Sleepless Giants: The Legend of Johnny and the Greek

Between legend-making, exaggeration, and fabrication, there is reason to believe we don't know the accurate story.

- Michael Craig



What Michael Craig says about the celebrated match between Johnny Moss and Nick "The Greek" Dandalos can serve as the epigraph to nearly any account of a card game, whether it took place in 1827, 1951, or last weekend. The leveraged uncertainty at the heart of good poker extends to most reports of how the long money changed hands. Unless he was an eyewitness, and sometimes not even then, all a historian can do is sift through what's been written and said about a game, trying to get a feel for which version of the lore sounds the least out of tune or, if he's lucky, has the actual ring of truth. (Online and televised games, of course, leave much clearer evidence trails.) That being said, sometime between January 1949 and the spring of 1951, a casino boss named Lester Ben Binion is widely believed to have hosted a heads-up, winner-take-all marathon between Moss and Dandalos in Downtown Las Vegas. Many of the details, including the year, remain subjects of debate, with Moss himself telling one biographer it was 1949, and another it was 1951.



What isn't in doubt is that Binion was born in Pilot Grove, Texas, 60 miles northeast of Dallas, in 1904. His grandparents had migrated there from Chicago, and both of his parents grew up Catholic and poor. Benny spent his youth punching cattle, trading horses, running numbers, and sitting on the fringes of card games, finally making his bones in the '20s and '30s. Starting with $56, he and his younger brother launched their own numbers policy, a kind of neighborhood lottery, netting $800 their first week in business. His brother died in a plane crash a few years later, but Benny branched out from numbers to dice, running no-limit craps games in the shadow of the Dallas courthouse. Regulars at his casino included H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Howard Hughes, all of whom rolled the bones for six-figure stakes, so Benny deployed a few tricks that guaranteed profitability. Among the surest of these were daubing and loading – making his dice slightly tacky or heavy on one side – in ways that disadvantaged the shooter even more than the house edge.



Cards were another story. "I was never a real good poker player," he told an interviewer, contrasting himself with friends who made a living at the game. "They know the cards, and know the percentages … and how many chances he's got to make it, and this, that, and the other. I can't do that. I don't know that end of it." What he did know was how to create a secure environment for games of skill and chance, and to take a handsome cut for his trouble.



Since the games were illegal, Benny and his fellow racketeers had to police both their clients and competitors. Their weapons of choice included baseball bats, shotguns, and homemade bombs. By nearly every report, Benny was a warm-hearted, generous family man who savored his reputation as a cold-blooded killer. "There's no way in the world I'd harm anybody for any amount of money," he declared near the end of his life, this after certain statutes of limitations, and not a few of his enemies, had expired. "But if anybody goes to talkin' about doin' me bodily harm, or my family bodily harm, I'm very capable, thank God, of really takin' care of 'em in a most artistic way."



As the boss gambler in Dallas during World War II, Benny was targeted for hits by his competition and prosecuted by the government on a regular basis. The cumulative heat became so intense that he decided to get out of town. "My sheriff got beat in the election," was how he explained it. In 1946, he piled his wife, their five young children, and $2 million in cash into his maroon Cadillac and drove to Las Vegas, where most of his games were now legal.



He first became a partner in the Las Vegas Club with J. Kell Houssels, but Benny's decision to reduce the house edge and remove betting limits led to a split in the merger. And Benny had other problems. Back in Dallas, numbers boss Herbert "The Cat" Noble's wife was incinerated by a car bomb meant for The Cat. So certain was Noble that Benny had authorized the hit that he fitted an airplane with bomb racks, got ahold of two incendiary devices, and circled Binion's Bonanza Road address on a map of Las Vegas. The sortie was thwarted by Texas police, but word of the bomb racks and map made its way out to Benny. In 1951, the year he took over the El Dorado on Fremont Street and renamed it Binion's Horseshoe Club, Noble – whose nickname referred to the number of lives he seemed to be blessed with – was decapitated by a pipe bomb planted next to his mailbox.



Born on Crete in 1893, Nick "The Greek" Dandalos was a much more refined sort of gambler. He moved to America with a lavish allowance from his godfather, a shipping magnate, and arrived in Vegas in 1949, claiming to have broken every high roller back east, Arnold Rothstein included, winning in the neighborhood of $60 million, though he admitted losing most of it back on the thoroughbreds at Joe Kennedy's Hialeah racetrack. His new game was poker, and he was looking to play "the biggest game this world has to offer." His problem was that poker in Vegas took place in ring games with limited bet sizes. Asking around, he was told that Benny Binion was the man to see about no-limit action. He proposed that Benny match him against "any man around" in a heads-up, no-limit, winner-take-all poker marathon.



The house tends to make relatively little by spreading poker, but Benny sensed that there might be other ways to skin this particular cat. He conferred with his friend Jimmy Snyder, who also used "The Greek" as his moniker. Snyder had been saying for years that poker was America's most popular game. Still played mostly in back rooms and kitchens, however, it remained an underground national pastime. All it needed to become more visible, Snyder imagined, was the institutional organization of baseball; and to get that, it needed a forum and some nuanced PR. Snyder also believed the best poker players were Texans, mainly because of the vastness of their landscape and the scarcity of other amusements. He told Benny that the best man to stand up to Dandalos would hail from that ornery state.



Snyder had also succumbed to his fellow Greek's charm. "He recited poetry," he said. "He was beautiful with women. He made Omar Sharif look like a truck driver." Benny called him "the strangest character I ever seen," and said he would host the game only if it was played at a table near the front of his casino, in full public view. When Dandalos agreed, Benny phoned his friend Johnny Moss, the best poker player he knew.



