Billy Baxter: Gambler Extraordinaire

It's 8:30 a.m., a couple of days into the 2005 World Series of Poker. On the outskirts of Las Vegas, in a bucolic neighborhood full of upscale, gated communities, Billy Baxter eats a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. He sits on a plush sofa in the comfortable living room of his home, with a picture-window backdrop that provides a view of his manicured backyard, complete with glistening swimming pool and gazebo. At 65 years of age, Baxter, a father of three and husband for 30 years, is the picture of a successful gambler. He's a crack sports bettor, winner of seven World Series of Poker bracelets, and ballsy enough to have taken on the United States government. Baxter successfully fought to change a tax regulation that deemed that money won playing poker was unearned income, just like money won in a lottery (that is, the result of a lucky occurrence) and therefore subjected to an unusually high tax. Over the years, Baxter has shuttled between Vegas and his home state of Georgia, retired once (but couldn't stay away), managed a clutch of world-class boxers, raked in millions of dollars, and emerged as one of the savviest, classiest guys on the scene.



Card Player: You started playing World Series events back in 1975, when the fields were microscopic compared to today. What do you think of the massive numbers of people who signed up to play in this year's tournaments?



Billy Baxter: I like it. One of the silliest things I've heard is that the entry fees should be raised because there are so many people playing, and that makes it too hard to win. I see a large field as an opportunity for anyone who considers himself a good player. In eliminating weak players, which is what you do by creating a bigger entry fee, you knock the value out of the pool. If you're a good player, you'll get through some of those fields, and your skills will come out. That's when you see who's capable of winning. Being able to close the deal is a big thing – in any sporting event. I think the value is in letting all these people play. They shouldn't close the championship out at 6,600. Add another first day and have 8,800. Give the first-place finisher $20 million and $10 million for second. I like the thought of that. If they can find 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 great hold'em players, God bless 'em.



CP: What do you think of rebuy tournaments?



BB: The same thing. People criticize them. They say that it enables the players with more money to buy more times. What it really does is allow bad players to spend more money, and it gives good players a chance to win more money. I play my stack like it's not a rebuy and watch people shoot off their cash.



CP: Your specialty is deuce-to-seven no-limit one-draw, a game at which you've won five World Series bracelets. How'd you get into playing it?



BB: All the big action used to be around deuce-to-seven. That is where the money was. Being a person in the business of making money, I stuck with deuce-to-seven and boycotted hold'em for a lot of years. That comes under the heading of good business.



CP: What is it that you like about the game?



BB: Deuce-to-seven, in my opinion, is the ultimate bluffing game – and I'm good in that situation. What's the term they use? Mano a mano? There is not nearly as much bluffing in hold'em. But in deuce-to-seven, you only have one draw. That lessens the likelihood of a guy improving his hand. So, you have to bluff – and you have to read bluffs. In other games, you have lots of streets in which to get a read on a guy. Here, you have just one opportunity, and that makes the bluff more critical. If you play no-limit, like we used to, with a $500 ante, and $1,000 and $2,000 blinds, your first bring-in is for $8,000. Someone plays back and it's 20 more. Then, if someone moves in on you, it's the rest of the stack – $20,000, $60,000, $80,000, whatever they got in front of them. When you got 9-8 and you're pat, and there's $30,000 or $40,000 in there and someone bets $100,000, well, you're put to the guess. And it happens all the time in deuce. That's where you have to have some balls.



CP: You don't see it spread very often these days.



BB: But when it is played, it's played for very high stakes – although they put a cap on it. That's one of those new things that I don't understand. (He hesitated for a beat.) Actually, I think I do understand.



CP: Yeah?



BB: I think the people who lose all the money like it better with a cap. And they probably get their way because they lose all the money.



CP: You obviously have no altitude sickness when it comes to high stakes. Did you grow up with a lot of gambling at home in Augusta, Georgia?



