It’s an abrupt change of career course for me, but a challenge I already find both energising and rewarding. The chance to lead poker’s first governing body, and to work towards poker’s international recognition as a skilled ‘mind-sport’ rather than just another form of gambling, was an offer I couldn’t refuse. The consequences for the game we all love, and so for its players and administrators, are potentially monumental.

At the Lausanne ceremony, the UK Poker Federation was one of seven founder-member countries to take the long overdue initiative of establishing the global governing body poker has never had – and so urgently needs. It was appropriate that the ceremony took place in a venue symbolizing international sports cooperation; Lausanne is the home of the International Olympic Committee and many other international sports federations.

Pictures of the event, plus encouraging editorial support from Nic Szeremeta, can be found in Poker Europa’s coverage. http://www.pokereuropaonline.com/pdfs/june/IPF.pdf

The IFP’s founder members are…

• Danish Poker Federation (Denmark)
• Fédération Française des Joueurs de Poker (France)
• Stichting Nederlandse PokerBond (Holland)
• Russian Sport Poker Federation (Russia)
• Ukrainian Poker Federation (Ukraine)
• UK Poker Federation (UK)
• Associacao Brazileira de Poker (Brazil)

Negotiations with 20 other countries are well advanced, and many of them are expected to join the Federation over the coming weeks. We hope to reach a critic mass of 75-100 member-countries during the IFP’s first three or so years.

Poker has developed beyond all predictable measure over the past decade, and has now become a major international ‘mind-sport’. But the international coordination and representation of the game has not matched the speed of its expansion. There are still conflicting levels of acceptability around the world.

IFP will be making an international case for poker as a ‘mind-sport’. We have already had encouraging conversations in Paris with the International Mind Sports Association, who organise the Mind Sports Games alongside the Olympics every four years. If we can achieve membership, it will be a huge step towards poker becoming legal everywhere, and eliminating the restraints many countries are imposing on the game.

The Federation will also draw together all the arguments, evidence and testimony gathered around the world by national federations or their equivalents which have been called upon to contest restrictive laws or punitive taxation.

IFP will also be working to standardize tournament rules internationally, as well as compiling international rankings alongside each member-nation’s own national rankings. These will be used to determine the teams sent to IFP-approved events, which will include annual world championships – both team and individual. IFP also plans to stage international team poker events along the lines of golf’s Ryder Cup, tennis’s Davis Cup etc.

Above all, IFP will be working to demonstrate that poker is a ‘mind-sport’ of strategic skill, not a mere game of chance, and so to win it exemption from gambling legislation throughout the world, and place it on a level of respectability and acceptance alongside bridge, chess etc.

Currently under construction, a state-of-the-art website will soon be launched for IFP. This will provide a forum for international debate on all aspects of poker, as well as the latest poker news from all over the world. Its custom-built TV channel will also offer footage of numerous TV poker events past and present.

This new site will, I regret, replace Biggerdeal.com – which has, for reasons you will now understand, been dormant these last few months. I apologise for that; but my new full-time job trying to win poker the legal acceptance it deserves around the world – and organising international tournaments to celebrate its newfound respectability – will surely make it all worthwhile.

Thanks for your company during this site’s two exciting years of existence, and to all who have made it such a fun place to write and play. Before long, anyone looking for BiggerDeal.com will be bounced straight on to the new IFP website – where I and my BiggerDeal comrades, and many more, will still be writing.

So see you there … where you will receive regular reports on IFP’s efforts to free poker from the cruel and unusual legal constraints it still suffers all over the world. Plus details of the exciting international tournaments we plan to stage.

And so, one last time – May the flops be with you !

If you’re interested in the IFP and its work, or want to get involved – especially if you’re from a country which has yet to affiliate – please email the Federation’s executive director, Oliver Chubb, at execdir@intfedpoker.com, copy to me at president@intfedpoker.com

Earlier, at the Fair Park Coliseum, Elvis had signed girls’ breasts, arms, foreheads, bras, and panties. No one had ever seen anything like it. We had met Elvis’ first manager, Bob Neal, bass player Bill Black and guitarist Scotty Moore. They wanted us to bring some beer out to the Cotton Club. So we did. My meeting with Bob Neal in 1955 was to have great meaning in my future. I was 15.

The old scandal rag, Confidential, had a story about Elvis at the Cotton Club and the Fair Park Coliseum. It had a picture of the Cotton Club and told of Elvis’ unique approach to autographing female body parts. It said he had taken two girls to Mackenzie Park for a tryst in his Cadillac.

