was told around the turn of the century. A brother and a sister in their early 20s were passengers on a slow steamship headed for New York. The young man was lured into a game by a middle-aged man who obviously knew his poker. The stakes were small at first but gradually increased to where the young man had lost over $1000 and had dipped into a moneybag he was carrying for his family. The game was jackpot—a pair of jacks or better is needed to open and the players keep anteing until someone can open—and another $1000 lay in the middle of the table, representing almost all the money the boy's family had in the world. Suddenly, on a whim, the young man stood up and said, "I've heard there's luck in a new player—if you've no objection, deal this hand to my sister." The man agreed and the girl, giggling excitedly, took her brother's seat. The man dealt and the girl picked her cards up one by one, holding them so the spectators behind her could see them. First an ace, then another ace, then a queen, a third ace and, unbelievably, a fourth ace. "Play it for all the money," whispered her brother.

The bet was called. "Cards, if any?" the man asked.

The young girl answered, "Four," and tossed her aces onto the table. The man quickly dealt four cards and stood pat, smiling. The girl started stammering that she'd gotten the game confused with old maid; her brother ran to the railing of the ship and began retching.

All the money had been played by then, so there remained only the showdown. The man held a small full house. The girl dropped her cards onto the table and whimpered. The spectators stared. The queen she'd kept had been matched by three more queens. The family fortune was saved, the brother stopped retching and the girl allowed as how this just might be a game she could get into, after all.

Except for Arnold Rothstein, gambler about town and the man who allegedly fixed the 1919 world series, poker lore flattens out some in the 20th Century. Rothstein played in the poker game with the second-biggest pot in history. It was against "Nick the Greek" Dandolos and the game was stud. Details on who held what are hazy, but it's generally agreed that Rothstein won a single pot of $605,000. The next day, Rothstein sent Nick a new Rolls-Royce as a token of his esteem, but Nick sent it back with a note reading, "Who needs a car in New York?" And in 1928, following a poker game in which Rothstein lost $340,000 and refused to pay up, he was shot in the crotch by one of the winners. He died shortly afterward.

And the biggest pot of all time? This should settle the usual squabbles that arise over Friday-night poker. The game took place, appropriately enough, in New Orleans. Allen Dowling, author of The Great American Pastime, says it was a two-man game in the old St. Charles Hotel shortly after the Civil War. Names aren't mentioned—perhaps the participants made a point of it—but it's known that one was a wealthy Louisiana importer of fruit, the other a cotton and tobacco grower. It was in the days of no-limit poker and the men had played all night when the big play finally came at dawn. They had raised and reraised each other until there was $300,000 in the pot, the limit of their respective checking accounts. The plantation owner then suggested that if his opponent would put up three blocks he owned on Canal Street, he, the planter, would bet the deed to his St. James Parish property—each property had been appraised at $250,000. For a total of $800,000, the hands were exposed. The planter had four aces, the importer a six-high straight flush.

Now, we've called that little episode the biggest pot ever, and that's because there was something a little uncricket about an event that took place in Santa Fe in 1889. Professional gambler John Dougherty was facing off against cattle baron Ike Jackson for the poker championship of the West. Everyone, including the governor of the Territory of New Mexico, was there at Bowen's Saloon. Jackson and Dougherty pulled big hands and after building the pot to $100,000, Jackson wrote out a deed to his ranch, which included 10,000 head of cattle, and bet it. Dougherty, who couldn't call, asked Èor a paper and a pen, wrote something down and handed the paper to the governor nearby. He also drew his gun. "Governor," he said, "sign this or I'll kill you." The governor complied at once. Triumphantly, Dougherty tossed the document into the pot and yelled, "I raise you the Territory of New Mexico. There's the deed!"

Jackson knew when he was beat and folded his hand. "All right, take it," he said. "But it's a damn good thing for you the governor of Texas isn't here."

OK, once around to the dealer. Those Mississippi steamboats and Western mining camps are no more and the heavy poker action has moved into air-conditioned parlors in Nevada and Gardena, California. And, of course, into your basement most Friday nights. So you can blame the politicians if you sense that something's gone out of the game. Nobody's reraising cattle ranches anymore, or, if they are, you're not likely to hear about it before the IRS does. Today it's illegal to run a poker game for house profit anywhere except Nevada and parts of California, where, with idiot reasoning, stud was declared a game of "chance" and therefore illicit, and draw a game of "skill" and therefore virtuous.

Private games for anything but matchsticks are illegal in most states, but the laws are a little screwy there, too. In some states, you can find loopholes that put private-club games pretty much out of reach of the law. In any case, the statutes that do exist for private games are virtually never enforced. The theory, presumably, is that all you're doing is playing to destroy your friend's self-esteem and cripple his credit rating—in other words, you're in a friendly game.

So the thing to do, now that the legends have faded, is to take on the cheerful attitude of the guy who was asked why he was joining a game he knew to be crooked. "Wa-a-al," he drawled, "it's the only game in town." And remember, there's consolation in what Maverick's pappy said about poker: "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time—and those are very good odds."