The World Series of Poker - Part I

During the 1960s, with his Horseshoe Casino on Fremont Street dominating Glitter Gulch in Downtown Las Vegas, Benny Binion still had to compete with the Rat Pack, the Folies Bergere, Elvis Presley, and all of the Jetsons-esque architecture going up a few miles south on the Strip. True to his Texas roots, Benny had carpenters fashion a 9-foot-tall golden horseshoe to display behind Plexiglas his collection of 100 $10,000 bills, which remained legal tender until 1969. Tourists flocked to see it, drawn by the opportunity to be photographed in the presence of a million dollars. So near, yet so far! The Horseshoe vault soon housed thousands of Kodak negatives, including one of the Manson family posing in front of the money, psychotic little Charles front and center.



Yet, Benny understood that joints like his could always use another spectacle, something to not only get working-class tourists talking and posing, but to draw in high rollers, as well. The idea of a poker "World Series" may have been percolating in the back of his mind since the Johnny Moss-Nick Dandalos showdown — a no-limit match attracting hundreds of spectators, many of whom also played blackjack and craps. If it had been, however, he let a couple of decades go by before finally acting on it.



The catalyst arrived early in 1969, when Benny and his sons received an invitation from Tom Moore to attend the Texas Gamblers Reunion at the Holiday Hotel in Reno. Moore's goal was to attract as many high rollers as possible into his new casino, but the Reunion was the idea of his advisor Vic Vickrey, who imagined that it would help drum up business during the slowest time of the year. Its focus was to be a series of high-stakes poker games. Vickrey recalls that the Holiday "had a couple of old poker tables over there in the corner, and I tossed in $3,000 of the hotel's money just so's these fellas would have a little somethin' extra to try shootin' at."



Dandalos had been dead for three years, but among the Texas road gamblers who showed up were Johnny Moss, "Amarillo Slim" Preston, Doyle Brunson, Jack "Treetop" Straus, Felton McCorquodale, Brian "Sailor" Roberts, the spiffily dressed oilman Crandall Addington, and Charles Harrelson, who would later be convicted of the contract killing of U.S. District Judge John H. Wood. The non-Texans included Walter "Puggy" Pearson out of Tennessee, the talkative Ohioan Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, New Yorker Jimmy Casella, and a pool hustler by the name of Rudolph Wanderone Jr., also known as "Minnesota Fats."

To avoid giving an advantage to single-game specialists, the players decided to alternate between five-card draw and stud, seven-card stud high and high-low split, and the favorite game of most of them, no-limit Texas hold'em. After playing for six or seven days, they named Moss "King of Cards" and presented him with a silver cup. Vickrey, however, was disappointed with how seldom they strayed from the poker tables into the casino pits, even though all of their meals and suites had been comped. Benny, however, was plenty impressed with the gathering. "That was a good thing up there in Reno," he said. "It sure brought in a lot of people, and I'm certain there will be even more next year. The more I think about it, that might be a good thing to have here at the Horseshoe."



When Benny and Jack confirmed that Moore had no plans for another Reunion, they decided to host it themselves. Their enthusiasm for a poker convention on Fremont Street was shared by Jimmy Snyder, who had just opened a public relations office in Vegas, with Howard Hughes as one of his clients. After Snyder volunteered to promote the event gratis, he and the Binions invited most of the men on Moore's list to the Horseshoe in May 1970 to compete in what they grandly decided to call the World Series of Poker, even though there were fewer than 50 poker tables in all of Las Vegas. Among the three dozen or so who showed up were Straus, Moss, Brunson, Casella, Preston, J.R. Green, Don Howard, Joe Floyd, Bob Hooks, George Barnes, Curtis "Iron Man" Skinner, and the singer and actor Chill Wills. Also on hand were Titanic Thompson and Joe Bernstein, two of the men who allegedly had taken Arnold Rothstein to the cleaners back in 1928.