Elvis did several shows in Lubbock during his first year on the road, in 1955. When he first came here, he made $75. His appearance in 1956 paid $4000. When he arrived in Lubbock, Bob Neal was his manager. By the end of the year, Colonel Tom Parker had taken over. Elvis played the Fair Park Coliseum for its opening on Jan 6th with a package show. When he played the Fair Park again, Feb 13th, it was memorable. Colonel Tom Parker and Bob Neal were there. Buddy Holly and Bob Montgomery were on the bill. Waylon Jennings was there. Elvis was 19. Buddy was 18.

Elvis’ early shows in Lubbock were:
Jan 6th 1955, Fair Park Coliseum. Feb 13th. Fair Park, Cotton Club April 29 Cotton Club June 3: Johnson Connelly Pontiac, Fair Park October 11: Fair Park October 15: Cotton Club, April 10, 1956: Fair Park. Elvis probably played the Cotton Club on all of his Lubbock dates.

Buddy Holly was the boffo popular teenager of all time around Lubbock. The town loved him! He had his own radio show on Pappy Dave Stone’s KDAV, first with Jack Neal, later with Bob Montgomery in his early teens. KDAV was the first all-country station in America. Buddy fronted Bill Haley, Marty Robbins, and groups that traveled through. Stone was an early mentor. Buddy first met Waylon Jennings at KDAV. Disk jockeys there included Waylon, Roger Miller, Bill Mack, later America’s most famous country DJ, and country comedian Don Bowman. Bowman and Miller became the best known writers of funny country songs.

All these singer-songwriters recorded there, did live remotes with jingles, and wrote songs. Elvis went to KDAV to sing live and record the Clover’s "Fool, Fool Fool" and Big Joe Turner’s "Shake Rattle and Roll" on acetates. This radio station is now KRFE, 580 AM, located at 66th and MLK, owned by Wade Wilkes. They welcome visitors. It has to be the only place that Elvis, Buddy, Waylon, and Bill Mack all recorded. Johnny Cash sang live there. Waylon and Buddy became great friends through radio. Ben Hall, another KDAV disc jockey and songwriter, filmed in color at the Fair Park Coliseum. This video shows Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Elvis, Buddy and his friends.

Wade’s dad, Big Ed Wilkes, owner of KDAV, managed country comedian Jerry Clower, on MCA Records. He sent Joe Ely’s demo tape to MCA. Bob Livingston also sent one of the tapes I gave him to MCA. This led to a contract. Pappy Dave Stone, the first owner of KDAV, helped Buddy get his record contract with Decca/MCA.

Another disc jockey at KDAV was Arlie Duff. He wrote the country classic, "Y’all Come." It has been recorded by 19 well-known artists, including Bing Crosby. When Waylon Jennings and Don Bowman were hired by the Corbin brothers, Slim, Sky, and Larry, of KLLL, Buddy started to hang around there. They all did jingles, sang live, wrote songs, and recorded. Niki Sullivan, one of the original Crickets, was also a singing DJ at KLLL. Sky Corbin has an excellent book about this radio era and the intense competition between KLLL and KDAV. All the DJs had mottos. Sky Corbin’s was "lover, fighter, wild horse rider, and a purty fair windmill man."

Don Bowman’s motto was "come a foggin’ cowboy." He’d make fun of the sponsors and get fired. We played poker together. He’d take breaks in the poker game to sing funny songs. I played poker with Buddy Holly before and after he got famous. He was incredibly polite and never had the big head. The nation only knew Buddy Holly for less than two years. He was the most famous guy around Lubbock from the age of fourteen.

Niki Sullivan, an original Cricket, and I had a singing duo as children. We cut little acetates in 1948. We also appeared several times on Bob Nash’s kid talent show on KFYO. This was at the Midway Theatre. Buddy Holly and Charlene Hancock, Tommy’s wife, also appeared on this show. Larry Holley, Buddy’s brother, financed his early career, buying him a guitar and whatever else he needed. Buddy recorded twenty acetates at KDAV from 1953 until 1957. He also did a lot of recording at KLLL. Larry Holley said Niki was the most talented Cricket except Buddy. All of Buddy’s band mates and all of Joe Ely’s band mates were musicians as children.

Buddy and Elvis met at the Cotton Club. Buddy taught Elvis the lyrics to the Drifter’s "Money Honey". After that, Buddy met Elvis on each of his Lubbock visits. I think Elvis went to the Cotton Club on every Lubbock appearance. When Elvis played a show at the Johnson Connelly Pontiac showroom, Mac Davis was there. I was too.

