The World Series of Poker -- Part III

Eric Drache's one-table satellites to the main event steadily had increased the number of entrants — to 54 in 1979, 73 in 1980, 75 in 1981, 104 in 1982; '82 was also the year Jack "Treetop" Straus won after being down to a single chip worth 500, giving rise to the expression "all you need is a chip and a chair," the mantra of every player sitting behind a short stack. Meanwhile, next door to the Horseshoe, the Mint's poker manager, Jim Albrecht, followed suit by spreading World Series of Poker satellites of his own. At the old Bingo Palace out on Sahara (today's Palace Station), Tom Bowling spread 100-player "supersatellites" with $110 buy-ins and encouraged other casinos to do so.



While the prize pool jumped $10,000 with every satellite winner, the downside, at least for the original coterie of Texans, was that it was increasingly difficult for one of them to win what they considered to be their event. Whatever their advantage in skill, it took more and more luck to survive the long gauntlet of bad beats and coin flips that the larger fields forced them to run.



A more practical problem was that by 1983, the Horseshoe didn't have enough space for all the players lining up to register — 234 in the limit hold'em event, 108 in the no-limit hold'em championship. The Binions not only had to borrow poker tables from neighboring casinos, but in the opening rounds, they had to seat much of the field across the street at the Golden Nugget, the Fremont, and the Four Queens. Only after a sufficient number of starters had been eliminated was everyone finally moved, under the supervision of tournament officials with walkie-talkies, over to the Horseshoe. Every player's dream had been to make the final table of a World Series event, and the joke among the fortunate survivors was that at least they had "made the final casino." Amid all these growing pains, it was probably inevitable that the winner, Grand Rapids, Michigan, accountant Tom McEvoy, earned his seat in a Horseshoe satellite, with runner-up Rod Peate, a medium-stakes player from Los Angeles, gaining entry in a Bingo Palace super.



After Brunson, Irish pro Donnacha O'Dea, and five other final-table players had been eliminated, the heads-up struggle between Peate and McEvoy lasted more than seven hours. Many of their hands have been recorded and analyzed, but it's a photograph by the young Binion's dealer Pamela Shandel that most vividly captures in classic black-and-white the moment Drache's project of democratizing the World Series finally achieved liftoff.



It's Friday, May 20, 1:45 a.m. Shandel had dealt earlier rounds of the tournament, but now she was off the clock and wielding her Nikon. After clawing his way back from a 4-1 chip deficit, McEvoy had just taken a 630,000 to 450,000 advantage. And now he had found pocket queens, his opponent the K J — two very strong hands when heads up, though McEvoy's was a 2-1 favorite. With the blinds at 8,000 and 16,000, Peate, on the button, raised it to 40,000, and McEvoy reraised all in. Peate quickly called — too quickly, he later admitted — and discovered he needed a king or a flurry of diamonds. The fatal race was on as Shandel composed her shot and refocused. After a flop of 6-6-3, a jack on the turn gave Peate two more outs, but when the 3 failed to save him on the river — click — McEvoy's life changed forever.



Shandel's picture illuminates both sides of the heart-pounding either-or that ABC in those years used to trumpet its coverage of Olympic events: the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Yet while sports broadcasts require an evening of videotape, Shandel's single image delivers the ecstasy and pain simultaneously. The moment that final trey hits the felt, McEvoy springs from his chair, grabbing his cowboy hat in one hand and punching the air with the other, while Bobbi, his wife, clutches his pants pocket and the small of his back. "I did it! I did it!" he gasps. Peate, stunned and sickened, can't bear to look anymore as his last chance to be the world champion — a king, please, a king! — got snatched out from under his mustache. He probably wasn't even thinking about the $216,000 he'd receive, compared to McEvoy's $540,000, a much steeper plunge between first place and second than in payout structures today. But at least, for Peate's sake, they weren't playing winner-take-all anymore.



(A note about deals: To insure themselves against getting unlucky at the final table, or to flatten out the sharp income spikes of tournament poker in general, many players trade or sell percentages of their action either before the tournament begins or upon making the final table. In '83, for example, Johnny Chan had 20 percent of both Peate's and McEvoy's action. Because each finalist had sold other pieces of himself before the tournament, the still unknown Chan netted more than either of them.)



