My Dallas No-Limit Experience

I played my first hand of no-limit hold'em in Las Vegas in 1978. It was love at first sight. I had an excellent hot streak starting out, winning 20 sessions in a row. I am fortunate to be able to pick up new poker forms very quickly.

For the first couple of years after I learned how to play no-limit, I was living in Detroit, which did not offer the kind of poker I wanted to play. It was only natural that I wanted to move someplace where I could play regularly. After taking a road trip to Houston, I decided that was the place I wanted to be full time. Accordingly, I took another trip to Texas shortly afterward, in the fall of 1980, in order to locate a place to live. I stopped in Dallas to check out that city - and never got to Houston.

The person mainly responsible for my deciding to move to Dallas was Bill Smith, who later won the world championship. Bill told me he had moved from Houston to Dallas because the games were better and the rake was cheaper, and he generously took me to various games in the Dallas area. I decided to respect his judgment, left Detroit, and rented an apartment near Central Expressway and Meadow Lane.

Dallas is a nice city. It has winters that are much more mild than Michigan's, and lots of friendly people. We had a no-limit hold'em game someplace just about every day. The action was at the Amvets Club for a while, but then it shifted to private games at someone's home. Delbert Chambers had a game a couple of times a week, but the biggest and best games were at Louisiana Charlie's. His wife, Lydia, was a superb cook, and there are few things better than eating steak and playing in a jam-up no-limit game.

The regular lineup at Charlie's was pretty awesome (although we had some donating drop-ins). Here is a glimpse of the regulars: Charlie himself put a lot of action in the game. He was a bulldozer, and when he got hot, he won big - and sometimes he lost big. Bill Smith hardly ever missed a session. Except for a month when he was on the wagon, he was downing beers. He was a lamb at the slaughter when he got real drunk, but before he got to that point, he was a very dangerous player. Bob Brooks was a man who had made a lot of money booking in Alaska, then wisely invested it during the '40s in Caesars Palace stock. He was a solid player. "Point" had moved from a town of that name to Dallas. He was an excellent player, solid and tricky. Ken Smith was a businessman with a pipeline company and a bookstore. I had known him as a chess player before ever dueling with him in poker. When he was in his prime, he was the best chess player in Texas. We sometimes played speed chess at five minutes a game while waiting for the poker game to start. Ken laid me 2-to-1 odds, and we were pretty even at that spot. He knew poker very well and was a fine tournament player, but his lack of discipline stopped him from being a winner in the money games. The biggest winner in the game was Bill Bond, who owned an insurance company but spent most of his time playing poker. When he entered a pot and checked to you, that often meant he had a bigger hand than when Bill Smith bet you!

One of the players in our game has had more stories told about him than practically anyone else in poker. He was Everett Goolsby, one of poker's great personalities. Everett was capable of playing very good poker when he wasn't angry. When he was hot, he could do anything. One time, in Las Vegas, he lost a big pot to Rusty, a wild player from Washington. He went to the cage and came back with 10 grand. The first time Rusty raised a pot a hundred bucks and Everett was heads up, he moved in with the whole 10 grand. Rusty thought a long time and folded. Everett showed him two tens - a bigger hand than I thought he had. A few years later, Everett turned to booking, and made some real big money very fast. By the time the law caught up with him, he had bathroom fixtures made of solid gold - or so he said.

From time to time, people from other places came to Charlie's game and joined us. Buck Buchanan and Speedy Myers were frequent guests. Bob Hooks dropped in from Lafayette on occasion - but never during football season. Hugh Briscoe of Denton was a very welcome guest. A couple of years after I had been in Dallas, T.J. Cloutier and Manning Briggs moved to town. By that time, I had taken up pot-limit Omaha, so I did not play that many sessions with the new arrivals.

I still have lots of poker hands from back then etched into my memory. The luckiest hand I ever held was against Bob Brooks. I was in the big blind with the K 6, and flopped a flush. I do not remember how the betting went, but Bob and I got all in on the flop for about a grand apiece. I did not have the best hand, but by the time I woke up to this, nearly all of my money was in. The dealer burned and turned twice, and it came club-club. Lo and behold, after all the cards were dealt, my 6 gave me the winning hand with a straight flush!

One hand I remember well, I was not even in the pot at all. Some fumble-finger was dealing and the second card to Ken Smith flashed. "That's an exposed card," I said. "It's a queen, and it flashed."

"No, it didn't," said Kenny, "and it's not a queen." No one else said anything.

I knew that Kenny had a pair of queens, or he would have turned the card in. The flop came with a queen as the high card on board. "Now, he's got top set," I said, disgusted at the ethical breach, and not wanting it to be rewarded.

There was a new guy in the game, and he had flopped a set on this deal. He wasn't going to let Bob Ciaffone talk him out of playing the best hand he'd had all day. He raised Kenny back all in, failed to buy the caser, and lost all of his money. That's what I call a very stubborn poker player.

I moved to Vegas in late 1983 to play in the delicious pot-limit Omaha games with "The Little Doc," who did more to popularize the game by simply sitting down at the table than I did by writing a book about it.

Despite moving away from Dallas, I had warm feelings about the place - and still have them. It would be hard to find a better education about how to play no-limit hold'em than could be found in that city - just ask Mr. Cloutier.

Editor's note: Bob Ciaffone's new book, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, co-authored with Jim Brier, is available now (332 pages, $25 plus $5 shipping and handling). This work and his other poker books, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Holdem Poker, can be ordered through Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons. E-mail [email protected] or call (989) 792-0884. His website is www.diamondcs.net/~thecoach, where you can download Robert's Rules of Poker for free.