Reporting from the 1973 World Series of Poker

Over the weekend I was in the middle of doing some reading for this week’s “Poker & Pop Culture” column for PokerNews when I had an idea for something I’m going to try to do this week on Hard-Boiled Poker.

The idea came as I was rereading Jon Bradshaw’s great gambling narrative Fast Company, published in 1975 (reviewed here), in particular the chapter on Johnny Moss. That chapter contains a detailed report from the 1973 World Series of Poker, including a number of specific hands described with varying levels of detail.

There were 13 players participating in that year’s Main Event at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino. It was the first year players paid $10,000 to play, actually. In 1970, the first WSOP had no tournament, then in 1971 the buy-in for the Main Event was $5,000. Then in 1972 the buy-in was $10K, but Benny Binion paid half of it for each player.

As would be the case through the 1977 WSOP, the Main Event was played “winner-take-all,” meaning the champ earned a $130,000 first prize. There were no bracelets yet, either, just a “corny trophy” (as Becky Behnen, Binion’s daughter, described it years later). The bracelet first was introduced in 1976.

As I was rereading Bradshaw’s entertaining account, I remembered how this particular WSOP Main Event not only was covered much more extensively than previous ones, but many subsequent ones, too.

David Spanier also writes extensively about the tournament in his 1977 book Total Poker in a chapter focusing on Pearson. (I reviewed Total Poker here.) Like Bradshaw’s account, Spanier’s includes a number of hands as well as chip count updates along the way.

There is also a filmed record of the event, made by Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder for the CBS Sports Spectacular anthology show and available on YouTube. During the 47-minute program you can see portions of several hands being played, get updates on counts, and hear still more table talk and other information from the event.

Speaking of media coverage, Benny Binion was interviewed in May 1973 by Mary Ellen Glass shortly after the completion of that year’s WSOP, and Binion tells her how “this poker game here gets us a lot of advertisement, the world series of poker.” He continues: “Last year it was in seven thousand newspapers; I don’t how many it was in this year, whether it was more or less, but we got awful good coverage on it this year.” (You can read the two-part interview here and here.)

The 1972 WSOP was won by Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston, who then went on to help publicize the WSOP (and poker, generally speaking) by appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson multiple times. Preston was also featured on 60 Minutes, spoke before various groups including the National Press Club in D.C., and produced a book titled Play Poker to Win that the some of the other players joke about at that 1973 event.

Some have misread Binion’s “seven thousand newspapers” quote to Glass as saying there were 7,000 articles written about the 1973 WSOP, when obviously he was referring to the 1972 one. In any event, Preston’s publicity tour certainly contributed heavily to the coverage, not only helping boost the number of articles but attracting folks like Bradshaw and Spanier to be there in 1973, as well as encourage CBS to go along with Snyder’s idea to do the special for the Spectacular.

Here’s my idea -- using primarily Bradshaw, Spanier, and the CBS documentary, plus a few random extra bits of info gathered online, I thought I’d compile as best as I could some “live updates” from the 1973 WSOP and share them here on HBP over the next few days.

The tournament itself lasted two days. They started sometime during the late afternoon on Monday, May 14, 1973, probably around 4:30 p.m., and after about nine hours of play (plus a dinner break) the original 13 had played down to six players. Play resumed on Tuesday, May 15, 1973 at around 6 p.m. again, and it was sometime after 2 a.m. that the last hand was dealt.

Coverage begins tomorrow, and may continue for the rest of the week depending on how quickly I can get through it all. Come back then and follow along as Crandall Addington, Bobby Brazil, Doyle Brunson, Jimmy Cassella, Bobby Hoff, Bob Hooks, Sherman Lanier, Johnny Moss, Walter “Puggy” Pearson, Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston, Brian “Sailor” Roberts, Jack Straus, and Roger Van Ausdall do battle to see who becomes the 1973 WSOP Main Event champion.

Image: “Binion’s Horseshoe Casino presents The World Series of Poker,” CBS Sports Spectacular (1973).

Cards, Money, and Bluffing

Gonna get a little abstract both in this post and the one tomorrow. I had written something up for another purpose a while back and never used it, and so rather than leave it hidden in an old file on my computer I have decided to share it here.