Standing on a chair above Peate's left shoulder, Shandel composed her shot wide enough, and with enough depth of field, to manage candid portraits of both finalists while conveying the stature of the event in the rapt attention of the other photographers, all tilted McEvoy's way. Then there was the luck factor, so basic to both photography and poker. Shandel already had McEvoy in her sights, but she needed Peate to turn left in three-quarter profile. Because heads-up opponents confront one another across the table, it was highly doubtful that both of their faces could be captured in a single frame, let alone at the moment of truth.



A score of telling details put us squarely back in 1983: the haircuts, the modest number of chips in play, the cigarette in the comforting hand on Peate's shoulder, Bobbi McEvoy sitting right at the table while sweating her husband. (Other Shandel photos capture Bobbi stacking Tom's chips and rubbing his back, and Peate's girlfriend, Janice, doing similar things.) This was the last year in which at-the-table sweating was permitted.



Above all, the photograph shows us two guys who didn't have 10,000 bucks to casually peel off beforehand, one of them crossing poker's ultimate finish line just ahead of the other. Without satellites, high-stakes tournament poker might have devolved into a faux-cowboy parlor game for a few dozen affluent rounders. Without Shandel's talent, persistence, and luck, it would be harder to appreciate the look and feel of the instant that Eric Drache's brainchild first realized its egalitarian potential.



As the main event garnered more print and television coverage, the number of entrants rose to 132 in 1984, 141 in '86, and 167 in '88. The other big growth factor besides media attention and satellites was the availability of Brunson's Super/System, Sklansky's Hold'em Poker, and other advice books. McEvoy himself went on to co-write more than a dozen primers after his win, which he said "changed my life overnight. It gave me instant recognition and opened other doors for me, including some tournament buy-in sponsorship deals. When I decided to write books, I had instant credibility, and many students came to me for private lessons." He believes his career would have been quite different if he'd finished "only" second.



"The astounding volume of how-to literature that is a by-product of the boom in poker's popularity has helped narrow the gap between so-called professionals and amateurs," Drache observed in '84. "A decade ago, probably 75 percent of the people at the World Series were professionals. It's a lot less than that now." The ratio of pros to amateurs has dwindled ever since, to the point where very few pros even make the final table anymore. Individually, any book-learned amateur who wins a satellite or has $10,000 burning a hole in his pocket might be considered dead money, but taken collectively as an ever larger fraction of the field, the odds are increasingly better that one of them will win the whole thing.



By purchasing the Mint, the casino next door, in 1988, the Binions nearly quadrupled their number of hotel rooms from 80 to 296, to go with a sun deck and swimming pool on their new tower's roof. Rooms in the 25-story hotel were also quite a bit spiffier than those in the old wing. Even better, in May, the entire field of every event could be seated in a single room with a high ceiling on the second-floor annex, with 38 tables and three times more floor space than the cramped alcove used for previous World Series.



First prize rose to $700,000 that year, when Johnny Chan, a Chinese-born former cook, outlasted a record field to become the third — and almost certainly the last — back-to-back winner of the main event. This time, "The Orient Express" narrowly defeated Erik Seidel, a tall, pensive backgammon expert and Wall Street stock trader who had been put out of work by the market crash of '87. In what was only his second poker tournament, Seidel had outplayed everyone when the tables were full, but admitted that he had little idea how to compete heads up, especially against the reigning titleholder. "I didn't have any feel as to how I should be playing the structure or the relative hand values," he said. In the final hand, already down 300,000 to 1.4 million in chips, he flopped the top pair; his problem was that Chan had flopped the nut straight. The crafty champion was able to trap the New Yorker into going all in on the turn with his pair of queens. Even more unfortunately for Seidel, this was their only hand to be featured in Rounders, which ends with Mike McDermott (the clean-cut, all-American Matt Damon character) heading to Binion's from downtown Manhattan with $10,000 in his pocket, bringing the lure of the World Series full circle.