BB: Not at all. My father worked for the government, running a general store on a military base. My mother was the manager of an insurance company. The summer of my 14th year, she took me out of town with her when she sold insurance. I helped out by soliciting over the phone and setting up appointments, but I didn't go on the sales calls. She'd drop me off downtown to go to the picture shows. Well, I discovered that all of these little towns had pool halls. I started going to those places instead of to the movies, and I got pretty good at shooting pool. I won enough money that by the time I was 16, in 1956, I had about $5,000 in a bank account. Well, one day my grandmother found the bank book. She and my parents wanted to know where the money came from. I had to tell them that I was playing pool. By that time, I was playing every day in Augusta and beating everyone in town. My mother told the poolroom owner that she'd get his place shut down if he let me in there again.



CP: Did you stop going?



BB: I couldn't. I had a knack for it, and I was making money, and I loved the competition. After turning 18, though, I started frequenting this local tavern. The guys there would play poker and gin rummy and things, and beat me out of whatever I had on me. Then, I'd go to the poolroom and win money and come back to the tavern and lose. This went on for a year and a half – until the tide turned. Soon after, I moved up and started playing against business people. That's when I got my hands on some real money.



CP: Were there lots of underground gambling joints in Augusta?



BB: They had a real nice casino there, a place called the Paisley Club. There were Las Vegas dealers, roulette, craps, blackjack, and the best food in town. I went down there one night and the guy who owned the place asked me to play gin rummy with him. I beat him out of $40,000. Back then, in the late 1950s, that was a lot of money. It more than doubled my bankroll.



CP: You left there with the cash?



BB: No. He realized that I played poker with all the best people in town – a country club crowd that included doctors, lawyers, engineers, and such – and he asked me to go into business with him. He offered me half his casino for the $40,000.



CP: Sounds like a pretty sweet setup for a college-age kid.



BB: Well, that partner of mine, he turned out to be a degenerate gambler. Every night, I won his half of the casino profits, and eventually I became sole owner of the Paisley Club. I had quit college and was out on my own, in my 20s, and doing really well. But then the sheriff came in and told me that this had been going on long enough. He said, "Either you close your place down or we're gonna close y'all down." I shut it down that day and got heavy into the sports betting and bookmaking. I was very good at making lines.



CP: You eventually got busted for bookmaking, but it got even worse than that, right?



BB: A few years after closing the Paisley, I opened the craps, roulette, and blackjack just for the duration of the Masters golf tournament. I did it out on a big farm. And to make a long story short, two days into the Masters, on a Saturday night, the doors came down. In came the GBI, the FBI, local law enforcement, everybody. And I had just gotten engaged to my wife Julie.



CP: What did she make of all that?



BB: She knew I gambled, but I never brought her around it. Her grandfather was the coroner, her father was the county commissioner, the whole family was very active in politics, and I wasn't popular in their house.



CP: Did you and the future Mrs. Baxter have a honeymoon in Vegas?



BB: Actually, we went to Hawaii and came back through Las Vegas. We stopped at the old Dunes Hotel in 1975 and wound up living there for nine months. I went downstairs every day and played gin and poker and whatever. I became acquainted with everyone very quickly: Major Riddle, Sid Wyman, and Puggy and Doyle. Chip wasn't there yet. We played a lot of deuce-to-seven, sometimes for three days straight, sitting there with cold towels around our necks to keep from dozing off.



CP: Did you have any inkling as to how you'd do against those guys?



BB: I didn't know, but that's one reason to get into a bigger pond. My first year here, I won the deuce-to-seven tournament. Then, I finished second the next year and won it again the year after that. We were out here for a couple of years when they got to calling me about that gambling problem in Georgia. I couldn't get out of it. So, I went back and did nine months and 21 days in the state penitentiary.



CP: So, you had already been sentenced to a prison term down South, and you were waiting for the appeals to run their course. Under those circumstances, I can't believe you were able to focus on poker.



BB: It was tough to play with that hanging over me. I had all those problems, but I fit in here and started winning right off the bat. I felt like I had gone to heaven. The games were so good in those days that it was unbelievable. Frankly, my biggest mistake was getting into that trouble. If I hadn't, I would have probably opened a casino in Las Vegas. I already had a seven-figure bankroll at the time. So, I had the means.



CP: How tough was it to be in jail?