The first part has to do with defining the game of poker according to its essential elements. It’s something I want to say was first inspired by a conversation with Tommy Angelo from many years back, although it could be I’m associating the author of Elements of Poker with this argument about the elements necessary to the game.

Wherever this started, the question with which we begin couldn’t be more broad in its scope: “What is poker?” And the answer is a list: “Cards, money, and bluffing.”

First, cards. Dating back as far back as the ninth century to imperial China, playing cards were employed in a wide variety of games over the next millennium while spreading throughout Asia and Europe, reflecting a host of cultural symbols and values in their changing designs along the way.

By the early 1800s, most features of the modern deck had been established, including the size and thickness of the cards as well as the four suits, with various games including bouillotte, mus, pochen, and poque having been introduced throughout Europe and carried to North America. Features borrowed from each of these games, including the building of five-card hands as well as discarding and drawing, would be incorporated into poker, a game initially played with 20 cards, then later with the full 52-card deck.

In the United States the game would grow and develop alongside the country itself, expanding to include a multitude of variants linked by the use of similar hand rankings and rules of play. Poker wouldn’t be poker without cards, but then the game has always been about much more than a flush beating a straight.

All of these precursor games offered opportunities for wagering, though it would be the amalgam of poker that would promote money to the status of being a required element of the game, as essential as the cards.

In an essay written about a half-century ago titled “Poker and American Character” (discussed here and here), historian John Lukacs maintains that “Money is the basis of poker: whereas bridge can be played for fun without money, poker becomes utterly senseless without it,” a position which many commentators on the game readily share.

Each hand of poker is like a complicated negotiation, with players forced both to invest in their own hands while weighing prices set by opponents on theirs. Entering into such transactions requires purchasing power -- one must bring money to the table to participate at all -- and just like in negotiations away from the poker table, each player’s personal idea of what money signifies directly affects the amounts set when selling, or the costs agreed to when buying.

“The money staked in poker represents not only our idea of the value of our cards, but our idea of what the other players’ idea of the value of our cards might be,” explains Lukacs, suggesting that money’s importance to the game is even greater than the cards. “Cards count in poker,” the historian acknowledges, “but they count less than in any other game.”

Of course, as anyone who has played even a single hand of poker well knows, such negotiations need not be entered into in good faith, thus making bluffing a third defining feature of the game.

Like the cards and the use of money, bluffing was likewise inherited by poker from most of its immediate precursors. For example, the British game of three-card brag -- one of the few antecedents of poker still played today -- bluffing is literally the name of the game, with players dealt a hand, then “bragging” their cards’ value with bets until just two remain.

“Bluff is the essence of poker,” argues David Spanier in Total Poker, articulating another sentiment with which many poker players would agree. “It is lurking in every single hand of the game,” he continues, alluding to the possibility of a bet or raise misrepresenting a hand’s value: “Has he or hasn’t he got what he says he’s got?” Every instance of a player backing cards with money presents the question to the next player to act, adding layers of complexity to the game that distinguish poker markedly from other card games and forms of gambling.

Poker needs cards, then, and money and bluffing. This argument might be used to exclude some card games that are often referred to as poker, such as liar’s poker (no cards) or HoldemX (no money) or Chinese poker (no bluffing), but to be honest I’m not that interested in drawing hard, angry lines around poker here. Rather I’d like merely to suggest cards and money and bluffing to be core elements of the game, perhaps forcing us to recognize that any variants that lack one of the three is better considered part-poker and part-something-else.

It’s not too complicated of an argument, saying poker is cards and money and bluffing. Of course, when these elements are combined, it is clear poker becomes much more than the sum of such parts, and, importantly, more complicated to describe. Doyle Brunson notes early start of Super/System that “poker is a game of people.” And because poker is a game of people -- and since people are inconsistent, flawed, and self-contradictory -- it perhaps isn’t surprising to find the game itself replete with several seeming incongruities.

These paradoxes of poker I’ll discuss tomorrow when I share the rest of this discussion.