In 1989, the tournament comprised 14 events running May 2-21. Limit and no-limit hold'em attracted by far the most entrants, though bracelets and serious money also could be won in seven-card stud, stud high-low, razz, ace-to-five draw, deuce-to-seven triple draw, and both limit and pot-limit Omaha. Altogether, the Series offered more than $6.2 million in prize money, with at least that much at stake in the side games.



Now that Eric Drache had left to run poker operations at Steve Wynn's new Mirage on the Strip, the Binions hired Jim Albrecht from the Mint to help run the show with Jack McClelland. Together they fine-tuned the blinds structures and introduced $220 supersatellites with unlimited optional rebuys during the first two levels and double add-ons after that; they also paid the winners in tournament chips that could either be sold or used to enter any WSOP event. These new wrinkles doubled satellite participation, which in turn swelled the number of entrants and size of purses of bracelet events.



The Albrecht-McClelland team also worked hard to preserve a welcome atmosphere for all the new female and international players who were now showing up. Having been a dealer and shift manager since '84, McClelland used his dry sense of humor to help maintain order and calm amid the sometimes belligerent World Series tension. "If you don't know the rules as well as you should, they'll use a technicality to try to win a pot. And we had a lot of characters back then, like Johnny Moss, Stu Ungar, who were sort of bigger than life. You had to use a firm hand. You had to spank them, then give 'em a little sugar. You're part psychologist, part kindergarten teacher, part priest." In 14 years of running the Series, during which he kicked off every tournament with his signature "Shuffle up and deal," McClelland would watch several players go from nowhere to millionaire poker star and back again. "There was more of a family atmosphere," he recalled of the late '80s and early '90s, "but it was really hard to make a living as a player because there weren't many [novices] in most of the tournaments."



Chan's poker star never faded, of course. His remarkable run at the end of the Reagan years continued through the '89 main event, when he buzz-sawed his way through a field of 178 to get heads up with Phil Hellmuth, a brazen 24-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin. The 6-foot-6-inch college dropout — from the University of Wisconsin, where his father was a dean — had late-blooming acne and a habit of loudly informing everyone within earshot how great a player he was; that is, how great he, Phil Hellmuth, was — not Johnny Chan, for example, the player on the verge of an unprecedented three-peat, or any of the other former champions who might have been listening. And much to many people's chagrin, Hellmuth took pocket nines against Chan's A 7 to become the youngest-ever WSOP champion. "The Poker Brat" had come, seen, and conquered, and the whole world would now have to hear about it.



Though Hellmuth continues to be among the poorest sports in poker, marriage and fatherhood seem to have matured him somewhat. "Having such big success so early, I thought I was some sort of poker god," he admits. "I guess my ego got out of line." He attributes this to his efforts to compensate for low self-esteem as a kid, as well as to a mild form of attention-deficit disorder, this to go with what can only be called phosphorescent hubris. "In 10 years," he gloated not long before breaking Chan's and Brunson's shared record of 10 WSOP bracelets in 2007, "I want people to say Phil Hellmuth broke every record in poker, and no one even comes close." And if people don't say that, it seems a safe bet that wild horses couldn't keep Hellmuth from saying it for them.



When evaluating the significance of overall bracelet counts, we should note that Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, and other friends of Jack Binion boycotted the Series for several years beginning in 1998, when Jack lost control of the Fremont Street flagship amid bitter legal wrangling among Benny's heirs and in-laws. And many pros have neglected to play some or all WSOP events because the stakes were lower and the luck factor higher than in the cash games they feasted on. Only in the current age of endorsement deals, as one's bracelet count emerged as a prime if imperfect measure of poker greatness, have many brilliant live-action players begun to focus (or refocus) on winning them. We also should bear in mind how much tougher it is to win bracelets in the 21st century, when more than 2,500 players routinely enter the no-limit hold'em events, compared to outlasting the tiny fields of the '70s and '80s. This is offset, however, by the 55 events that can be entered these days at the Rio, compared to the five or six in the earliest years at the Horseshoe.



Next: the WSOP in the 1990s.