TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061890/0618170.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.5 KB | 152 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 10

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

The Big Poker Freeze-Out


Three tens sure beat having to work for a living

By JOHN SKOW


    Players and rubberneckers are four hours into the big,
no-limit World Series of Poker freeze-out here at Binion's
Horseshoe in Las Vegas. Maybe 170 players are left of the 194
who began chasing the $835,000 first prize with $10,000 each
in chips. From three tables away, a raspy Texas drawl cuts
through the watery green air of Binion's cardroom. Amarillo
Slim Preston is telling stories, fogging his opponents with
rascally nonsense. Something about beating somebody in 312
straight games of gin rummy. Something about riding a camel
through a casino in Marrakech. Preston is a tough, lanky,
61-year-old cattleman in jeans and a straw Stetson who won this
tournament in 1972, and who collected $142,000 from a
preliminary event here last week, enough to tide him over. He
is wealthy from poker winnings, and not lacking in aggressive
self-confidence.

    The gods of poker are not impressed. Preston bumps a pair
of queens, and the last $3,500 of his $10,000 stake, against
what turns out to be a pair of kings. Now Slim is out of the
action, and so is 83-year-old Johnny Moss of Odessa, Texas, a
three-time champion with the smile of a crocodile. Earlier,
Moss had said, "I like my chances better than anybody's. If a
man can go high, I can go higher." Not this time.

    The game is Texas Hold 'Em (no limit), a diamondback species
of seven-card stud in which each player gets two cards down,
and then five cards usable by all players are dealt face up;
the first three at the same time, then the fourth, then the
last. You can't bring in fresh money, so that when you run dry,
you're gone, frozen out. The last two gunslingers left on the
tournament's fourth day are firing from behind stacks worth a
total of $1.94 million.

    Best of all, for civilians with dreams of glory, anyone with
$10,000  and a detectable pulse rate may enter. They won't let
you sign up for Wimbledon, will they? Alas, poker is a pure
gambling game only in the very short run. Beyond the quirk of
a single hand, skill takes over and twirls its mustache. The
trouble is that a single hand can run you out of town. Last
year's winner, Phil Hellmuth Jr., 24, a tall, weedy youth whose
soft face projects an unsettling expression of sweet decay,
jukes and twitches to the music of his Walkman. He piles up a
fortress of chips, then watches it disintegrate. The last of
it backs two nines. He pulls a third nine, but his opponent gets
a third queen. Television crews have filmed almost every hand
he has played. Now he's gone. Dewey Tomko, who came in second
here a few years ago, used to be a kindergarten teacher for
migrant workers' children in Florida. He would stay up all
night playing poker, he admits shyly, and when his class took
its nap, he would take one too, on his very own mat, sometimes
waking up long after the mammas had collected the kids. Tomko
quit teaching and became a world-class poker player. But now
all he can think of is getting back to Florida to play baseball
with his three sons. Is that why he lost today? He's worried
that he isn't worried, another good man gone wrong.

    But look who's still here as play ends for the day. Diane
Borger from Winnipeg is one of five women in what is still
largely a man's game. She's a psychology student at California
Lutheran University, of all places, where she will have to
finish her master's thesis if she doesn't place well at
Binion's. Borger is small and blond, and though she's 28, she
looks like a little girl. When she plays, she wears a blue cap
that says TOP GUN and smokes long, skinny cigars. All you can
see is her little, straight-across mouth under the peak of the
cap, and that evil smoke curling up.

    You make your statement with what you have. Crandall
Addington, slim as a whip, whose year-round gamble is oil and
gas exploration in South Texas, wears an elegant suit, a
diamond stickpin, alligator boots, a neatly trimmed beard and
a full-rigged Stetson. Tuna Lund, a huge fellow from Reno who
got his nickname from an oceanic losing streak in Carson City,
Nev. (a sure loser is a fish, and a tuna is a big fish), just
sits at the table looking massive. He hasn't much choice; but
if he's winning (which he is, just now) and you're not, maybe
your mind wanders, and you begin wondering just how much he can
see through those bottle-bottom glasses, or whether the
toothpick he's chewing is the same one he started the day with.
This puts you in the wrong frame of mind when Lund (as he does
just now) pushes 100 chips worth $1,000 each into the pot.

    Poker may be the most successful U.S. export these days.
Here at Binion's, where tournament poker took shape in 1970,
there are good players from India, Sweden and other places that
seem unlikely. Dewey Tomko estimates that there are only ten
or 15 really successful players, whose lives and incomes would
be comparable to those of the world's best tennis
professionals. Sure, he admits when an eyebrow is raised, there
are a lot of others who scuffle along at $200,000 a year, "but
that's as bad as having a job."

    The big stacks of chips represent big money, but money
itself, an onlooker begins to understand, is almost without
psychological weight to the top players. Eric Drache, who runs
the cardroom at the fancy new Mirage casino here, was offered
a job once when he was a full-time card player. He had to ask
a civilian friend whether $150,000 was a good year's salary.
It didn't sound like much to a man who was usually up or down
more than that after an evening's play. Unofficial side games
here routinely slosh with more money than the World Series
itself. Hundred-dollar bills are banded in sheaves of 50; and
sheaves are wadded in stacks of ten; and bets and raises hit
the table hard, thud-thud-thud.

    But bragging rights to the Series are important, even if
first prize is only $835,000. By day four Diane Borger is back
at college. Addington has left, beaten but unwrinkled. Jerry
Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, has run through $10,000
in pocket change. Big old Doyle Brunson, a two-time World
Series winner and perhaps the best poker player of all, they
say here, has tossed in his last chip.

    There is always one hand they talk about. It comes when only
two players are left. Mansour Matloubi, a placid-seeming
Iranian living in England, is down to his last $800,000 in
chips. He bets it all on a pair of tens in the hole, with the
rest of the cards still to come. Tuna Lund's toothpick does not
tremble. He has about $1.1 million in front of him, and he
calls with ace-nine, good but not great hole cards.

    Dollar amounts here are deceptive; what Lund and Matloubi
are really playing for is $501,000, the difference between
$835,000 and the  $334,000 second prize. But to win, you need
all the chips. Lund looks golden after the three-card "flop"
gives him another ace-nine, for a nearly unbeatable two pairs.
Matloubi placidly kicks the table. He needs a third ten, a
22-to-1 shot against, or the tournament is over.

    And, of course, the last up card gives the Iranian his ten,
and $1.6 million in chips. A couple of hours later he erodes
Tuna's last reserves and wins it all. Photos are taken with
Matloubi embracing a huge pile of cash, and Tuna looking
bemused. Then the watchers and players begin drifting away. The
boys are looking for a poker game.