Photo: “Cash Money,” Aaron Jacobs. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Paul Newman and Poker

When we think of poker in film, it is hard not to think of Paul Newman. Whether as prisoner Luke Jackson, repeatedly calling out to “kick a buck” with nothing but air in Cool Hand Luke (1967), or as con man Henry Gondorff surprisingly turning over quad jacks to outcheat a cheater in The Sting (1973), Newman’s grinning mug necessarily springs to mind whenever someone sets out to compile a short list of the best poker scenes on the silver screen.

By the time of his passing in 2008, Newman had appeared in over 60 films, with America’s favorite card game popping up in more than a few of them. As a result, Newman came to be identified somewhat with the game. In fact, among the many quotes often attributed to the actor is a poker-related one which anyone reading this post will undoubtedly recognize:

“If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”

So Newman is thought to have said, although the line likely had its origins elsewhere. Whatever its true source, it’s a line fans of poker films recognize instantly as paraphrased by Mike McDermott during the opening of Rounders (1998): “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

The actor was himself not an especially dedicated poker player, at least not according to his biographer Shawn Levy. “Despite the evidence of his film work,” writes Levy, “he played pool and poker passingly to badly; chess too.” Rather did Newman prefer bridge, says Levy, spending down time on sets “working out bridge hands silently in his head.”

Such evidence from his films is indeed ample, with the aforementioned poker scenes from Cool Hand Luke and The Sting easily the most memorable.

As the stubborn, intrepid inmate in Cool Hand Luke, it’s a game of five-card stud that helps Newman’s Luke earn a certain status among the other prisoners, as well as his nickname. In the hand, several disinterested-and-thus-super-strong-appearing raises from Luke ultimately force his opponent to fold his “pair of Savannahs” (or sevens), at which point Luke reveals his king-high. Or, as observer Dragline (George Kennedy) gleefully crows, “a hand full of nothing.”

“Yeah, well,” says Luke, pausing just a beat while opening a bottle, “sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” In just three minutes, Luke’s complicated character is comprehensively defined both to the other prisoners and to us via a simple hand of poker.

The Sting found Newman teamed with Robert Redford as a pair of Depression-era grifters out to score revenge on a large scale against a hated crime boss named Lonnegan. Along the way, the twisty, surprise-filled plot places Newman's Gondorff on a cross-country train across the poker table from their enemy in a private, high-stakes game.

Playing five-card draw, the villain Lonnegan has a deck prepared to ensure Gondorff receives quad treys versus his own four nines. But Gondorff has an extra deck himself from which to draw cards, and when the betting concludes, he is the one who surprisingly turns over the best hand -- four jacks -- to the disbelief of Lonnegan. “What was I supposed to do?” says a fuming Lonnegan afterwards. “Call him for cheating better than me in front of the others?”

There are other Newman films in which poker makes an appearance, including Hud (1963), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), and Nobody’s Fool (1994).

Adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, Hud finds Newman as the irascible title character, a woman-chasing man in his mid-30s growing increasingly uncomfortable with a life working on his father’s cattle farm. A family drama in which Newman plays an antagonist pitted against his father and nephew, relationships are further complicated by the presence of their housekeeper, Alma, played by Patricia Neal in an Oscar-winning performance.

Midway through the film comes a sexually-charged meeting between Hud and Alma during which she explains how her ex-husband was a gambler whom she now suspects is probably working as a dealer in Reno or Las Vegas. In fact, Alma has just come from a poker game herself where she left a winner. Hud asks her “how much you take the boys for tonight,” her ability as a player clearly increasing his fascination with her.

While Newman doesn’t play poker in Hud, he does in another western, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). Though loosely based on a true story, the strange, uneven film plays out like a fantasy with a sequence of oddball episodes featuring Newman’s eccentric Bean surrounded by a cast of oddballs.

As an outlaw Bean stops in a frontier town where he is robbed and nearly killed. He soon exacts bloody revenge, then appoints himself the “judge” of the town where he eventually surrounds himself with marshals, a mayor, and others amenable to his idiosyncratic rule. In a sense, Bean is a Don Quixote-like figure, living in a world of his own imagination and successfully persuading others to do the same.