Because the Horseshoe had no poker room – floor space for pit games and slot machines was simply too lucrative – the baccarat alcove was temporarily fitted out with three tables. For 10 or 11 days, the invitees played five forms of poker: five-card draw high, deuce-to-seven draw, seven-card stud, razz, and no-limit hold'em. The stakes amazed the railbirds, including a group of potential hijackers, pressing up close to the tables. Seeing that some of the contestants were getting nervous, Benny asked the outlaw types to step back from the rail. When they refused, he sidled up to their leader. "I know you're a young man who thinks he's tough," the 66-year-old Binion told him. "I'm an old man and I know I'm tough. If you want to see who's tougher, let's go to the garage and figure it out."



"Right about then," Doyle Brunson recalls, "those guys left."



And once again it was another tough old Texan, 63-year-old Johnny Moss, who dominated his mostly younger foes at the tables. At the dinner afterward in the Horseshoe's Sombrero Room, they voted him the champion. Jack Straus was voted Most Congenial, while Slim Preston seemed to be campaigning for Least. "I couldn't understand why the f—- anybody would vote," he presciently complained. "We played for a lot of money, and that was the vote." Moss, in any case, received another silver trophy and kept what he'd won at the tables. "In those days it warn't no one game and it warn't no freezeout," he told Al Alvarez in 1981. "You had to win all the games, win all the money. Then you're the best player, an' they vote on you. A lot of gamblers hate me, but they still vote on me being the best player in the world."



For the Binions and Snyder, the goal had been to garner publicity. The problem was that watching these pros play expressionless poker wasn't all that exciting, especially three decades before holecard cameras. Among the bored spectators was Ted Thackrey, who'd been assigned by the Los Angeles Times to cover the event. He advised the Binions to "make it a contest" somehow. "If you want to get the press involved and turn the World Series into a real sporting event, you need to give it some structure, create some drama, and make it a real tournament."



Seconding Thackrey's opinion, Preston and Pearson persuaded Benny that, instead of voting for the winner, the players should compete in a no-limit hold'em "freezeout" — that is, with no chance to rebuy and the blinds rising every two hours, the action would proceed until one player had all the chips. In 1971, six starters put up $5,000 apiece and played for two days. Once again, Johnny Moss won, pocketing the entire $30,000.



The next year, two winner-take-all events were scheduled, and both attracted eight players. The five-card stud tournament, with a $5,000 buy-in, was won by Bill Boyd. And this time, the buy-in for the no-limit hold'em event was doubled, with Benny putting up the extra $5,000 for each of the entrants because he and Snyder figured the rounder number would snag more publicity. The $80,000 was won by Preston, whose idea it had been to double the buy-in. (Though inflation has eroded its value and other events now cost more to enter, the magic $10,000 continues to be the buy-in for the WSOP no-limit hold'em main event.)



A vastly more seductive raconteur than the taciturn Moss, the tall, rail-thin Preston wrote a quickie best-seller, Play Poker to Win, and went on the talk-show circuit. His first appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show was such a hit that he was invited back 11 more times. He also appeared three times on 60 Minutes, and made speeches to the National Press Club in Washington and one before the Senate. Far and away the world's most famous player, he was able to boost exponentially the public's interest in, or at least its awareness of, tournament poker.



Preston became such a sought-after guest that Tom Snyder gave him, Benny, and Joe Bernstein an entire Tomorrow Show, during which they put on what Slim called "an hour's commercial for the Horseshoe."



"Benny," asked Snyder at one point, "why is it that those places out there on the Strip in Vegas have a $500 limit and you've got no limit?"



"Well, they got great big hotels and little biddy bankrolls," drawled Benny. "I got a little biddy hotel and a great big bankroll."



"But aren't you afraid someone will break the bank?"



"Well, not really. I got a darned good head start on 'em."



Both the Horseshoe and its World Series were now on the map.



