History of Poker

In 2000, there were 23 World Series of Poker events, the smallest of which yielded more prize money than the main event of most competing tournaments. Copying the WSOP's freezeout format, with a $10,000 no-limit hold'em event as the finale, they included Jack Binion's World Poker Open, held during January in Tunica; Amarillo Slim's Super Bowl of Poker in February, hosted by various casinos; the Diamond Jim Brady in August at The Bicycle Club in Los Angeles; and the U.S. Poker Championships, mid-September to mid-October at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. National championships were also being held in a dozen European cities, including the Helsinki Freezeout, the Irish Open at the Merrion Club in Dublin, and the Euro Finals of Poker at the Aviation Club on the Champs-Elysees. The Australasian Championship took place in Melbourne, along with smaller events in New Zealand, South Africa, and Costa Rica.



But as far as prestige was concerned, when a survey of 15 top touring pros asked them to rank the 50 most important tournaments worldwide, the WSOP championship received every first-place vote, giving it a perfect aggregate score of 15. Twenty of the next 30 best scores went to preliminary WSOP events. At the turn of the millennium, then, golf and tennis had four majors apiece, horse racing three, and boxing a shifting variety of sanctioning bodies and belts. But like America's major team sports and the world's most popular form of football, poker still had only one.



Yet, there was also much less of a family atmosphere at the Horseshoe these days, and it wasn't solely due to the size of the fields and the crowds. Benny had passed away, and Jack was forced out in the same year, 1998, in which Ted died a horrible death – either the victim of an Ungaresque overdose or murdered by his live-in girlfriend and a male friend who was later caught digging up 48,000 pounds of silver that Ted had buried on his ranch in Pahrump. Besides forcing out Jack, the major complaint against Becky Binion Behnen was that she cut too many corners, from serving mediocre food in the buffet to reducing the gold in the bracelets from 18 to 14 karats. They no longer were fashioned by Neiman Marcus, either; their new design was flimsier and less elegant. On her husband Nick's advice, she had sold the bills in her father's $1 million horseshoe display. Before the '99 Series, she and Nick replaced nearly every employee associated with her brothers, including poker-room managers Jim and Susan Albrecht and WSOP director Jack McClelland, who now ran Jack's World Poker Open. It was out of loyalty to these people that Brunson, Chip Reese, and other top pros were boycotting the Series. In May 2000, there was a jury deliberating charges of first-degree murder against Ted's friend and consort one block away during the tournament his father invented.



Even so, most former champions, and plenty of others, had put up their $10,000. Johnny Chan's red Mercedes SL was back in valet parking, with its California plates reading 333JJ – treys full of jacks. Also on hand was Card Player's Linda Johnson, resplendent in silver and black geisha garb to set off her bracelet in razz. Beside her stood Puggy Pearson, decked out in a lemon silk Genghis Khan outfit, including a crown with tasseled ear flaps, to go with his pug nose and Abe Lincoln whiskers. "Some crowd here this mornin'," he observed with a Tennessee twang. "Lotta pretty ladies, all rot." A few of the female players had on what could only be called boudoirwear: lacy nothings hung with spaghetti straps over flamboyant tattoos and plush torsos. But despite the tradition of look-at-me threads on day 1, the leading sartorial choice for the men remained Poker Practical: baseball cap, sunglasses, sateen casino jacket, sweatpants or khakis or denim.



The field was an ecumenical crazy quilt of players from 23 countries, among them Hasan Habib from Karachi and Jason Viriyayuthakorn from Bangkok. Any all-name team would have to include Chip Jett, Exxon Feyznia, Sirous Baghchehsaraie, Toto Leonidas, Somporn Li, David Plastik, Lin Poon Wang, and Spring Cheong, as well as the '96 champion, Huckleberry Seed. Evangelical Christians would be competing with Larry Flynt and Devilfish Ulliott, CEOs and dot-com zillionaires, blackjack and poker dealers, gay men and lesbians, cowgirls and golfers and artists, black poker professionals and Jewish physicians, Jewish pros and black docs, at least one Aramaic scholar and rabbi, and several Vietnamese boat people. Altogether they numbered 512, breaking the previous record by 119 and bringing the purse to a staggering $5.12 million. Five tables would be paid instead of four – nine players more than the usual 36. First place would bring $1.5 million, second almost $900,000, and all other payouts would escalate. Places 45-37 would be paid $15,000 apiece.