The last time Elvis played the Fair Park Coliseum on April 10,1956, he was as famous as it gets. Buddy Holly, Sonny Curtis, Jerry Allison, and Don Guess were a front act. They did two shows and played for over 10,000 people. Those wonderful I.G. Holmes photos, taken at several locations, usually show Buddy and his pals with Elvis. Lubbock had a population of 80,000 at the time. Elvis was still signing everything put in front of him. Not many people could have signing women as a hobby.

Many of the acetates recorded at KLLL and KDAV by Buddy and others were later released, many as bootlegs. When Buddy Holly recorded four songs at KDAV, the demo got him his first record contract. It wasn’t just Lubbock radio that was so supportive of Buddy Holly. The City of Lubbock hired him to play at teenage dances. He appeared at Lubbock High School assemblies and many other places in town.

Everyone in Lubbock cheered Buddy Holly on with his career. The newspaper reports were always positive. At one teenage gig, maybe at the Glassarama, there was only a small crowd. Some of us were doing the "dirty bop". The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal had photos the next day showing people with their eyes covered with a black strip. Sonny Curtis mentions that in his song, "The Real Buddy Holly Story." When Buddy Holly and the Crickets were on the Ed Sullivan show, the newspaper featured that. The whole town watched.

Buddy was fighting with his manager Norman Petty over money before he died. They were totally estranged. Larry Holley told me that Norman said to Buddy, "I’ll see you dead before you get a penny." A few weeks later, Buddy was dead. When Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, it was headline news in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Over 1000 people attended the funeral on February 7, 1959. Buddy was only twenty-two years old. His widow, Maria Elena Holly, was too upset to attend. The pall bearers were all songwriters and musicians that had played with Buddy: Niki Sullivan, Jerry Allison, Joe B. Mauldin, Sonny Curtis, Bob Montgomery, and Phil Everly. Elvis was in the Army. He had Colonel Tom send a large wreath of yellow roses.

In 1976, I was managing the Joe Ely Band. They had recorded a yet-to-be-released album for MCA Records. I was in Nashville to meet with the MCA execs. They wanted Joe to get a booking contract and mentioned some unheard of two-man shops. Bob Neal, Elvis’ first manager, had great success in talent managing and booking. He sold his agency to the William Morris Agency, the biggest booking agency in the world, and stayed on as president of the Nashville branch.

I called the William Morris Agency and explained to the secretary that I did indeed know Bob Neal, as we had met at the Cotton Club in Lubbock, Texas when he was Elvis’ manager. He came right on the phone. I told him the Joe Ely Band played mostly the Cotton Club. He said that after loading up to leave there one night, a cowboy called Elvis over to his car and knocked him down. Elvis was in a rage. He made them drive all over Lubbock checking every open place, as they looked for the guy. Bob Neal invited me to come right over.

Bob Neal played that now classic demo tape from Caldwell Studios and offered a booking contract. We agreed on a big music city strategy: Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, London, and Austin. Bob drove me back to MCA and they could not believe our good fortune. The man had been instrumental in the careers of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Johnny Rodriguez, and many others. The William Morris Agency sent the Joe Ely Band coast to coast and to Europe, first to front Merle Haggard, then on a second trip to front the Clash. The original Joe Ely Band were Lloyd Maines, steel guitar, Jesse Taylor, electric guitar, Steve Keeton, drums, and Gregg Wright, bass. Ponty Bone, on accordion, joined a little later. The band did the shows and the recording. The recorded tunes were originals from Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

However, some of the William Morris bookings led to zig-zag travel over long distances to so-called listening clubs. When I complained to Bob Neal, he’d recall the 300 dates Elvis played back in 1955. Four guys in Elvis’ pink Cadillac. When Buddy made some money, he bought a pink Cadillac. Joe Ely bought a pristine 1957 pink Cadillac that was much nicer than either of their pink Cadillacs.

When I’d hear from Bob Neal, it was very good news, especially the fantastic, uniformly-rave, album and performance reviews from newspapers and magazines everywhere. Time Magazine devoted a full page to Joe Ely. The earliest big rock critic to praise Joe Ely was Joe Nick Patoski, author of the definitive and critically-acclaimed Willie Nelson: An Epic Life. After one year, MCA was in turmoil. Big stars were leaving or filing lawsuits. We were told they might not renew the option to make a second record. MCA regularly fired everyone we liked. Bob Neal thought the band should go to Los Angeles for a one-nighter.

He booked the Joe Ely Band into the best-known club on the West Coast, the Palomino, owned by his dear pal Tommy Thomas. We alerted other record companies. They drove back and forth to L.A. in a Dodge Van to play only one night. Robert Hilburn, the top rock critic for the Los Angeles Times, came with his date, Linda Ronstadt.

