The man they elected, by unanimous decision, was Benny’s old friend Johnny Moss.Ībout three dozen gamblers showed up for that first occasion.
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.
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So supporting him now that he had set up shop in Las Vegas was a patriotic thing for high-rolling Texans to do.īinion 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. 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. 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. 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. I realized this the first time I went to Binion’s Horseshoe, in 1981. 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. 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. I love it, of course, because I love the game, but somehow it doesn’t feel right. I play along with them when I need a break from work (which is often) and I watch it on television whenever I can. 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 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. 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 took to the game with a passion and have been playing it ever since.
It was as near as a nice English boy without a horse could get to being a cowboy. 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. 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.
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