While the Greek had a degree in philosophy, Moss' formal education had ended, like Benny's, in second grade. After working with Benny as a Dallas paperboy, Moss followed his friend into the gambling rackets, learning to cheat at poker long before he learned to play square. "Dealin' from the bottom of the pack, dealin' seconds, usin' mirrors, markin' cards," he recalled. "We thought we were smart. Everybody we looked at was a sucker. The suckers had money an' we didn't. I could make a livin', but it warn't a good livin'. I could never get hold of a lot of money, like a sucker could, so in time I come to see it was better to be a sucker. For sixty years now, I've been a sucker. But I'm hard to beat." In 1949, he was tired of evading the police while trying to beat other cheats, legitimate players, and runs of cold cards, all this while packing a revolver at the table and carrying a .410 double-barreled shotgun from town to town because road gamblers were such enticing targets for highwaymen.



Legend has it that Moss was already in a pretty good game in Odessa when Benny finally reached him. He'd been playing for three days without sleep, but he still got on the first plane to Vegas, took a taxi to Benny's joint on a crisp Sunday evening in January, and sat down to play. Dandalos was 56, Moss 42, so stamina was going to be an issue; so was the ability to concentrate, since their table was soon hemmed in by chattering audiences of 200 or 300. From time to time, well-heeled tourists were permitted to "change-in to" the game for a minimum of $10,000, but none lasted more than a day or two.



Early on, the Greek pulled dramatically ahead, threatening to wipe out Moss' more limited bankroll. Apparently, the Greek seldom slept, since he spent nearly all of their break time at the craps table. Once, when Moss came back downstairs from a nap, Dandalos joshed him, "What are you going to do, Johnny, sleep your life away?" They are supposed to have played for five months, breaking for sleep only once every four or five days, this as fresh dealers rotated in every 20 minutes to keep the action brisk and precise. Meanwhile, the flock of railbirds continued to grow. Noting how much they were wagering elsewhere in his casino, Benny called his new main attraction "the biggest game in town." During one break, he and Dandalos allegedly chaperoned Albert Einstein along Fremont Street, introducing him to the locals as "Little Al from Princeton – controls a lotta the action around Jersey."



In one famous hand of five-card stud, the upcards were 8-6-4-J for the Greek and 6-9-2-3 for Moss. With more than $100,000 already in the pot, the Greek bet $50,000. Moss, who had a 9 in the hole, raised by moving all of his available chips in. The Greek had only $140,000 left of what had recently been a seven-figure bankroll. "I guess I have to call you," he said, pushing the last of his chips toward the pot, "because I think I've got a jack in the hole."



Moss told him, "Greek, if you've got a jack down there, you're liable to win a helluva pot." Dandalos indeed had the jack, and the pot came to $520,000. The Greek had recklessly chased Moss' pair of nines during the final two betting rounds – hoping for, even counting on, then hitting the miracle jack. "But that's all right," Moss said years later, observing that the Greek's weakness for long shots didn't bode well for him. "I broke him in the end."



It wasn't until the middle of May that Dandalos finally succumbed with a handshake and the famous line, "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go." Legend also has it that the Texan took between $2 million and $3 million from the game. Adjusted for inflation, this would be like winning $25 million today.



Did it happen that way? If it did, why did Moss then begin taking jobs managing Las Vegas cardrooms? One explanation – that he needed the money – was reaffirmed in June 2004, when Doyle Brunson told Michael Craig that Moss had told him that he promptly lost the entire Dandalos bundle at the craps table. Since then, however, Craig has provided a variety of reasons to believe that any match the two men played was quite a bit shorter, with much less at stake. He points out several discrepancies in accounts published decades later (in Jon Bradshaw's Fast Company and Don Jenkins' Champion of Champions), and that articles about Moss or Dandalos from the '50s and '60s fail to mention it at all. Then there is Benny's 1973 oral-history interview with Mary Ellen Glass, in which, Craig reminds us, Benny "talks about Nick the Greek in connection with the Horseshoe back then and in later days. … But he never mentions (a) Johnny Moss; (b) a poker game between Moss and Dandalos; © any big poker game that drew spectators to the Horseshoe; or (d) any poker game from that era having anything to do with the start of the World Series of Poker in 1970." Craig also notes that when Dandalos was buried in Vegas in 1966, "the Sun and the Review-Journal both reported it on the front page. (Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Sun, was one of the pallbearers and delivered a eulogy.) The Review-Journal story says, 'The Greek was an attraction here for many years. Local gamblers enjoyed pointing out the legendary "Aristotle of the pass line" to gaping tourists.' There is no mention, however, of poker, Moss, the Horseshoe, Benny Binion, or the legendary game" in either story. Craig now believes "the whole thing wasn't made up, but like many great poker stories, it grew over the years. And as Johnny Moss evolved from a tough old cheater who was banned from Vegas for a couple of decades – banned or in fear for his life – to the 'Grand Old Man of Poker,' what was a big score [against Dandalos] grew into a battle of the titans."



From Bill Hickok to Stuey Ungar to Annette Obrestad, accounts of the hand-to-hand combat of historical figures have always been embellished somewhat. Though Homer says he did, Achilles couldn't vanquish a river, despite all his speed and ferocity, but he was still the Greeks' most intimidating weapon in their war against Troy 3,200 years ago. Lance Armstrong certainly climbed those French mountains faster than anyone else between 1999 and 2005, but we'll never know the precise chemical nature of his battles with cancer and gravity. Dandalos and Moss were exceptional high-stakes players who engaged in a mid-century showdown that Dandalos lost. It was apparently something of a spectacle. And the spectacle was hosted by the impresario who two decades later would launch the World Series of Poker.