Youth Can Age You

Back in the early 1970s, the World Series of Poker was pretty much an annual reunion of the good old boys of the circuit. The king players with the motley monikers—Texas Johnny Moss, Amarillo Slim Preston, Sailor Roberts, Doyle (Texas Dolly) Brunson, Puggy Pearson, Jack (Treetop) Strauss and the rest of them—were all old friends, veterans of countless more-or-less clandestine high-stakes poker games throughout Texas and the South. Every year, for a few weeks in late April and May, they would gather around poker tables at Benny Binion's Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas to swap stories and jokes while, almost incidentally, they won tens of thousands of dollars from one another.

It was only natural that the reunions should be at the Horseshoe. Binion's place is an old-fashioned gambling hall pure and simple—no lounge show, no seminude revue, no superstar headliners like those at the glossy palaces along the Las Vegas Strip. Just good steak from Binion's Montana ranch, good chili and the highest gambling limits in town. If a man wants to bet $40,000 on a single roll of the dice, he can do it at the Horseshoe. What's more, silver-haired, ramrod-straight Binion, who opened the casino in 1951 and now, at the age of 74, spends most of his time holding court at a booth in the Sombrero Room while his sons Jack and Ted run the operation, is the undisputed doyen of Texas gamblers. Born in the first decade of the century on a farm in Grayson County, Binion spent his youth scraping together loose change and hustling and gambling on the sidewalks and back alleys of Dallas with his friends Johnny Moss and Chill Wills. He became a bootlegger during Prohibition, then a full-time gambler and eventually a guest at Leavenworth prison for three years (for tax evasion) in the 1950s before he settled into his present position as one of Las Vegas' most respected senior citizens and poker host par excellence.

In 1970, the first year of Binion's little get-togethers, the boys played poker informally and finally voted Moss, then 63, the world champion. The following year and every year thereafter the Binions organized a series of freeze-out tournaments to determine the world champion of each game—seven-card stud, lowball, razz, draw, high-low split and, biggest of all, no-limit hold 'em, a deceptively simple-seeming variation of seven-card stud in which all players use the same five exposed community cards in combination with their two hole cards to form the best five-card hand. Though the number of participants in the World Series increased steadily from year to year, the players at the final tables and the ultimate winners were nearly always the same gamblers who had been coming to the Horseshoe since the beginning of the decade. In the first seven years of the $10,000 buy-in, no-limit hold 'em tournament, which is the richest and most prestigious event, Moss was the winner twice, Brunson twice, and Preston, Pearson and Roberts once apiece. And they were all Texans except Pearson, who grew up in Tennessee.

Four years ago Brunson commented that he could not think of a top poker player who came from a well-to-do family or was under 30. A year later, in May 1976, a cherub-faced, curly-haired 25-year-old named Bobby Baldwin, out of Oklahoma State University (and hold 'em games in Oklahoma City), dropped into the Horseshoe and put down $10,000 to have a go at the hold 'em world championship. At the end of the first day of the three-day event he was the leader of the pack. A fluke, the old pros figured, and, indeed, Baldwin was the first of the remaining players to tap out on the final day. However, Tommy Hufnagle from Schwenksville, Pa., barely 30 and a Yankee to boot, lasted a good deal longer and finished third. "You got good moves—for a Yankee boy," winner Brunson told him.

In the World Series the following year, what had been a tentative foray by youth became an all-out attack. Baldwin returned to win the seven-card stud and the deuce-to-seven lowball world championships on consecutive days. Jeff Sandow, a 23-year-old from Trenton, N.J., a graduate of Syracuse University who has a master's degree in psychology, won the preliminary seven-card stud tournament. George Huber, a 30-year-old Vietnam veteran from Indianapolis, won the preliminary hold 'em tournament. David Sklansky, a 29-year-old mathematical whiz out of the University of Pennsylvania, finished second to Brunson in the high-low split world championship. And 27-year-old Bones Berland from Gardena, Calif., a sometime student at the University of Nevada, won the razz world championship and amazed everyone by finishing second, once again to the indomitable Brunson, in the no-limit hold 'em championship. It was no longer possible to ignore what was happening. "These younger players used to be soft as butter for us," Amarillo Slim observed, "but not anymore."

Nevertheless, most of the old pros were not yet convinced the new young players could hold their own in the vertiginous reaches of a no-limit game, which requires not just technical know-how but an ability to read opponents' hands with a high degree of precision, a keen sense of the value of marginal hands and the steel nerves to bluff enormous amounts of money. At five o'clock one morning last May, after a night playing a casual game of no-limit hold 'em with a $50,000 buy-in, just tuning up for the upcoming world championship, Brunson and another old hand named Crandall Addington were drinking coffee in the Sombrero Room, Brunson in a white sport shirt that billowed over his 300-pound bulk like a Bedouin tent, Addington in one of his habitual custom-tailored suits and ten-gallon hats. During the all-night hold 'em session, 27-year-old Dartmouth graduate Chip Reese had won about $20,000 and Baldwin had won almost as much.

"These young fellows, they're all fierce limit players," Brunson said. "Chip is probably the best, while Bobby's the best at no-limit. But most of them haven't had the experience at no-limit to be good at it yet, and maybe some just don't have the heart for it."

"Limit poker is a science," Addington said, removing a thin cigar from his mouth, "and these kids are scientists. But no-limit is an art. In limit you're shooting at a target. In no-limit the target comes alive and shoots back at you."

As fate would have it, the subsequent no-limit hold 'em world championship, which paid $210,000 to the winner, came down to a battle between the 41-year-old Addington—"the last of the old school," as he calls himself, though he has much in common with the new—and Baldwin, certainly the most thoroughly rounded of the new school, who has many affinities with the old. It was as though the poker gods had arranged for the argument that had grown up between the old school and the new to be settled by two of the best.

Matters did not look too promising for young Baldwin when a break was called at 8 p.m. on the unprecedented fourth day of the lengthy tournament, which had begun with 42 participants. He had $145,000 at that point to Addington's $275,000, and the dapper real-estate magnate and oil wildcatter from San Antonio had the reputation of being one of the toughest head-to-head players in any high-stakes game. Among the gamblers watching, Addington was the clear favorite.