Ante Up
America's card rooms are playing to a full house like never before.

By Ralph Wetterhahn

On Aug. 2, 1876, Jack "Crooked Nose" McCall shot "Wild Bill" Hickok in the back during a poker game. Hickok fell to the floor, and among the blood and gore lay five cards: two black aces, two black eights, and a card of ever-since-disputed rank. From that day on, aces and eights forever will be known as the "dead man's hand."

The occasion marked a low point in poker's murky history, but come the 21st century, the game has gone beyond the purview of cigar-smoking gamblers stacking grimy piles of chips in seedy back rooms. Today more than 60 million Americans play poker — including many celebrities, whose games are aired on cable TV. You'd have to go back to World War II to find as much interest.

Willing to gamble

Back then, card games could be found in muddy foxholes, in flight crew ready rooms, and deep within the bowels of every Navy ship. When men gambled with their lives in combat every day, winning or losing large amounts of scrip, colas, or cigarettes was simply an extension of the culture of risk taking. If you died, it made no difference whether you were rich or poor — but if you survived, well then, why not have a pocket full of cash?

It wasn't just the troops who loved the game. Returning from the Potsdam Conference shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in 1945, President Truman mulled over his next decision: whether, and where, to deploy the atomic bomb. Secretary of State James Byrnes opposed Truman on the use of the weapon, so Truman used daily 12-hour poker games to reduce Byrnes' access to him. A UPI reporter onboard wrote that Truman was "running a straight stud filibuster against his own secretary of state."

Back in the White House, Truman sought games as a favorite means of relaxation. He twice filled inside straights in a five-card stud game against a pair of aces back to back, evidence that he loved playing and never seemed to care whether he won or lost.

Meanwhile, 10,000 miles away in the Pacific, Quaker-raised Richard M. Nixon won a hand worth $1,500 — a whopping sum in those days — by bluffing with a pair of deuces.

A devoted player, Nixon turned down a chance to have dinner with Charles Lindbergh when it conflicted with a regular poker session. Nixon said years later, "Today it seems incredible to me that I passed up an opportunity to have dinner with Charles Lindbergh because of a card game. But in the intense loneliness and boredom of the South Pacific, our poker games were more than idle pastimes, and the etiquette surrounding them was taken very seriously."

Serious money, indeed, said Navy friend Jim Stewart: "I know for a fact [Nixon] sent home $6,800 from Green Island, and I dare say he stashed away quite a bit more after that." Mustered out of the Navy, Nixon needed expense money during his first congressional campaign in 1946. "With my pay," wrote Nixon in his memoirs, "Pat's salary, and my poker winnings, we had managed to save $10,000 during the war." All of it went into the pot to initially finance his run. He won, and his political stack of chips began their rise.

Solace for POWs

During Nixon's presidency, North Vietnam's prison camp at Son Tay was raided in November 1970. Up to that time, American POWs generally had been confined alone or in two-man cells. They suddenly were moved from scattered locations to communal prisons inside Hanoi where security was tighter. With 26 to 35 men in each room, the POWs relished ways to break the boredom.

"The Vietnamese gave us playing cards," F-4 pilot Spike Nasmyth recalls. "They were made of cardboard, so they couldn't be shuffled without breaking them. We swished them around to mix them up. The chips were made by Dick Bolstad, a very inventive guy. He used bread and water, then mixed coloring from ground-up roofing tiles to make orange chips, leftover medicine extract for the purple ones, and coal dust to make a black version."

Poker sessions went on for days at a time. The senior American officer mandated a loss maximum of a thousand dollars, "but some guys hit their max in several rooms over the years," Nasmyth notes. Nasmyth kept tally on a small piece of paper, which he managed to smuggle out upon release. "When we got home, I mailed IOU letters to the losers. Everyone paid up, and every winner got paid."

Ancient history

The origin of poker is obscure. Many consider it a direct descendant of the Persian game As Nas, a five-handed game using 25 cards. French soldiers brought a game called poque to New Orleans during the 1700s, when it was played with a 20-card deck.

According to Ken Warren, a poker professional — as well as an Air Force veteran, who learned the game while stationed in Turkey — Americans mispronounced the French word as "poker" and began playing it in New Orleans around 1820. Before the decade was out, poker had spread via riverboat up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The 52-card deck was incorporated in 1833.

