The Story of the Aces & Eights Poker Chip

Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.

This haunting line from poet Francis Thompson suggests that everything in the universe is connected. This is also true for poker, as I'll try to show in this somewhat complicated relating of various connected events in my life.

A couple of months ago, I played in the 33rd-annual Aces & Eights poker tournament. A&E, founded by Jay "Moose" Moriarty, is the oldest private invitational tournament in the world. Another location was needed this year so that Alabama Eddie couldn't find and crash it, and it was eventually held, appropriately enough, at the Moose Lodge in Burbank, California. Though the buy-in is relatively small, Aces & Eights is a fiercely contested tournament that offers huge bragging rights. For example, although my sweetie owns just about every record for a woman in poker, her most coveted accomplishment is being the only woman to win A&E.

Moriarty, a talented and engaging former TV scriptwriter, as usual was in his element, singing a poker tune he composed, making all the introductions and announcements, including a crack that the final table would come back in November. This year's event was especially enjoyable because, for once, neither Ralph the Rattler nor Action Al was in attendance. However, as expected, I screwed up. Early on, I got lucky and built up a lot of chips, then, much to the exasperation of Barbara, dwindled them away by anteing them off with overly tight play, ending up 13th and out of the money again; nothing unusual there. But what really got me thinking and going over my life was the fact that this time, our starting stacks included one large metal chip embossed with an Aces & Eights design.

Holding the chip in my hand, my mind wandered back to the early '70s when I was an advertising salesman for Women's Wear Daily, a fashion trade publication. One of my stops was a small advertising agency specializing in apparel accounts that was owned by an outgoing young woman named Lynda Sinay, whom I became friends with and took out a couple of times. Her agency was kind of a freewheeling operation. Some of the staffers enjoyed sitting bare-assed on the copy machine to make pictures of their butts. This, as it turned out, was a disrespectful way to treat a copier and was destined to change history. If you think I'm trying to be funny, read on.

This was during the Vietnam War and the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers controversy. For those of you too young to know, Ellsberg was a Defense Department consultant with the Rand Corporation who had access to thousands of top-secret papers that contained explosive revelations about the U.S. deliberately expanding the war with air strikes against Laos, coastal raids in North Vietnam, and so on. Ellsberg leaked the papers to The New York Times, which published them, generating a debate that divided the country about national policy and freedom of the press. It widened the gap between the U.S. government and its people, fueling the Nixon administration's paranoia, which later contributed to the Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters, leading to Nixon being forced to resign the presidency.

Ellsberg was indicted, and then one day I was stunned to read that Lynda had been subpoenaed to appear at his grand jury hearing. Why? Because it was her copy machine that was used to reproduce the Pentagon Papers! The connection was that she was a friend of Anthony Russo, a colleague of Ellsberg. When I phoned Lynda to find out what it was all about, she made light of it. She said that she asked her father (Jack Harris, a movie producer) what she should wear to the hearing, and he jokingly said, "A Xerox copy apron" (used in those days to protect against chemical spills).

I'll I bet that you never expected to learn about history from one of my columns, did you?

And now let me get to the poker connection. Does the name Charles Nesson sound familiar? He's the maverick Harvard law professor who's been in the news lately for bringing poker into the classroom to have students examine the legal and ethical issues of the game. He brings seminars such as "Poker: A Game of Truth in Life and Law" and "Law as Rhetorical Poker" to the campus with guest speakers, including poker greats, in an attempt to give poker serious academic treatment. He's partnered with the student-led Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, which is based at Harvard and has chapters at other universities.

But how does he fit into the Pentagon Papers trial? Well, for one thing, he was Ellsberg's defense attorney.

The case against Ellsberg was eventually dismissed because of government misconduct. Later, Lynda married a businessman named Stewart Resnick. She invited me to see their beachfront home in the exclusive Malibu Colony, and that was the last time I saw her. But I kept reading about her as she and her husband began building a business empire. They bought the flowers-by-wire company Telaflora, a security company, Fiji Water, nearly 100,000 acres of orchards and farmland, and then the Franklin Mint, paying Time Warner $167 million for a 70 percent interest. They greatly expanded the Mint's collectible business, scoring coups such as buying Jackie Kennedy's faux pearls at auction for $211,000 and replicating them; buying a gown owned by Princess Diana and using it for a porcelain doll, and so on. More recently, they began marketing the "POM Wonderful" pomegranate juice drink. The Resnicks now are Beverly Hills billionaires. One story about them likened their home to the Italian embassy, only more tastefully appointed. They also are philanthropists who had the Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA named after them. If the hospital ever needs more business, I know a lot of poker players I could send over for treatment.

OK, so where's the poker connection here? Well, a few years ago, I sent Lynda a letter filling her in on my life in poker and telling her about Barbara. She wrote back and sent me a gift of an impressive, 19th-century-design cabinet from the Franklin Mint that was filled with bronze and silver poker chip tokens and specially designed cards selling for $500. The name on the set: "Aces & Eights." I loaned it to Moose, it's been used from time to time at his tournaments, and seeing the chip again started me down memory lane.

And that, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story.

P.S. Don't try to buy the poker cabinet. It's out of production and a collector's item now.

Max Shapiro, a lifelong poker player and former newspaper reporter with several writing awards to his credit, has been writing a humor column for Card Player ever since it was launched 20 years ago. His early columns were collected in his book, Read 'em and Laugh.