BB: I handled things OK, but it wasn't the place where you wanted to be. I wasn't on a chain gang with the guys holding rifles and dogs barking on the side of the road, but, being in the state penitentiary, I could have been. When I left Vegas [to go to prison], I weighed 205 pounds. Jack Binion and Doyle Brunson bet me $5,000 that I couldn't get down to 165. I worked at it real hard. Then, I got out and flew back to Las Vegas. We went to Binion's Horseshoe and they put me on the meat scale. I weighed 162 pounds. So, I got something good out of it.



CP: When you returned to Vegas, after doing time, was that when you first met Stu Ungar?



BB: No. The first time I met Stu, I was in the Dunes Hotel, right after my honeymoon. [His backers] brought him to my room and put him on a wooden Coca Cola crate, so he could get up to the table. He beat me out of $40,000 playing gin rummy.



CP: And you were quite confident about your gin game.



BB: I was a pretty good gin player, but I couldn't beat him. I'll tell you that.



CP: Did that mark the end of your playing gin with Stu Ungar?



BB: Actually, I played him some other times, and he never beat me again. I never gave him a chance. I got him to the point where he would deal. And we made all kinds of propositions on the deal. I figured out a way to make the game work for me. We played five or so times through the years. And he couldn't beat me under those conditions.



CP: Did you get him to play any lowball or deuce-to-seven?



BB: Stuey tried to play in our deuce game, but he didn't survive too good. Stuey was just a guy who liked to throw his money around to me. Whenever he had money, I would try to beat him out of it. That's what I did. And other than the first time I met him, I don't know about him ever beating me again. I beat him playing pool at the house here for $80,000 one night. I beat him up on sports. Whatever he wanted to do. He was not a successful gambler. He was a great gin player. Nobody could beat him. He was a very good no-limit hold'em player. But he wasn't a successful gambler.



CP: Isn't that the big difference, though, between the young players today and you and Doyle and those guys? Weren't you all a lot more willing to risk money because you just loved to gamble?



BB: I don't know who told you that. Maybe you got misled along the way, but it's not quite accurate. I never thought of myself as loving to gamble. I always thought about it as a way to make money. We gambled on everything, but we always fought to get the best of it. Doyle wouldn't gamble on anything, and neither would Puggy. Puggy wouldn't bet that fat meat was greasy unless he thought he had an edge. We looked for opportunities to get the best of it. We gambled with each other all the time. But both sides went in thinking they had the best of it. Our golf matches, for example, were really tight and they made us into better players. So, whenever we spread out and went against other people, we just chewed them up. It would be like the two best players playing on clay against each other every day. Then, they go up against weaker players and it's pretty much a slaughter. We sharpened ourselves up by gambling with each other.

(The telephone rang and Baxter took a call, getting into a discussion about some upcoming baseball games. His wife, Julie, had been sitting in on some of the interview, and she offered an entertaining recollection.)



JB: I'll tell you a funny story about a family vacation. Donald Trump invited us to go to Atlantic City for a fight and then up to New York for his 40th birthday party. It was going to be this wonderful trip for the family. We get on the airplane in Vegas, and all five of us [Julie, Billy, and their three kids] are in first-class. I'm by the window, and Bill is on the aisle. Who do you think is sitting across from Bill in the opposite aisle seat? It's Stu Ungar.

(Baxter hung up and smiled as he remembered the situation.)



BB: Stuey came to play gin on the plane. He said, "I'll entertain you on the way up."

Jb: I'm stupid. They have already arranged this, and I think we're on a family vacation. What I need to do now is move to another row, so he and Stu can play gin all the way across the country. Then, after we get to Atlantic City, Bill has to bankroll Stu.



BB: I beat him up pretty good on the plane.



CP: Did Stu Ungar go to Donald Trump's birthday party?



BB: I got him a ticket for the fight, but he didn't go to the party.



JB: Bill is an invited guest and he's gambling at the Trump casino. So, they send the three kids up to New York in their own limo with a police escort. We're right behind them in another limo. We're on the freeway, and a third limo pulls up beside us. Someone is hanging out a window, gesturing for us to pull over. Guess who it is.



BB: I played craps and everything on this trip. They comped me, so I gave them some play – and we beat them out of $160,000. Stuey won a bunch of money, too. He found out, some way or other, when we'd be leaving. He wanted to get into our limo so that we could play gin on the way to New York. But we didn't stop.