The Joe Ely Band loved to play music. They started on time, took short breaks, and played until someone made them stop. Robert Hilburn wrote that Ely could be, "the most important male singer to emerge in country music since the mid-60s crop of Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson". The long review with pictures took up the whole fine arts section of the biggest newspaper in the country. Hilburn praised each of the band individually. He was blown away when they just kept playing when the lights came on at closing time. After that, several major record companies were interested.

The last time I saw Bob Neal was at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco on February 22, 1979. Little Pete, a black dwarf who was always around Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, was travelling with the band. To open the show, Little Pete came out and announced, "Lubbock, Texas, produces the Joe Ely Band!" Then he jumped off the elevated stage and Bo Billingsley, the giant roady, caught him. Bob Neal, the old showman that had seen it all, just loved that.

My point, however, is not mere pedantry, though I concede it may seem that way. The concept I have in mind is variance, one with which most online players will be all too familiar. Many people contend that the fluctuation is the fun of poker, and what makes the game so great. ‘Anyone can win and anyone can lose’, they might say. One would suppose that all the people who do say this are either running good, or have no reliance on income generated from poker. Or they are dangerously insane. What variance does do, however, is mean that more players are willing to play the game, as there is always a chance of them winning, even against brilliant players. It is this aspect that ensures profitability for the cardsharps; who would want to play against superior players if they were always going to lose? The interesting thing though, is that some of the better players tend to not see it in this way. The megalomaniacal ramblings of Phil Hellmuth illustrate a truly unbalanced approach to this most trying aspect of the game.

I am certain that many will have watched, some with glee, as the pantomime villain of poker had his aces outdrawn by Tom ‘Durrrr’ Dwan’s pocket tens in the National Heads-Up Poker Championship not too long ago. “What happens if I get it all in with aces and he hits a ten again?” contended Hellmuth when asked if he would accept Dwan’s challenge and play a heads-up cash game with him, compounding his ungraciousness with an apparent ignorance of the way of the poker world to create what for most poker players would be a ridiculous remark, but for him appears commonplace. This is indeed a comment that should never be uttered by a professional poker player, as there is no real answer to that question that can define anything that Hellmuth shouldn’t already know.

I will, however, clarify what would indeed happen if Dwan were to outdraw him, i.e. that Hellmuth, of course, would lose his buy-in. After playing the same scenario with aces against tens multiple times, Hellmuth would win somewhere quite close to 80.749% of the time; pretty good odds for an even money shot. However, the difference between 80% and 100% is all too often forgotten in poker. I believe it to be a fair assumption to make that most players feel righteous in victory and unlucky in defeat against an underpair, but this is not the correct way of thinking in such a position. The truth is that, unless one player is drawing dead or two players have the same hand with equal covering of suits, the correct result never happens in poker. If Dwan had lost, he would in fact have been unlucky, as he was in fact due just over 19% of the pot. Equally, if Hellmuth had won the pot, he would have run over expectation, albeit on a sample that does not lend itself too well to scrutiny and deliberation. Shockingly, what must be pointed out to the ‘Poker Brat’ is that if someone were to win with aces one hundred percent of the time over a reasonable sample, they would be the luckiest player in the world. It simply doesn’t happen.

Everybody who plays poker will have known many times when they end a session in the red, having played well and simply been unlucky. We have reached a stage of enlightenment where it has been proven several times that shit does indeed happen –and, I would venture, quite often. In the words of a man discussing (arguably) more important things, ‘What is to be done’? Outside playing more hands, reducing short-term variance is something that can be achieved, but at the risk of reducing win-rate. In fact the solution is simple, if you do not want to handle the dreaded fifteen buy-in downswing: tighten up. If you are always shoving tens and above pre-flop when given a decent opportunity, you can be sure that a lot of the time you will come up against better hands, and very rarely worse. What makes this move profitable against some players is the fold equity you have, and the equity against big aces that they may be prepared to call off. This is therefore a high variance move, as there is marginal profitability in a move that risks an entire stack.

Being prepared to shove fewer hands will probably subtract from your profits, but add a couple of extra years to your life. However, before you take this to heart, it is important to see the positives of a high-variance style as well. Opening up the range of hands you are willing to play will mean that you can find spots of increasing profitability, and give you the opportunity of running over the table. It will tend to improve your game and, in all honesty, playing under eighteen percent of your hands is quite boring.

Ideally, one should simply accept variance as a fundamental part of the game, and a strategy with a lower standard deviation may well be counterproductive in the long term. The most profitable move can always be justified as the correct one; however there may be merit in avoiding these tough situations in an attempt to blunt the swings. There is a trade-off here between increasing profitability and reducing personal stress, and choosing the former is not always suitable for everybody. For those who can truly handle the ups and downs, might I recommend some 2-7 lowball triple draw?

