All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker - Hardcover

Grotenstein, Jonathan; Reback, Storms

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312348355 ISBN 13: 9780312348359

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005

Synopsis

All In is the story of the greatest tournament in the world--the World Series of Poker.  It began in 1970 as a mere gathering of Texas road gamblers who rendezvoused at Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas each spring.  Today it has become a cultural phenomenon, attracting exhaustive national television coverage, legions of fans, and thousands of players, from legendary professionals to amateurs with little experience outside of their home games.  And with good reason.  The prize money for the 2005 tournament was more than the purses of the Masters, the Kentucky Derby, and Wimbledon combined.
      Professional poker players themselves, authors Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback combine interviews, firsthand accounts, and extensive archival research into a comprehensive and highly entertaining look at this incredibly unique experience, recounting its history through the breathtaking and sometimes brutal hands played at the Horseshoe's tables.  They introduce colorful and seemingly fearless characters who, over the tournament's thirty-five-year history, have been lured by huge paydays--and the chance to play against the best in the world, including the legends:
 
·        Veteran road gamblers like Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim, whose success at the tables helped push poker into the national spotlight
·        The troubled poker savant Stuey "The Kid" Ungar, who would eclipse his unlikely debut at the World Series with an even more improbable comeback
·        And many others like "Poker Brat" Phil Hellmuth, who proved that you didn't need to be old or from Texas to master the game, and Chris Moneymaker, the man with the impossible name who parlayed $40 into $2.5 million
 
      All In is a no-limit look at the phenomenal transformation of poker from a vice hidden in shady back rooms into the hottest game on the planet. Where some of the World Series's simple charms have been lost, they have been replaced by a complicated human drama, huge in scope, where luck and skill forge an exciting and unpredictable intersection.  Simply put, there is nothing else like it in the world. "If my old pal Benny Binion were still with us, he'd wet his britches seeing that his little publicity stunt in 1970 between a few Texans became a tournament with over $25 million in prize money. If you've ever played a hand of Texas Hold'em, you won't want to miss this book."
--Amarillo Slim Preston, 1972 World Series of Poker champion and author of Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People
"Reading this book is like having Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, and every single one of the World Series of Poker champions over to the house for dinner, a beer, tall tales, and a fine game of No Limit Texas Hold'em."
-- Phil Gordon, coauthor of Poker: The Real Deal and cohost of Celebrity Poker Showdown

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Grotenstein is a writer and professional poker player living in Los Angeles.  He is the coauthor (with Phil Gordon) of Poker: The Real Deal.
 
Storms Reback is a writer and professional poker player living in Austin, Texas.  A former sports reporter and columnist for The Jackson Hole News, he recently completed his first novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
TWO THE HARD WAY

Johnny Moss was not a handsome man. He was almost entirely bald, while failing eyesight towards the end of his life required he wear a preposterously thick pair of glasses. Without them, his face lacked any distinguishing features, unless you count its utter lack of expressiveness. So impassive was Moss, he often fooled others into thinking he had fallen asleep at the table.

If his bland appearance won him no friends, his brusque disposition helped to lose them. In the words of frequent rival Thomas Amarillo Slim Preston, Johnny had the type of personality that was well suited to a poker game but not much else. Fortunately for Moss, after discovering that he not only had the ultimate poker face but also an unparalleled capacity for winning at the game, he rarely had to do much else.

Life hadn’t always been so easy. Shortly after Johnny’s birth in 1907, his father John Hardie Moss lost his job as sheriff’s deputy in a small West Texas town and was forced to take the family on the road in search of work. A burst appendix killed Johnny’s mother along the way. John Hardie eventually found a job as a lineman for the telephone company in Dallas, but lost it when a falling pole crushed his right leg, rendering him a cripple. To help put food on the table, Johnny dropped out of elementary school to work full-time selling newspapers for a penny apiece. What free time he had he spent studying the only men who seemed to be prospering in his dirt-poor neighborhood—the back-alley dice shooters, the gamblers who played dominoes at the parlor on Ackard Street, and the poker players at the Otter’s Club, a private house of chance—and he eventually mustered the nerve to join their freewheeling fraternity. It quickly became clear that the gambler’s lifestyle, marked by long, odd hours and an ever-fluctuating bankroll, was in no way compatible with that of the working stiff, a point that John Hardie made to his son in the form of an ultimatum: quit gambling or quit his job.

Daddy, if I don’t work, how can I get money to gamble?

Son, that’s what gamblers got to figure out.

In 1923, at the age of sixteen, Johnny found a temporary compromise. The owner of the Otter’s Club began paying him three dollars a day to act as a lookout man in the poker room, protecting the players from cheaters. The education he would receive proved far more valuable than the salary.

The owner of the place was the best draw [poker] man around and the first thing you know, I learnt myself to be a real fine draw player, recalled Johnny. I hung on there for about three years and then moved on to the Elks Club ’cause there was some shrewd players in there who could learn me hold’em. I lied about my age to get into the place. It was two-dollar-limit hold’em. During the day I made enough money at the domino parlors to support my hold’em lessons at night.

His schooling was briefly disrupted when he caught the eye of Virgie Ann Mouser, the girl who worked behind the counter of the neighborhood drugstore. They were married after a six-month courtship. As wives of gamblers are wont to do, she quickly tired of his late nights and the unpredictability of his financial situation and insisted he find regular work. Hoping to appease her, he took a job driving a truck for the National Biscuit Company during the week, relegating his poker playing to the weekends; but the arrangement only upset her further, as she now saw him even less. It wasn’t long before she issued a familiar ultimatum. Choose one: the job or the gambling. After taking a long motorcycle ride to think it over, Johnny gave his notice at the biscuit company. Confident that his skills at the poker table would pay their bills, he took to the road as a professional player.

