House Of Cards Worth $220,000

On the sixth card Texas Dolly stared hard at Jesse Alto. Four cards face up and $40,000 in gray $500 chips lay stark against the green of the poker table. The four cards were the jack of diamonds, the 2 of hearts, the ace of spades and the 10 of diamonds, which had been the last to fall. The gamblers both had two hole cards. On the strength of his hidden cards—or was he bluffing?—Alto bet $80,000. It was getting late: a warm dawn was about to break in downtown Las Vegas, and Alto's raise was all the money he had left in the game.

Texas Dolly sighed. "O.K., baby," he said. Hunching forward, his massive shoulders rolling inside his dark brown sport shirt, he began pushing forward $20,000 stacks of gray chips. The bet was called, and there was one more card to be turned.

"What do you have, Jesse?" Texas Dolly asked. Because Alto had nothing left to bet, the hole cards could be turned over before the final one fell.

Alto flipped over an ace and a jack, both hearts. Matched with the four cards in the center of the table, they gave him two pairs, aces and jacks. His dark Lebanese face was blank.

"You've got me beat," Texas Dolly drawled. He revealed a 10 and a deuce, both spades. Another two-pair hand, but his pairs were too small. "Turn the last one over," he said looking across at the dealer. The dealer's right hand moved toward the deck.

Fifty-seven hours earlier, on May 14, 22 men had sat down at three tables in Bin-ion's Horseshoe club, where $1 million in $10,000 bills is on display behind a thick shield of Plexiglas, to begin the Seventh Annual World Series of Poker. All but three were full-time gamblers; 13 of them were Texans.

Each man needed $10,000 to sit in on the Series, and when a player's stake was gone, so was he. The last man left at the table would keep all the cash—$220,000. The game was hold 'em, which is no less Texan than the Alamo, and all it takes to play it well are a gunfighter's nerve, the endurance of a cattle drover and a drunken cowboy's respect for money on Saturday night.

The rules of the game, a volatile variation of seven-card stud, are simple. After two cards are dealt face down to each player, bets are made. Then three cards, called the flop, are dealt face up in the middle of the table. More bets are made. The sixth and seventh cards also are dealt face up, with betting after each. The player puts together his best five-card hand, using his two hole cards and the five community cards. Success is keyed to the bluff, armed robbery with an empty shotgun, and the trap, making your opponents think you are Gomer Pyle when you really are the 1st Marine Division.

"Played for high stakes, poker is brutal," says Crandall Addington, one of the 13 Texans, but after a highly successful five-year tour playing gin rummy, no longer a full-time gambler. A handsome, balding man who favors diamond stickpins and hand-rolled Brazilian cigars, Addington greatly fattened his gin rummy winnings on the commodities market. He now deals in San Antonio real estate. "After half a million years of man hunting man, we now do it in a socially acceptable manner," he says. "We play poker for fortunes."

A small game hunter when not trapping two-legged prey at cards, Junior Whited spent most of his first 19 years picking cotton in Texas. A burly man with a wide, pleasant face, thick sideburns and his hair slicked back in a pompadour, he looks as though he belongs in a stock car streaking around a track in North Carolina. He bought his first shoes when he was 10 years old, and lost them the next week, shooting craps with a cousin. A few days later Whited and his cousin played again. The cousin went home naked. The next year, still shooting craps, Whited won a grocery store from his uncle. His mother made him give it back. "It was just a little ol' store," Whited says.