In a field thinned by Christmas parties and there’s-a-lot-of-it-about – gastric flu prevented even our resident whiz-kid Oliver Chubb from playing in his own eponymous tournament –there was high percentage of American starters, not to mention a German or three.

The atmosphere was as convivial as always, with good-natured banter flowing on all sides amid chivalrous chat-box compliments. As his own contribution your correspondent put in his worst performance ever – second to hit the rail after less than ten minutes, when a queen-high flop saw my A-Q succumb to ValleyGyrl’s flopped set of fives.

There were four Americans at my table, and four in the last nine – always assuming that the BatesMotel, supposed home of psycho1950, is somewhere in the States? Psycho finished in 8th place, one ahead of staropram of Halesowen.

Seventh place went to Kartajana of Barrowford, sixth to SilverNines of Daventry, and fifth to ArizonaPat of Phoenix, my nemesis last month.

Out on the bubble was poor notknell of the Bay Area, who promptly revealed it was his sixth bubble in a row, then declared: ‘I’m going to leap off a building’. We can only hope he is not a man of his word.

After a long tussle for second place, USRaider of Austin, Texas, went out in third, leaving fredfosterOE of Barnet to battle it out with Birmingham FC supporter bullnose, whose full house aces won him this month’s title on the first hand after the dinner break.

Thanks to all for playing, and happy hols to all of you from all of us!

The cards were barely out for the first hand before Tuesday Night Game regular QuackQuack quipped “Are father and son allowed at the same table, Tony?” Sam Holden had indeed been drawn across from our patriarch, who rose to the bait: “Don’t worry, he won’t be sitting down until 8.45 and I can assure you he’s in a different house”. An hour later, and now assured of the game’s integrity, the rest of the players could take the following jokey exchange with Sam with a pinch of salt: “Sam, you’re not supposed to raise on MY big blind!” “Oh yeah, sorry Pops!”

The Poker Stars Random Number Generator was in a generous mood last night. Ten hands into the tournament, Plaice flopped a set of jacks, played it fairly slowly and improved to quads on the turn. Barely a few hands later we saw ArizonaPat betting modestly into a board of 5 hearts. Tony read this for a lone big heart, I for a naked steal. We were both way off base. Pat’s probing bet was called and he gleefully turned over a 9 high straight flush. With only four tables active and 15 minutes since the off, we were well on our way to a record number of monster hands.

Forty-five minutes in,, the BiggerDeal crew were struggling. Richard Whitehouse barely had a chance. Every time he had a piece of a flop he was beaten, and when he finally picked up a sizable pair about 30 hands into the tournament, he ran into pocket kings. Exit Whitehouse 34th of 34. I had already had an elbow in the ribs from Holden. “Make sure you put down that I was card dead for the first hour!” Indeed Tony had barely seen a playable hand and was languishing around the 1k mark. As was the stack in front of the empty Sam Holden seat. The only good news was that our eponymous password hero Peter Alson (aka Mortallock) was sharing the chip lead with dinodog79.

Fortunately Sam arrived soon after and steamed heavily into the first pot he played. Perhaps the table hadn’t noticed the “sitting out” graphic below his avatar and would assume he was a rock? He picked up a pot uncontested, folded the next and steamed heavily into the third, winning uncontested again. Ten minutes into his tournament he had doubled his stack without showing a hand and it was only this aggressive stack-building that helped him survive a brutal flush vs flush shortly before the first break.

Early in the second session, Tony managed to delay the inevitable by coming over the top of a late-position steal with AQo. He was called by 34o and the ace high held up. Still, he was at least one double up from the top of the Medium M zone so when he saw a K high flop with K2 on his big blind, an aggressive play was mandatory. Leading out for all his chips, Tony was called in three places by a flush draw, middle pair and (alas) a king with a higher kicker. The best hand won the day and ArizonaPat claimed the bounty by eliminating Tony and moving up to the top few in the leaderboard.

Sam could carry the Holden standard for only another half an hour. The blinds were beginning to put all but the biggest stacks under pressure. Sam called a raise from the blinds with QTo and was moderately happy to see a KTx flop. He checked to the preflop raiser who took a long time to peel off a free turn. The J on fourth street gave Sam an open-ender to go with his second pair but also, alas, made an unbeatable Broadway straight for MastahPL. After the understandable all-in, Sam’s only chance was one of the three remaining aces for a split pot. None was forthcoming and the Holden dynasty’s last hope busted out a respectable 14th of 34.

It did not take long to move from 14 players to the final 3. MastahPL went on a rampage, doubling up with Pocket Rockets, winning a huge pot with ace high against a flush draw and out-drawing Losbert’s KK overpair with his top pair. Silvernines kept pace, spiking a brutal king after ending up all-in with cowboys against a pair of aces, then hitting his ace overcard when all in with a nut flush draw.

