Winnin' a Cardroom, Losin' to Deuces

After Titanic Thompson and I closed our joint in Tyler in 1963, I returned to my home base in Dallas, and from there I took my game on the road, fadin' the white line all across the Southern poker circuit. I've played with more poker players in Texas than you can fit into the panhandle. It wasn't until 1972 that I opened my second joint. I got it the easy way - no, I didn't inherit it, I won it in a poker game.

I went to play poker one evening at the AmVets club on Greenville Avenue in Dallas near the downtown area. It was just a ratty-looking place that was located upstairs above a carpet business, but it was big. The club hadn't been doing much business, and it was empty except for me and the owner, so we started playing head-up no-limit poker. About the biggest thing I'd ever won in a poker game was my horse, Ace, but by morning I had won something a little bit larger - I won the entire joint from him! That caused me to stick a little closer to home than I usually did.

At that time I was on the road a lot between Dallas and Houston gambling, playing in good poker games, doing some hustling, and making side trips to Brenham, Texas, playing poker with Broomcorn and all those guys. I had just returned from Houston, where I had won a whole lot of money playing craps. With all that craps money in my pocket, I paid "Big E," who owned both the downstairs carpet business and the building, to install cherry red carpet in my newly won club. Then, I painted it and built a big bar and a nice kitchen in it - spent about $30,000 fixing it up. I had some people in with me on the deal (a couple of them were army veterans) who helped me run it. We worked in shifts, because we were open 24 hours a day and I couldn't be there all the time. We installed an iron door with a buzzer on it, and nobody ever bothered us. It wasn't long before we had a helluva no-limit hold'em game going. Everybody in the country came to play in it - Bob Brooks, Carl Biggs, Everett Goulsby, Ken "Top Hat" Smith, and others. We also had two limit hold'em games going, and, boy, business was good!

AmVets is a veterans organization on the same order as the Red Men. The reason that people got Red Men and AmVets charters was because you could take a drop legally only if you had a fraternal charter. Your reason for taking the drop, you explained to the officials, was to support the fraternal organization, make charitable contributions, pay the rent, and so on. You didn't need to be a veteran to get an AmVets charter, but we always got it in somebody's name who was a veteran, because it looked better that way.

One of the old-timers we played with was Lawrence Herring. Everybody always called him "Broomcorn," so lots of people never knew his real name. He was a famous player in Texas back when Johnny Moss was in his heyday. Broomcorn used to play in the big game in Odessa at the Golden Rooster, and usually ordered two beers at one time. His "hand" was 6-3 - didn't make any difference to him what anybody else had, he was likely to go all the way to the river with it. Broomcorn used to play at my place in Tyler, and was there the night that Sarge broke all of my players at Georgia skin.

My first encounter with Broomcorn was at a lowball game in Brenham that I'd heard about. I drove 250 miles to play in it with about $500 in my pocket. Martin Cramer ran the place; he had a big Vegas-style dice game and the lowball game. Hubert Watson, Hugh Shoemaker, Broomcorn, and a bunch of others were there. I bought in for the $500, and about three or four hands into the game, I was dealt something like two kings and two queens. Broomcorn was first to act and drew two cards. Hell, I wasn't gonna draw, so I stood pat with my two pair - and bet the rest of the money I had in front of me, about $300. He was pretty cagey, and studied around and studied around. "I smell snow," he said, and called me with two deuces. That broke me.

I've got a thousand other stories about the old days, but I'll save a few of 'em for next time.

Editor's note: Cowboy Wolford is the author of Cowboys, Gamblers & Hustlers, a true account of his adventures on the rodeo and poker circuits in the old days. Visit www.pokerbooks.com for more details, or e-mail the cowboy himself at [email protected].