Puggy Pearson took 19 hours to win the championship in '73, when 13 entrants (none subsidized by Benny this time) contributed to a purse of $130,000. The relentless Mr. Moss finished second. Pearson also won two of the other five events, which included razz, five-card draw high, deuce-to-seven draw, seven-card stud, and a smaller no-limit hold'em tournament.



With the World Series doubling in size, Jack Binion hired Eric Drache, a young seven-card stud player from New Jersey who had learned to play seriously as an MP in Vietnam, to organize the various tournaments. Snyder, meanwhile, had persuaded CBS to film a documentary of the main event, to be narrated by Jimmy himself. Watching the action in person, Al Reinert of Texas Monthly described Pearson as looking "like he's between acts as a circus clown" and Moss' face as "transparently blank, the practiced result of 50 years of self-induced rigor mortis." After Straus' flush on the river sent Preston to the rail, the loquacious Texan began hawking autographed copies of Play Poker to Win for $50 apiece.



"This poker game here gets us a lot of attention," Benny told historian Mary Ellen Glass in May 1973. He wasn't exaggerating. Thanks to Preston and Snyder, 7,000 stories about the World Series already had appeared in newspapers and magazines, not to mention the TV coverage. Yet, Benny was just getting started. "We had seven players last year," he said, "and this year we had 13. I look to have better than 20 next year. It's even liable to get up to be 50; might get up to be more than that …" He paused, gazing beyond Glass for a moment. "It will eventually."



Moss outlasted 15 other players in 1974, finally defeating Crandall Addington heads up for the $160,000 prize. He received yet another silver trophy to go, this time, with a manly gold bracelet commissioned from Neiman-Marcus, a purveyor of luxury goods based in Texas, of course. It was the first time these bracelets were awarded, and they've since become the symbol of excellence in tournament poker. Boyd had won his own bracelet in the five-card stud event, Preston in the smaller no-limit hold'em event, Roberts in deuce-to-seven draw, and Casella a pair of them in razz and seven-card stud. As usual, though, there was more money at stake in the side games, where some pots dwarfed what tournament winners took home.



They were still playing winner-take-all when Roberts earned $210,000 in the 1975 main event and Brunson $220,000 the following year. When Brunson became the second repeat champion in '77, 34 players had entered, so his prize money mushroomed to $340,000, a considerable sum when the median family income was $14,000. Both years, his holecards on the final hand were 10-2, and both times, he came from way behind on the flop to river a full house. Jesse Alto, a Houston car dealer and regular final-tablist, was his unlucky victim in '76; the next time, it was Gary "Bones" Berland, an L.A. pro who eventually won five bracelets, though never in the main event. At crunch time in the Big One, Brunson's miracle river cards came sliding off the deck two years running. Alto's and Berland's stayed buried, the main reason that far fewer people have heard of them.



By this point, Benny, at 73, had come to prefer the kitchens as his bailiwick. His motto was, "Good food cheap, good whiskey cheap, and a good gamble." He also insisted on cleanliness. "My kitchens get dirty," he threatened with weirdly draconian logic, "I'll call the health department. They'll straighten 'em up pretty quick." All beef served in Horseshoe restaurants, from the ground chuck in burgers and chili to the prime rib up in the steakhouse, was raised on his 400,000-acre ranch in Montana. Quality non-beef selections also appeared on the menu. T.J. Cloutier, then a younger Texas pro, recalls that Benny "always had some oddball item in the players buffet line — buffalo steak, rattlesnake, bear meat, this and that — and the main courses were never repeated during the Series." The players loved him for inventing their annual championship and get-together, and they loved the down-home hospitality with which he continued to host it.



When Benny died on Christmas Day 1989, Slim Preston proposed an epitaph for his friend: "He was either the gentlest bad guy or the baddest good guy you'd ever seen." He was certainly the impresario who nurtured Vic Vickrey's brainchild of a few Texans gambling "over there in the corner" in Reno into a million-dollar poker tournament covered on network TV. Even so, it's doubtful that he ever imagined the nine-figure international spectacle that his World Series would become in the future.