With only three players remaining and such large blinds, one or two stolen pots were enough to seize the chip lead. First Mortallock was leading the pack, then SilverNines, then MastahPL. Play was cagey but smart and probing; one clash of solid hands was sure to end up all-in. Around 10.15pm we saw a standard steal raise but this time a re-raise and two calls. The three hands were revealed as KQ vs KJ vs KT. MastahPL’s highest kicker was good enough and he began the heads up against Bigger Deal’s own Mortallock with a modest chip lead.

The heads-up was epic. With barely 50 big blinds on the table one would have guessed 10 minutes, maybe 20. Forty-five minutes later we had not even seen either player all-in. MastahPL had managed to build to a commanding 4:1 chip lead, but could not find a way to separate Mortallock from his remaining few Big Blinds. Finally he had the cards, and the cunning, to do just that. MatsahPL limped on the small blind and Mortallock lobbed in his remaining 4 big blinds before the flop. The call was instantaneous, and gleeful. The trap was sprung, and no amount of cheering from his two BiggerDeal buddies could help Mortallock’s K4o survive against MastahPL’s Pocket Rockets. Our congratulations Mastah, a most brilliant coup.

Final Table:

• 9th: dinodog79 (Linwood)
• 8th: ProsperityHB (Northampton)
• 7th: losbert (Leicester)
• 6th: Califnaughti (Redding)
• 5th: Ghostway (Spalding)
• 4th: Kartajana (Barrowford) – $34
• 3rd: SilverNines (Daventry) – $51
• 2nd: Mortallock (NYC) – $102
• 1st: MastahPL (Abingdon) – $153

Next month’s tournament will be on Tues 16 December. Same time (8pm UK time), same place (PokerStars,com, via panel at top of our home page). Password (y-e-s!) : OChubb.

Nephew of the late, great Norman Mailer, Peter is the author of the terrific poker narrative Take Me To The River, and co-author with Nolan Dalla of the classic biography of Stuey ‘The Kid’ Ungar, One of a Kind (UK title : The Man Behind the Shades).

An earlier incarnation of his gambling self also wrote the entertaining memoir Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie. I first got to know Peter while living and writing Big Deal in 1988-9, when he wrote the definitive profile of then world champ Johnny Chan in Esquire magazine. We have remained firm friends ever since, so it is incumbent upon me to remind you that all his books are available at amazon.com.

As you can see from the panel at the top of our home page, PAlson is the (case-sensitive) password for this month’s Tuesday Night Game on PokerStars.com, starting at 8pm (UK time, 1500 EST).

That’s the good news. The less good is that, thanks to the credit crunch, we are no longer able to boost the prize money. But I get a sense that most regular players turn up for the fun – and the prestige of winning – more than the cash, which is anyway modest by online standards. So I do hope as many of you as possible will still be taking us on.

I will embarrass myself, as usual, by playing under my own name, as will other bloggers from this site. And the entry fee is little more than the equivalent of a fiver!  So hurry, hurry while seats last. The entry fee for the tourney is $10 plus $1. It’s a No-Limit Hold’em freezeout; the blinds start at $10-20 and increase at a stately pace, with occasional five-minute breaks, and we generally reach the final table around midnight, wrapping it up by 1 a.m. or so (GMT).

Ten percent of starters get into the money, and there is a really good atmosphere throughout. Much friendlier than most such tournaments, with a good deal of merriment in the chat boxes, usually at my expense. There is also a signed book for the lucky (by definition) player who knocks me out.

To play, you first have to download the PokerStars.com software onto your laptop, PC or Mac. If you don’t already have it then it is easily obtained via the tourney panel at the top of our home page, or by visiting the Bigger Deal Download page  and clicking on FREE POKER DOWNLOAD.   Then you must open an account (if you don’t already have one), and deposit a few dollars – a minimum of $11 to enter the tournament.

To register for The Tuesday Night Game tournament, just log in to PokerStars.com and up the top of its home, or ‘lobby’ page, click on the green button reading TOURNEY. Seven options appear across the top under the ‘Tourney’ button; click the one at the right reading PRIVATE, then scroll down to Nov 18th at 1500 (because it’s listed as EST) and double-click on ‘The Tuesday Night Game’.   Click register and you will be asked for the password, which this month is PAlson (all one word, case sensitive). Entry closes one minute before the tournament is due to begin.

It’s important to note that the password changes each month, for each event, and this will always be displayed on the banner at the top middle of our home page.

Go get ’em / us ! 