CP: You backed Ungar in the 1997 World Series, when he stunned everyone by winning it – and generating a $500,000 windfall for you. Do you get into backing players?



BB: I've never done much of that. I loaned Stu $25,000 before he died; Mike Sexton came to the house and picked up the cash. But I didn't lend him money to play poker with. I don't like backing people. I figure that if you're a good player and a good gambler, you should have your own money. If you don't have any money, there's something wrong.



CP: You spent a lot of time gambling with Jimmy Shagra, the notorious drug trafficker who came to Las Vegas and tried to establish himself as a professional gambler. That must have been great for the real pros.



BB: Shagra was a guy with a lot of money who liked to lose. It was the greatest. He once owed me some money from a golf bet and asked me to come to his house in Vegas to collect it. Fine. I went over there, and it was his intention to hustle me. He had a pool table in his living room, and he asked me to give him a chance to get even. It was like the heavens had opened up. I just thought, this is a wonderful country. It took about two minutes to see that he didn't know what he was doing. I looked at him and said, "Yeah, I'll try a few rounds of this game." I wound up winning $350,000.



CP: Over the years, you've devoted more energy to betting sports than to playing poker. One of your strong suits is wagering on single-participant sports like tennis, golf, and boxing – and finding things in individual players that the bookies neglect to see. Considering their resources, how does that happen?



BB: In some sports, the bookies are [inept] at making lines – maybe because they're not betting their blood. They come in, they get a salary, they make a line, and they go on to the next event. Me, I've been thinking about these things for a month. (He gestured toward his wife.) And I've got her looking at me. She doesn't want to hear no bad-beat stories. I am not betting for entertainment or to make the match more interesting. I bet for cash. This is my livelihood. My latest tennis story is that before the French Open started, I made a really big bet on this kid Rafael Nadal to win it. I took 4-to-1 and bet him all the way through. I won quite a bit on that.



CP: In fact, it's only in the last seven years that you've even taken up Texas hold'em. Yet, you're playing well enough to have had some pretty good in-the-money finishes. Are you phasing out sports?



BB: No. As far as sports go, football betting is what I like to do best – I make my own lines, watch all the games, don't discuss it with anybody, and place my bets on Sunday night – and I'm still busy with it. I especially like the halftime bets; I see certain things in a game that give me a knack for being able to predict what that last half will be like. All winter long, when everybody else is playing poker, I'm betting sports every day and don't have time to devote to poker. But I look back and wish I had focused on it more. I've been more successful at poker than at anything else. The reality is that I never lost. I was always winning money when I played poker.



CP: When you say always winning, you mean what, like maybe 70 percent of the time?



BB: Perhaps more. I had a knack for it. Plus, there were a few weak players in the game, so that made it easier.



CP: How do you compare poker to sports in your personal pantheon of gaming?



BB: I'm kinda wore out with sports, but I've always been wore out from sports. It's a lot of work. On the other hand, I enjoy the poker playing a little more right now. It's not near as big as the sports. I bet $50,000 a game, as opposed to chopping out $20,000 or $30,000 playing poker. There's no comparison. But I get more satisfaction out of poker. The nice thing is that you feel like you do it yourself. You're involved in the game rather than betting on someone else's performance. I've found hold'em to be a fun game and a challenge. Now I'm learning it the way I've learned everything else: the hard way.



CP: Is it your goal to win one of the TV tournaments?



BB: Sure. And I've gotten close. Up in L.A. there were eight of us, and you had to get to the last six to make the TV table. I had two aces against that kid Adam Schoenfeld's pair of nines. He put $670,000 in the pot, and if I won, I was going to have $2 million of the $2.9 million on the whole table. Then, he made a straight against my aces.



CP: You're obviously a grand master at deuce-to-seven, but do you see hold'em moving in that direction for you?



BB: Now that I've played a bit, I think I've got a good handle on the game. I look at it this way: I'm making money from the tournaments I've entered and I've never really played Texas hold'em before, so I must be on the right track. Now I've got the bit back in my mouth, and I'm ready to play. You can say that I'm embarking on career number two.