The judge frequently holds court over poker games, said by one of the marshals who narrates part of the story as having “had as much to do with winning the West as Colts .45 or the Prairie schooner.” Indeed, poker is described as “more a religion, than a game,” with Bean believing himself “a past master.”

That said, the games shown in the film serve mainly to show Bean to be a losing player, though nonetheless confirm his authority over his dusty kingdom. For example, after losing a hand to one of his marshals, Whorehouse Lucky Jim, the Judge immediately charges him $25 for the next beer he orders.

“That ain’t sportin’,” complains Jim. “What is a man supposed to do?” “Start losing or quit drinking,” declares Bean.

One last poker game precedes a final battle between Bean and a rival to his authority. As if to foreshadow the gunplay to come, the players use bullets for chips. “I open for a .38,” says one. “I call the .38 and raise you two .45s.” It perhaps goes without saying that when the end comes for Bean his demise is reported thusly: “the judge cashed in his chips.”

Finally, Newman again found himself at a poker table in Nobody’s Fool (1994), a smart, occasionally moving film that probably deserves a wider audience. There Newman plays yet another against-the-grain type in Sully Sullivan, a freelance construction worker struggling to get by in wintry upstate New York.

Sully hates Carl Roebuck (Bruce Willis), owner of Tip Top Construction, but is forced to take work from him. The pair butt heads at the poker table, too, where Carl taunts Sully by calling him “the only guy I know still dumb enough to believe in luck.” Sully has a response for a man who inherited his business from his father: “I used to believe in brains and hard work ’til I met you.”

Whether by luck or otherwise, Carl beats Sully in their game, and appears to be beating him in life, too, having married the beautiful Toby (Melanie Griffith) -- with whom Sully openly flirts -- though Carl is cheating on her with a succession of secretaries.

Meanwhile, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays force Sully to consider whether he ought to try to amend what has been a life as a neglectful father and grandfather, with the subsequent development of that primary plot providing both an absorbing story and opportunity for Newman to shine in a particularly well-fitting role.

Sully gets another crack at Carl in a later poker game, by which point his change in character has taken place. Things go better for him there, but when others mention his luck turning, he insists “luck has nothing to do with it.”

There’s at least one other film of Newman’s in which poker does take place, although only in passing -- The Hustler (1961). Nonetheless, in his 1977 book of essays Total Poker, David Spanier provocatively suggests The Hustler to be “the best film about poker,” even though “it isn’t about poker at all.”

Pointing out how the story of the pool-player Fast Eddie constitutes “probably the definitive statement about winning and losing in games, if not in life,” Spanier believes the movie to provide cinema’s most cogent commentary on poker without even focusing on the actual game.

“Although The Hustler is about pool, its lessons apply just as strongly, indeed precisely, to poker,” argues Spanier.

Can’t really blame Spanier too much for thinking of poker while watching a Paul Newman movie, even one in which poker isn’t being played. After all, the guy always seemed to have cards in his hand.

Winning, Losing, Wanting to Be Great

Yesterday I rewatched The Hustler, the 1961 film starring Paul Newman, George C. Scott, Piper Laurie, and Jackie Gleason that many consider to be one of the all-time best gambling films ever made.

Some even go so far as to consider The Hustler a great poker film, despite the fact that it really contains very little poker at all -- just a couple of incidental shots, really, of a game being played. The central game is pool, of course, and while I can’t say I’ve seen a ton of pool-related films, I imagine The Hustler heads most lists of the best films in which that game is central.

But the movie really does give poker players a lot to think about. In fact, in Total Poker (1977), David Spanier, in his chapter about “Movies,” idiosyncratically promotes the film as “the best film about poker” in his estimation for the way it depicts winning and losing and the struggles and challenges often faced at the tables. The Poker Grump did a nifty job a while back explaining the many “poker lessons” in The Hustler, too. Check out his post here.

It had been a few years since I’d seen The Hustler. Definitely a riveting, well-acted story with a lot of “hard-boiled” elements. And like I say, and as both Spanier and the Grump argue, the “poker” stuff is all there right on the surface. There were a couple of other elements of the film that stood out for me on this viewing, though. Or a couple of characters, rather.