And see you at the final table !

If the first version of poker arrived in the United States in the 1820s, imported by French sailors landing in Louisiana, it took another hundred and fifty years for ‘community card’ variants to catch on. Then, just as the poker revolution was catching fire in the early 21st Century, a Texan dealt a lethal blow to the game invented in his home state.

On 13 October 2006 – Friday the Thirteenth, or ‘Black Friday’ as it soon became known in the poker world – President George W. Bush signed into law an outrageous piece of legislation that at least temporarily crippled online poker in the US. The ‘Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act’, which rendered it illegal to transfer funds between online gaming sites and financial institutions from banks to credit card companies, had been cynically sneaked through Congress in the early hours of Saturday 30 September 2006, on the last vote before both Houses rose for the mid-term elections.

In a nakedly opportunist move, apparently designed to appease the religious right and other fundamentalist voters, Senate majority leader (and then presidential hopeful) Bill Frist attached the anti-gaming act to the completely unrelated ‘Safe Ports Act’, a ‘war on terrorism’ measure which passed on a mere voice vote. It made little difference to US politics – the Republicans lost control of the House, anyway – but it dealt a lethal blow to online poker, which the legislation treated as a game entirely of luck, like craps or roulette.

As far as Texas hold’em was concerned, the wretched Bush acquiesced in this fundamental assault upon a game of supreme skill invented in (and indeed named after) the state of which he had once been Governor. The consequences are still with us, perhaps to be resolved by the next occupant of the White House. The first was to see the number of entrants in the world championship event of the 2007 World Series of Poker fall for the first time in the event’s thirty-eight-year history.
Nine months later, nonetheless, on 11 May 2007, the Texas State Legislature formally passed Resolution 80(R) HCR 109, declaring:

WHEREAS, The popularity of the poker game Texas Hold’em has increased dramatically over the past several years, and each day untold numbers of peope throughout the world play this exciting game of skill, intuition and good old-fashioned luck; and

WHEREAS, A true phenomenon of our time, Texas Hold’em has taken the world by storm, captivating countless card enthusiasts with its deceptively simple format; whether betting and bluffing across casino tables and kitchen tables, raising and folding in the virtual world of online card rooms, or moving ‘all-in’ at charity poker tournaments, poker players everywhere have embraced this fascinating and challenging game; and

WHEREAS, The game’s invention dates back to the early 1900s when it is traditionally held that the first hand of the popular card game was dealt in the city of Robstown, and from there it travelled northward in the hands of ‘rounders’ and up the sleeves of cardsharps who quickly recognized the game’s potential for mass appeal; and

WHEREAS, Poker legends such as Crandell Addington and Doyle ‘Texas Dolly’ Brunson helped further popularize the game in and around Texas in the 1950s, and they and others eventually brought Texas Hold’em to Las Vegas, where it was first played at the Golden Nugget casino in 1967; three years later, the inaugural World Series of Poker was held at the Horseshoe Casino, featuring no-limit Texas Hold’em to determine the world champion, and that annual tournament has continued to grow in both size and stature with each passing year; and

WHEREAS, The popularity of hold’em has no doubt been spurred by the advent of online gaming and by the broadcast of televised poker tournaments, most notably the World Series of Poker’s ‘Main Event’, a $10,000 no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament that attracts top poker professionals, talented amateurs, celebrities, and poker wannabes from around the globe hoping to become the next world champion of poker; and

WHEREAS, It is said that Texas Hold’em takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master, and this telling statement underscores the high level of skill necessary to win consistently; a successful Hold’em player relies on reason, intuition and bravado, and these same qualities have served many Texans notable well throughout the proud history of the Lone Star state; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the 80th Legislature of the States of Texas hereby formally recognize Robstown, Texas, as the birthplace of the poker game Texas Hold’em.

There is no evidence beyond this eyebrow-raising document that Texas Hold’em dates back to the early 1900s; and nothing but ‘tradition’ to suggest that the first hand was dealt in the small, south-east Texas town of Robstown, a suburb of Corpus Christi in Nueces county. Robstown was not even founded until 1906, when it was named for a prominent son of Corpus Christi, Robert Driscoll.