It was the perfect time and place to do so. Not unlike the gold and silver rushes that sustained the Western cardsharps of the previous century, an oil boom had transformed much of Texas into a gushing well of loose money. Looking to separate these overnight millionaires from their newfound wealth, an entire generation of gamblers faded the white line, traveling the state highways that connected roughneck boomtowns, such as Tyler, Longview, Kilgore, Breckenridge, and Graham, in search of action.

The circuit was littered with dangers. Getting busted by the Texas Rangers was the least of a road gambler’s fears—cheaters and hijackers were commonplace. Moss took to carrying a .38 with the hammer removed, enabling him to pull the pistol out of his pocket that much faster. Occasionally, he even had to use it.

Like the time he noticed a peephole in the ceiling while playing in a poker game in an unfamiliar small town. So I pull out my gun, Johnny recalled, and said, ‘Now, fellas, do I have to go and shoot a bullet in the ceiling? Or are you going to send your boy down without any harm?’ Hell, they thought I was bluffing, he laughed. Ended up shooting the guy in his ass.

Other incidents were less light-hearted. Asked if he had ever killed a man, Moss flatly replied, I don’t know if he died.

The life of a road gambler came with its highs and lows, and it was often Virgie who took the brunt of such volatility. The pattern was set on their wedding night when Johnny, stuck in a poker game, pulled her engagement ring off her finger and used it as collateral to win a huge pot.

If’n ah hadn’t [allowed him to take the ring], Virgie later declared, Johnny would’ve ripped mah whole finguh off.

No occasion was too sacred to prevent him from gambling. The night before she was to deliver their first child he chose to play craps, losing all his ready cash in the process. Unable to pay for the room she had reserved at the local hospital, Virgie was forced to have the baby at home. Then there was the night Johnny won $250,000 in a particularly juicy poker game. Flush with cash, he instructed Virgie to start looking for a new house, but by the time she’d found one to her liking, it was too late. Johnny had already squandered his winnings.

Of his many setbacks the most devastating may have been when, during a single session, he lost $80,000 of credit, money he didn’t even have. With limited options, he contemplated skipping town to avoid the debt, but could not bring himself to actually do it. Contrary to popular belief, most gamblers of the old school valued honor above all and considered a handshake deal more binding than any written contract. Swallowing his pride, Johnny turned to the one person he knew could help him—his childhood pal Lester Ben Benny Binion. Understanding well the life of a road gambler, Benny not only loaned Johnny the $80,000 he needed to pay off his debt, but $20,000 on top of that so he’d have a bankroll big enough to get himself back in the game.
Benny Binion and Johnny Moss first met as paperboys in east Dallas, two street urchins with dreams of better days. While Johnny sought his fortune as a gambler, Benny saw clearly the benefits of the other side of the equation—the house always wins.

Gone were the storied gambling saloons of the Old West, having fallen to the wave of moral reform that swept through the country at the dawn of the twentieth century. But while the reformers may have limited the means, they couldn’t quench the desire to gamble.

Benny grew up in Pilot Grove, a small Texas town near the Oklahoma border where gambling was an intricate part of everyday life. The men of Pilot Grove, writes Dallas historian Jim Gatewood, gambled with dice, on dominos, cock fights, greyhound races, bare-knuckle fights, card games, foot races, dog fights, elections, the weather, which tree a dove would land in—anything with an unknown element affecting the result.

A fight with a local bully intent on revenge spurred a teenage Benny to leave his hometown, eventually making his way to Dallas. As a tough kid who understood the principles of gambling, Benny soon found himself rubbing elbows with the informal league of gangsters who ran the city’s card games and dice parlors.

In his twenties, Benny started a numbers policy—an illegal neighborhood lottery—occasionally turning an extra dollar selling bootleg whiskey on the side. He ultimately chose gambling over liquor, driven as much by personal preference as the repeal of Prohibition: The bootlegging, to me, he’d later recall, was never no good.

He learned the ins and outs of running a craps game from Warren Diamond, a racketeer who for years operated a no-limit game out of the St. George Hotel, located, ironically, a stone’s throw from the Dallas County courthouse. In 1926, the twenty-two-year-old Benny severed relations with his mentor and started his own no-limit craps game in room 226 of the Southland Hotel. When the arrangement attracted too much heat, he turned it into a floating game that appeared wherever there was a thirst for action. Using specially designed tables that could be folded quickly into crates that, at least according to the labels on the outside, contained hotel beds, the entire operation could be packed up and moved to a new location with just a half-hour’s notice. These mobile casinos were, despite the humble trappings, the only real game in town—the birth of Las Vegas as we know it today was still a decade or two away—and Benny’s tables often attracted the likes of H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Howard Hughes, millionaires who weren’t afraid to gamble and, more important, lose vast sums of money. At the height of his success, Benny earned as much as $1 million a year from the operation.

With financial security came the desire to keep it. Like Johnny Moss, Benny occasionally had to resort to violence to protect himself and his assets. His motto was, from a very early age, Do your enemies before they can do you.

I ain’t never killed a man who didn’t deserve it, he often bragged.

In 1931, he shot ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0312348355
• ISBN 13: 9780312348359
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320