Newman as Fast Eddie, Scott as the slimy Bert Gordon, Myron McCormick as Eddie’s partner, Charlie -- all are certainly great performances and well-wrought characters. But also compelling are Sarah, Eddie’s girl, played by Laurie, and, of course, Minnesota Fats, portrayed by Gleason.

Sarah reminds me a lot of certain troubled female characters populating novels by Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and the like. Her ailments, addictions, and neuroses seem to mirror Eddie’s own considerable flaws, a fact which I’m sure many who’ve analyzed the film have pointed out many times over.

Fats, meanwhile, stands in sharp contrast to Eddie, a man utterly confident, comfortable, and content. He represents a figure Eddie wishes he could be but cannot. For Eddie, “the Fat man” is larger than life, a kind of ideal player who has all of the things -- ability, style, and most importantly, character -- Eddie lacks.

But Fats is human, too. He can lose. He’s not really larger than life. We can (I think) “play” like he does, given enough experience and commitment to whatever game it is we choose to play.

I love Gleason’s look there during the final scene as he listens to Gordon and Eddie arguing with each other over both the money and the meaning of everything that has transpired. Been there. Done that. He’s Phil Ivey enduring a horrendously bad beat at the hands of an amateur. It’s an inspiring image, I think, upon which Eddie -- amid all of the emotions and disturbance of his argument with Gordon -- cannot help but comment before leaving.

“Fat man,” he says. “You shoot a great game of pool.”

It’s what we all want to do. We want to win, sure. And we don’t like losing. But really, more than anything, we all want to be great.

Breakfast and Poker

Good morning, all. Sleep well?

We are presently moving through a unit called “The Culture of Poker” in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class. After talking about all the cheating that went on in the 19th century (and well into the 20th), then the relatively “square” games of the latter decades of the 20th and today, we’re turning our attention to the poker scenes in California and Las Vegas over the next few meetings.

One of our readings in this part of the course is a chapter from David Spanier’s 1977 Total Poker titled “Breakfast in Vegas,” a neat sketch of the scene there circa mid-1970s that also includes a brief look at Gardena, too.

Spanier provides a colorful, thoughtful portrait of Vegas in this brief chapter, focusing in particular on the morning, his “favorite time of day in Vegas.”

There are at least a couple of reasons why Spanier says he likes breakfast in Vegas so much. One is how the nonstop, 24-7 nature of the city produces a kind of wonder in the visiting Englishman who can “eat his breakfast, saunter through the door, and whamm! there are one hundred games going on all over town just waiting for him.”

Another reason why he likes the early morning hours in Vegas is somewhat less specific to the actual city, I think. It’s that feeling that we all have experienced upon first waking -- when the entire day lies before us -- that we still have time to accomplish a great deal, that the possibilities of the day are at their least limited.

Such a feeling gets accentuated somewhat there in the gambling mecca, of course, as Spanier explains:

“The gamblers sip their coffee, mentally run over the remaining dollar bills in their wallets, figure out maybe it’s not so bad after all. If the dice had just rolled a couple of times the other way, if they had doubled down a couple of times more, they would be back to almost even. Yeah! They take a second cup of coffee and begin to slide toward optimism.”

It’s a new day. A kind of rebirth, you might say. And anything can happen.

Speaking of breakfast, I am also reading the new poker strategy book by Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt and Paul Christopher Hoppe awesomely-titled Don’t Listen to Phil Hellmuth, which I’ll be reviewing soon over on Betfair Poker. Came across an interesting passage there in which breakfast and poker were linked in a different way.

As you might have heard, the book is organized around debunking a lot of commonly-repeated advice (some uttered by Hellmuth over the years), the purpose being to show how such bromides are either outdated, overly simplistic, misleading, or just plain wrong. A nifty idea for a book, and especially enjoyable for someone like me who has read a lot of the books that contain those ideas to which Schmidt and Hoppe are responding.

One of the “myths” or occasionally-recommended bits of advice the authors consider is the one that says “make all your preflop raises the same size” so as not to convey to your opponents any potential information about the strength of your hand.

