Amarillo Slim Memoirs

Imagine shooting the breeze with Shaq and Kobe at the NBA Finals or grabbing a cup of joe at the World Series with Derek Jeter and Roger Clemens.

What separates the World Series of Poker from major sporting events is that the stars are accessible. At Binion's Horseshoe this year, I couldn't seem to remove myself from Amarillo Slim. We got to talking so much that we're going to work together on writing his memoirs.

To my knowledge, Thomas "Amarillo Slim" Preston is the only person ever to have four Hall of Fame inductions – and he'll soon have five in September, when he'll be inducted into the Legends of Texas. There's the Poker Hall of Fame, the Binion's Horseshoe Hall of Fame, the Seniors Hall of Fame, and the Legends of Nevada.

Knowing that there's no way he'll be able to remember everything about his life, I'd like to enlist the help of Card Player readers to send me their favorite stories about Amarillo Slim. If they make their way into the book, you'll be duly acknowledged and will receive an autographed copy of the book from Slim when it's published.

To get the ball rolling, Slim has this treasure to share:

If there's anything I'll argue about, I'll either bet on it or shut up. And since it's not very becoming for a cowboy to be arguing, I've made a few wagers in my day, but I wouldn't call myself a hustler. You see, neighbor, I never go looking for a sucker. I look for a champion and make a sucker out of him.

I knew that I wasn't going to get no amateur to play me in ping-pong, but Bobby Riggs, the champion tennis player – now that's a man who might be interested in doing some speculating. Hell, if a man don't think he's hustling you, you got no shot to get him to take a bet. All trappers don't wear fur caps.

I agreed to play him with the stipulation that I got to choose the paddle. You can imagine that he was a little surprised when I handed him a skillet. Hell, I could have beaten that boy 21-0, but I wanted him to feel like he had a chance. I like to leave a good taste with people I beat. That's what a good friend meant when he told me one time, "You can shear a sheep many times, Slim, but you can skin him only once." And just as I was collecting a few dollars from this gentleman, I was already thinking about how I was going to shear the next one.

Like I knew it would, word spread throughout the country, and on my next trip to Tennessee, wouldn't you know that the world champion table tennis player from Taiwan was there waiting for me. And while I could play a fair game of ping-pong with a skillet, I'm not one for speculating.

I knew he had been practicing with that skillet and had a suitcase full of money, and as you can imagine, he wanted to play that night. But I knew if I waited, word would spread that Slim himself was about to get fleeced. I wanted them to gather as many people and as much money as they could, and give that man even more time to practice with that skillet.

A few months before, by accident, I was at the KFDA radio station in Amarillo, and my buddy Wendell Cain and I were playing ping-pong. Just as I finished my Coke, I reached down and hit the ping-pong ball, and it went over the net. I thought, how the hell did I hit that over the net? Wendell asked if I could do it again, and I started trying, but couldn't do it. You see, there's only an area of a one-sixteenth of an inch that would make the ball go over that net. I practiced and practiced, and when I made that bet in Tennessee, I knew that Coke bottle was going to make me a boatload of money.

They had eleven private jets hit that runway. They brought enough hundred dollar bills to burn up thirty wet mules. When I handed him the Coke bottle, that boy looked like he couldn't swallow boiled okra. As far as I was concerned, he was just another champion that I turned into a sucker.

I'm looking forward to hearing more stories about Slim. Please send them to [email protected]. And unless you hate money, please don't make a bet with Amarillo Slim.

Editor's note: Greg Dinkin is the author of The Poker MBA: Winning in Business No Matter What Cards You're Dealt (www.thepokermba.com); see his ad in this issue. He also is the co-founder of Venture Literary (www.ventureliterary.com), where he works with writers to find publishers for their books and producers for their screenplays.