Youth Can Age You

"We were just about as poor as anyone could be without actually starving," Moss told Gambling Times Magazine writer John Hill. "There wasn't no time for going to school for any of us kids. It was a full-time job just getting enough for the family to eat."

In contrast, virtually all of today's successful young players grew up in middle-class or upper-middle-class environments. Many of them went to college—or did until they decided a degree wasn't going to advance their poker careers. They chose to become poker players as one might choose to become a doctor or a lawyer. "The world's got plenty of lawyers," says Huber. "What we need is a few more gamblers."

Reese, who won the high-low split championship in the 1978 World Series, is a prime example of the new breed. Scion of one of Dayton 's most respected families, a high school football star, a debating champion at Dartmouth and an economics major with a bright future in industry, Reese quit a $25,000-a-year job as a manufacturer's representative five years ago to play poker in Las Vegas . Last Nov. 1, in a changing of the guard full of significance, Reese took over for the venerable Moss as the manager of the poker room at the Dunes Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, where the best poker in town is played (except during the World Series at the Horseshoe and the Amarillo Slim Classic at the Hilton ). Reese drives a Mercedes 450 SL, lives in a suite of rooms at the Dunes and wouldn't think twice about winning or losing $25,000 in one evening of poker.

Nor are the gamblers in the highest-stakes games at the Dunes the same as those who played during Moss ' tenure. Most of today's regulars are 35 or under—people like Danny Robinson out of Ohio University , Eric Drache, who went to Rutgers , and Rod Pardey, a onetime bowling pro from Tacoma, Wash.

The new players don't see their poker playing as "gambling" in the way their older counterparts do. Sklansky sums it up succinctly. "What's most important," he says, "is that the best player is the most successful player. There is a high correlation between your ability and your reward." There is no talk of luck here, and whereas older players rely to a great extent on their gut instincts and years of experience turning cards, younger players don't just play poker, they study it like academicians. Mike Caro, for example, has spent hundreds of hours doing computer studies on various mathematical aspects of draw poker, at which he excels. Sklansky has performed similar studies for high-low split and other games.

While all players, including Caro and Sklansky, are quick to point out that psychology is much more important than mathematics in poker, the young pros nevertheless start from a sound mathematical base. Baldwin has become famous for psychological ploys and flamboyant bluffs, such as those he employed so successfully in the 1978 World Series; yet he is also a Life Master in bridge, and in his introduction to Sklansky's recent book on poker theory he suggests that "psychological maneuvers do you little good if you can't first evaluate your hands in light of the cards on the board, the money in the pot and other such technical factors." Berland, who won two World Series tournaments last year, agrees with Baldwin and maintains that some older players make bad calls simply because they do not know the elementary mathematics of a given betting situation.

Nearly all the older pros pay a great deal of homage to luck and superstition. They believe in "rushes," or hot streaks, when they are winning, and when they are losing they might blame anything at all—the chair they're sitting in, the deck being used or especially the innocent, underpaid house dealer. When he gets a string of bad hands, veteran pro Davie Singer has a habit of tearing up a $20 bill and throwing it away. "That was your tip," he growls at the dealer. And when he operated the poker room at the Dunes. Moss sometimes employed an even more powerful weapon: if he lost a couple of big pots, he simply fired the dealer on the spot.

There isn't a younger player who doesn't also "steam" occasionally and play crazily after a couple of bad deals. But he doesn't vent his anger on the dealer or anyone else. He blames only himself. "If you start losing every day," Reese says, "no matter how good you are, you're not playing unlucky; you're doing something wrong."

To these young players poker is basically a day-to-day job, but one that requires total dedication if you're to win in the long run. "You've got to have the desire to be a winner, to be No. 1," seven-card stud expert Pardey said one Sunday afternoon during last year's World Series. He was sitting in the sunny living room of his suburban Las Vegas home playing with his baby boy. His wife Sandy was in the kitchen preparing dinner, while his two stepchildren were playing outside. "But poker is just another sport like golf or baseball," Pardey went on. "It pays well if you work hard at it."

"The best player," Reese says, "is the one who gets up every day and plays good every single day, and doesn't steam or go goofy when he loses."