You can imagine how Schmidt and Hoppe poke holes in this idea. I’m not going to rehearse all of their points here but will say they all serve the larger purpose of always keeping one’s mind open to alternate lines preflop. Rather than go on “auto-pilot” here (say the authors), think about the specific situation and what play might serve one’s purposes the best when planning the hand.

They end the chapter with a nifty simile, I think, that compares such active, critical thinking before the flop to starting the day with a nutritious, health-improving meal.

"Overly static preflop play can lead to overly static postflop play," they explain. "Before you know it, you can be auto-piloting ABC poker on all four streets. Starting your imagination and paying attention preflop is like eating a good breakfast. It gets your hand started on the right track."

Well put, I’d say. Hmm... think I’ll go fix myself a bowl of cereal and maybe eat a piece of fruit. The day awaits!

The Unwanted Call (On Bluffing)

Was playing a bit yesterday (my usual pot-limit Omaha game, $50 buy-in) when I was interrupted by a phone call. The land line. Basically no one calls the land line other than telemarketers or perhaps the dentist reminding me of an appointment. I answered, though didn’t interrupt my playing to do so.

“Hello?” Nearly ten seconds pass. Then the recording starts, an excited voice saying, with urgency...

“Don’t hang up!”

You can guess what happened next.

For the next few hands I found myself wondering what percentage of those who hear that greeting actually follow its directive and continue to listen. Has to be mighty small, I thought. What a poor strategy.

After a little while I realized that at one of the two tables I had going I had fallen into an interesting bit of cagey back-and-forthing with another player. We’d bet each other out of a few hands, and by the way he was playing I could tell he probably wasn’t always waiting for a hand to place his bets. I knew I wasn’t. I’d bluffed him out of a couple of medium-sized pots, and, like I say, I’m sure he probably had succeeded in doing the same to me.

There are some who never play PLO or who perhaps are novice players who do not realize how big of a role bluffing plays in the game. Believing that someone always must have the nuts, some feel bluffing is rarely (or never) a viable option.

But that is wrong, of course. There are many, many situations in PLO that call for bluffing, and indeed, if one doesn’t realize that, one is either going to lose consistently or (perhaps, if one is patient enough, and sufficiently lucky) win at very, very slow clip. As David Spanier writes in the opening line of his 1977 book Total Poker, “Bluff is the essence of poker.” (More on Spanier’s book here.)

The art of bluffing is complex, to be sure, and aside from determining when the circumstances are correct for bluffing, sizing one’s bets successfully is of crucial importance. In pot-limit games, you have a predetermined range of possible bets from which to choose, from the minimum (one big blind) to the maximum (the size of the pot). The fact is, bluffs come in all possible sizes. Whatever is the right amount to achieve your goal -- i.e., to get the other player to fold the better hand -- is obviously determined by a host of factors.

That little interruption got me thinking how in certain situations, bluffs tend to operate a lot like that phone call. A limped pot. Flop comes , an early position player bets pot, and the button just calls. The turn is the . The early position player again bets pot, and the button again calls. The river is the . The early position player checks, and the button bets just under half the pot.

Because of several factors, including the pair’s history playing together, the early position player folds his flopped middle set. The button scoops the pot with -- nothing but a busted straight draw. The early position player saw that “value bet” on the river and heard “Don’t hang up!” Then he did what most do when hearing that. He hung up.

Of course, at these modest limits, many tend not to hang up with their flopped set in that situation. So you recalibrate the message, trying to size the bet in such a way so as to encourage the response you desire. Probably best to keep the bluffs on the small side and the bets with real hands bigger, if you can manage it. But like I say, bluffs necessarily come in all sizes, shaped according to the circumstances.

Indeed, bluffing helps remind us, as Spanier says in his elaboration on the subject, “there is really no such thing as a good hand in poker, only good situations.”

Maybe some telemarketer will figure out a different way to keep the suckers on the line, perhaps by calling out “Hang up the phone immediately!” Like a wild, incongruous pot-sized river shove, that.

Who could resist the call?