Bad Beats and Warning Bells

After my professional football career in Canada was finished, I moved back to the Bay Area in California and started a business with my father and brother-in-law. We called it Bets Quality Foods, and our slogan was, "Your Best Bet in Quality Foods." I worked 16 hours a day taking orders, loading trucks, and delivering products to customers. We later merged with another wholesale food company but they stole us blind and our business went down the tubes. To get past this bad beat and keep bread on the table, I took a job delivering bread for Toscana, and eventually wound up as the night manager for Wonder Bread in San Francisco. Then in 1976, I headed for Texas, where I worked as a derrick man on the oil rigs. On my off days, I played poker. Pretty soon, I was making more money at poker than I was in the oil fields. I'd been freezing my butt off on the rigs anyway, so I moved into playing poker full time.

I played no-limit hold'em in Longview, Texas, and pot-limit hold'em in Shreveport, Louisiana, 51 miles away. I hadn't played much hold'em before that, because we played mostly lowball at the Cameo Club in Palo Alto, California, where I played when I lived in California. The few times that I had played hold'em were at the club across the street. The club's owner tried three times to start a hold'em game, but the police came in and busted him every time.

The games in Shreveport were so good that I moved there to play poker every day at the Turf Club. The games were much smaller than we're playing now, but on Sundays they would have a big game run by an old gambler named Harlan Dean, who was well-known in all the gambling places. He used to be George Barnes' partner in the bridge tournaments in Vegas, and he was one of the original hold'em players. I ended up selling the chips and sometimes I went broke. Harlan would call up on a Sunday and ask, "Well, we're broke, are we, ol' partner?" And I'd say, "Well, Mr. Dean, I know you're not broke, but I am." Then he'd say, "Well, you come on by today and I'll give you some chips." And if he was losing in the game, I could have the chip rack, because he didn't want the game to end. That's when I started playing real serious poker.

While I was living in Shreveport, I found out about a real good game in Dallas that was run by a man I will call "The Big Texan." It was a $5-$10-$25 no-limit hold'em game with either a $500 or a $1,000 buy-in. I used to drive the 200 miles from Shreveport three days a week to play in that game. The first 12 times that I played in it, I won. On my next visit, the Big Texan said, "I'm dropping the latch on you. If you don't give me half your play, you can't play here anymore." I gave him half my action for my next 10 sessions, and I won all 10 times.

Then one day, out of the blue, the Big Texan said to me, "I'm out today." That rang a warning bell in my head. I knew that something was going on, that something was wrong. There were two new players in the game that I'd never seen before, so I bought in for just $500 in chips, played for about an hour, hardly ever got into a pot, broke even, and quit.

That warning bell can be pretty important when you're on the road as much as I was. I was playing down in Baton Rouge one time, where everything closed at 2 a.m. But if you were hungry, you could go across the bridge after closing time, where there was an all-night dance hall and a restaurant that served great boiled crawfish on big tin platters. Right next to the dance hall, I noticed a door with a peephole in it. I looked through it and saw that there was a poker game going on, so I knocked on the door.

"Looks like a helluva game you're playing in there," I said to the bouncer. "I've just got one question to ask you: If I happen to get lucky and win the money, can I get out of here with it?"

"In the five years I've been doing this job," he answered, "you're the first one who's ever asked me that question. I would suggest that you don't play." Naturally, I left, and settled for a crawfish dinner instead.

Editor's note: T.J. Cloutier is the co-author of Championship Hold'em, the latest in the Championship series of poker books. He and Tom McEvoy are the co-authors of Championship Omaha and Championship No-Limit & Pot-Limit Hold'em. Visit the web at www.pokerbooks.com for more details.