Phil Hellmuth was also on hand, hoping to extend his bracelet count to seven or eight. The previous year, he had boorishly challenged the guy who knocked him out of the main event to play heads up for $1 million. Once he calmed down, though, he checked himself into Esalen to work on his temper, having promised Linda Johnson to control it as a condition of writing for Card Player. But he still made no small plans for himself. "If I could stay healthy and get lucky and win 25 WSOP bracelets over my lifetime," he posted modestly on philhellmuth.com, "then I may well be considered the best poker player of all time." This year he had pulled out every stop, budgeting almost $200,000 for the World Series month. To have access to Bellagio's health club and swimming pools, he was spending $1,100 a week to bunk there, not counting what he called "the world's most expensive room service," plus $1,800 a week to rent a Lincoln for the seven-mile commute to the Horseshoe and $90,000 for tournament buy-ins and rebuys. He even decided to skip the $5,000 limit hold'em event because its final table was scheduled for the night before the "Big One." Instead, he flew home to Palo Alto to relax with his wife and young sons, then flew back to Vegas on Monday morning. But at least he had managed to show up on time for the tournament. He often sleeps through the first hour or two, letting 5 percent or more of his chips be blinded off, a display of hubris his opponents both savor and resent.



Many reporters considered 512 entrants more than a little flabbergasting, not only because of the five-figure buy-in but because the World Poker Open had ended only a week before the World Series began. "All that money hasn't had time yet to filter back down into the poker community," one of them observed. "Most of it's still deep in the pockets of the winners." Others noted that hundreds of other tournaments now competed with the WSOP. There was also the relative decrepitude of the Horseshoe facilities and the fact that most affluent players would rather stay – and play poker – at the Mirage or Bellagio, out in L.A., or in Europe. But Andy Glazer cited the NASDAQ being "north of four thousand," the prestige of being the oldest and largest tournament, and the extra week of satellites Becky had scheduled. And as Slim Preston pointed out, "The Series is so big and successful you could hold it in Pahrump, out there where Teddy had his silver buried, and people would show up."

The $1.5 million first prize would be one and a half times the previous record, and the most money ever awarded to a single winner of a sporting event. (Boxing purses have to be split with small armies of trainers and managers.) The player who lost the last hand would still receive $896,500 to salve the pain. The winner of that year's Masters, Vijay Singh, earned $828,000, and the owner of Fusaichi Pegasus got $888,400 for winning the Kentucky Derby.



Mike Sexton, Annie Duke, Mickey Appleman, Kathy Liebert, and Jeff Shulman all made strong runs, but by the end of day 4, only T.J. Cloutier and Chris Ferguson were left. Chris had once held a 14-1 chip lead over T.J., but the former CFL tight end gradually built up his stack while waiting for the other finalists to be eliminated. After a two-hour heads-up match, T.J. was only slightly behind, 2.5 million to 2.6 million, when he raised to 175,000. Chris thought for a moment, took another peek at his cards, and reraised to 600,000. T.J. moved in like a shot.



Chris now went into the tank for a couple of minutes. He scratched his cheek through his beard, shook his head, exhaled. Then he thought for another five minutes before finally calling. As the buzz of the crowd rose to a crescendo, he turned over the A 9 while T.J. showed him the A Q. The crowd gasped and whistled.



The flop – K 4 2 – kept T.J. in the lead, amid much delirium. Neither T.J. nor Chris held a heart.



The K fell on the turn. So now, any deuce or 4 would produce a chopped pot. Exuberant Ferguson fans yelled for a 9, though surely Chris himself would feel lucky to gain a split pot. But he suddenly leapt from his seat with his fists in the air, this as T.J. thrust a huge paw across the table, as the 9 spiked on the river. Chris reached across it to clasp T.J.'s hand. "You outplayed me," he said, in the din. T.J. shook his head, disagreeing. That he had just been harpooned through the ventricles didn't register on his craggy features. He smiled!