As the game spread, cheaters moved in. Cards were "marked," and aces were secreted up sleeves. Even so, poker expanded west with the California gold rush and became just another expression of man's yearning to get rich quick. For more than a century, the games were mostly played in noisy, smoke-filled saloons by gunslingers and greenhorns alike.

Then, in 1970, gambler Benny Binion skedaddled to Nevada to escape retribution for an alleged murder in Texas. In Las Vegas, he founded the World Series of Poker (WSOP). Every year since, the affair has been held at Binion's Horseshoe Casino. Soon, the legends of the game — Amarillo Slim, Texas Dolly, Kid Poker, and Oklahoma Johnny — were joined by a new generation of skilled players like bare-footed Annie Duke, Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, and mathematical whiz David Williams.

Television coverage picked up in the 1990s, but watching players mull their hidden hands was like watching a cat sleep. Then a knockoff of the WSOP, the World Poker Tour, emerged on the Travel Channel in 2003, and everything changed. Tiny cameras embedded in the tables enabled the audience to see the players' two hole cards. Couch potatoes began leaping from sofas screaming "Fold!", "Raise!", or "Call!" The WSOP immediately adopted the concept.

At the WSOP

Since the WSOP began, the number of participants has risen from a handful of professionals to 2,575 entrants in the 2004 contest. Each player must pony up $10,000 to enter, but the majority — more than 1,900 in 2004 — earn their seats by winning cheap Internet or satellite tournaments. The 2003 series' $2.5 million winner, aptly named Chris Moneymaker, got his "ticket" to WSOP — his first live tournament! — by winning a $40 Internet contest. In ceremonies before this year's competition, Moneymaker commented on the degree of opportunity afforded amateurs, "I can't play [golf] at the Masters, but I can enter the World Series of Poker … and win."

At the Horseshoe, pre-World-Series events, including varieties of poker such as Omaha, Seven Card Stud, and Razz, begin a month before the Hold'em Championship. The prize money is substantial. Pot-Limit Omaha poker winner Ted Lawson of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., won $500,000. Preliminary No-Limit Texas Hold'em winner Mike Sica of North Brunswick, N.J., walked away with $503,160.

The final table for every event is played upstairs in the Bullpen, a cordoned-off arena. Above the lone poker table, ESPN microphones and cameras hover. TV monitors show the table cards, but the players' hole cards are not visible to the "railbird" audience in real time. Not that it matters — as Chris Moneymaker remarked, "The electricity walking back in here was phenomenal, and watching gamblers compete for millions gets everyone's blood pumping."

Hollywood was represented at the tables by Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man, Sea Biscuit) and James Woods (Casino, Ghosts of Mississippi), but poker nuts were more interested in the game's legends. When champion "Amarillo Slim" Preston appeared sporting his 10-gallon hat, he was besieged by autograph seekers. Warren, the author of numerous poker guides, approached and introduced himself, adding, "You may have heard of me, I've written several poker books." Preston smiled. "Not only do I not read poker books, I don't read books!"

Every nook in the casino was taken up with green felt tables. After a week of grueling competition two players remained: David Williams and Greg "Fossilman" Raymer, a corporate patent attorney from Stonington, Conn. Both men qualified for the championship by purchasing $150 tickets in a PokerStars Internet competition.

At 8:40 p.m., after seven hours of play, they reached hand No. 113 of the day. Five million dollars in bundles of $100 bills was pushed onto the table from Binion's traditional cardboard box. Raymer had $17 million in chips and Williams $8 million. The dealer flopped three cards: 5-4-2. Williams placed a bet and Raymer raised to $2 million. Williams called. The next card: another deuce. Raymer bet $2.5 million. Another call.

The final card was a third deuce, and Raymer moved all his chips in. Williams called, then showed ace-four (for a full house, deuces over fours). But Raymer showed a bigger full house: two eights (deuces over eights). He won $5 million and the World Championship bracelet. As Raymer's arms flew up in victory, Williams eyed those two eights, glanced at his useless ace, and looked for all the world like he had been plugged in the back, just like Wild Bill Hickok.