Chris made his way around the table to where T.J. was standing with his pretty wife, Joy, inside a crush of reporters. While Chris was almost as tall, when the two men embraced, their difference in mass was straight out of vaudeville: mesomorph-endomorph, steel-wool ringlets meshing with yard-long chestnut locks, the burly tight end held by the sinewy swing dancer.

"Are we still friends?" Chris asked him.



"Of course! Don't feel bad. You played great." But once they let go of each other, T.J. asked, "You didn't think it would be that tough to beat me, did you?"



"Yes, I did. Believe me, I did."



By now, Glazer and Hellmuth had latched onto T.J. with microphone. "Chris is the one who should be getting the attention," he told them. "There's a lotta luck in poker, and if you're gonna play this game, you better get used to it." When asked about the river card, he said, "I felt the nine coming off at the end. When I get in that zone, I can feel the cards coming. But you should be talking to Chris. He's the champion."



Directly behind him, Mike Sexton was explaining to the French TV audience that not only was Cloutier the all-time World Series money leader, he was also the leader in overall tournament winnings. "Nobody's even close." Glazer was nodding, but added: "All true, but Chris earned this title. He walloped the little stacks when he was supposed to, he played cautious when he was supposed to, when he didn't want to give T.J. easy double-throughs. He was also more aggressive when the two stacks got closer, and when it was finally time to gamble, he picked the right moment."



That Ferguson made clear he realized how lucky he was on that hand made it easier to appreciate how brilliantly he played throughout the 2000 World Series: four final tables, two first-place finishes, $1,672,260. "I really feel terrible for T.J.," he said. "I can imagine how brutal losing like that can be. He was definitely the best player today."



Six months later, another milestone occurred when Henry Orenstein's holecard cameras were used to broadcast the inaugural Poker Mi££ion from the Isle of Man. But of course there was much else at stake in the world that November. For one thing, America's line of succession was up for grabs for the first time since a tie occurred in the electoral college between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr in 1800. The decision was put into the hands of the House of Representatives. A majority of Federalist congressmen voted for Burr, many of them with the goal of blocking the Republican Jefferson from the presidency. But the influential Federalist Alexander Hamilton, who detested both candidates, believed Jefferson was the lesser of two evils, so he intervened against Burr, which allowed Jefferson to become the third president. Hamilton's intervention also led to a duel with Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey, resulting in Hamilton's death.



Two centuries later, supreme courts in Tallahassee and Washington were about to decree whether chads had been dimpled, pregnant, or hung. The lead in New Mexico already had changed hands three times, with one recount putting George W. Bush ahead of Al Gore by four votes. This photon-thin margin was made all the more interesting by a statute decreeing that should the final tally end in a tie, all five of the state's electoral votes would go to the winner of – not a duel, but of a mutually agreed-upon game of chance. No-limit Texas hold'em, anyone?



The organizers of the Mi££ion had crossbred the WSOP format with Orenstein's cameras, which had proved to be so successful on Britain's Late Night Poker broadcasts. Determined to call their event the Poker Mi££ion, Ladbrokes Casino and Sky Sports guaranteed the winner £1 million. The pound was then worth about $1.50, and they wanted to keep pace with the record $1.5 million prize Ferguson had won back in May. The problem was that even after the sponsors added £250,000 to the purse, everyone but the winner would be competing for the relatively paltry amounts left over for places two through nine. The world watched London television director John Duthie put on a spectacular display of bluffing to win the event going away.







Unfairly top-heavy as the payout structure was for the 156 players putting up $10,000 apiece, the promoters' magic round number had been accomplished. Final-table action was broadcast live to 300 million households in 140 countries, they said, then rebroadcast in the U.S. in prime time on Thanksgiving evening. The upshot was that by 2002, the World Poker Tour, a rival series of tournaments using the WSOP format, was deploying holecard cameras for its highly rated shows on the Travel Channel, and ESPN followed suit in '03 for its popular coverage of World Series events. The age of new poker millionaires being minted at monthly or even weekly tournaments was now under way.