Johnny Moss, never the most reliable of witnesses, claimed to have played Hold’em in the 1930s. In his forthcoming book The Story of Poker, James McManus will suggest that Hold’em arrived in Dallas, the ‘unofficial gambling capital’ of Texas, around 1925. ‘No one knows for sure where and when the first hand of hold’em was dealt,’ he has already written in Card Player magazine. ‘One plausible guess is that a dozen or so Texas ranch hands wanted to play a little stud, but found they had only one deck. The most creative cowboy must’ve got to thinking: If five cards were shared by all players, as many as twenty-three of them could be dealt two-card hands…’

McManus quotes Moss claiming to have played limit at the Elks Club and no limit at the Otters Club, both in Dallas, in the 1930s. But he also points out that, when the authoritative Oswald Jacoby on Poker appeared in 1940, it mentioned ‘no game called or resembling Hold’em’. The same goes for Foster’s Complete Hoyle, which appeared in 1963. Five years later, the A.D. Livingston who introduced the game to America in that 1968 issue of Life magazine, could not find a single reference to Hold’em, or even Hold Me (Darlin’), in his extensive collection of poker books.

But let the Texas legislators have their self-regarding moment in the sun; at least they called Hold’em a game of skill, thus belying the law enacted by their pal Bush – which was all but endorsed in the UK by an absurd court ruling (jn the Crown’s case against London’s Gutshot Club) adjudging poker to be a game of luck because the deck is shuffled before the deal. If Texas Hold’em is a game of luck, how come you see the same players at final tables month in, month out? How come so many expert players make a handsome living from the game?

Luck (or chance) is but one element of poker; much of the skill lies in knowing how to minimize it. That, among many other things, is what this book will attempt to teach you.

Extracted from Anthony Holden’s new poker strategy guide, HOLDEN ON HOLD’EM, published by Little, Brown on 6 November.

Texas Hold’em was introduced to Europe in the 1980s by the Irish bookmaker and poker entrepreneur Terry Rogers. Nicknamed the ‘Red Menace’ because of his ginger hair and bursts of belligerence, Rogers was one of the first Europeans to travel to Vegas each May for poker’s world series. At the 1980 event, he was the only bookmaker not to write off Stu ‘The Kid’ Ungar too soon, quoting him at 20-1 while all else were offering 100-1; Ungar went on to win the first of his three world crowns, beating Doyle Bruson in the heads-up.

Back in Ireland, Rogers founded the Eccentrics Club in Dublin, where the inaugural Irish Open tournament saw Colette (‘Collect’) Doherty sent to Vegas as the first European, man or woman, to play in the World Series’ main event. Another Eccentrics Club member, carpet millionaire J.J. ‘Noel’ Furlong, went on to win the world title in 1999. Before his death that year, Rogers handed control of the Irish Open to his friend and partner ‘Gentleman’ Liam Flood, who really deserves to share the credit for introducing Hold’em to Europe. The advent of poker on television saw Flood, another bookmaker and professional poker player, become a popular tournament director; as a player he was a finalist in the first two series of Channel 4’s Late Night Poker and won the $125,000 first prize in the 2007 Party Poker European Open.

Back in the US, the popularity of Hold’em was swiftly boosted by the advent of a tournament circuit, and the first few manuals offering tips on the game, by the likes of Brunson, David Sklansky, ‘Mad’ Mike Caro and Mason Mallmuth . In 1988 the game finally became legal in the casinos of southern California, spreading across the country to Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the early 1990s.

John Dahl’s 1998 movie Rounders also, undoubtedly, played its role in the growth of Hold’em. Starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton and John Malkovich, it also used the players themselves to recreate the famous showdown between Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel at the 1988 final table. The movie was the inspiration for the 2003 world champion, Chris Moneymaker, whose name alone – plus his amateur status, as in ‘If that guy can win it, anybody can’ – also triggered a poker boom symbolised by the sub-title of his 2005 memoirs: ‘How an Amateur Poker Player Turned $40 into $2.5 Million at the World Series of Poker’.

By then television had joined the internet in promoting Hold’em into the stratosphere, starting in Britain with the Channel 4 series Late Night Poker, which debuted in 1999; its pioneering format proved influential throughout the world, thanks to the system devised by the late Rob Gardner of seeing the players’ hole cards via a glass panel around the rim of the table. Across the Atlantic, the inventor of Transformer toys played a crucial role when he switched from chess to poker in his sixties because chess was giving him headaches; bored with ESPN’s coverage of the World Series, which simply pointed its cameras at a group of unhealthy-looking men playing cards, Holocaust survivor Henry Orenstein devised and patented the under-the-table camera, later known (because of its shape) as the ‘lipstick’ camera, which could also share the players’ hole cards with the viewer.

ESPN or CBS Sports had been airing short segments on the WSOP since 1979. But the capacity to see hole-cards, allied with snappy graphics keeping tally of the pot, changing odds and so on led to an explosion of poker on cable television that turned the leading players into celebrities, – even, in some cases, brands – whom the average Joe could find himself sitting down next to at a tournament. Joe’s liability, what’s more, was limited to the buy-in, which he could win in a low-entry-fee satellite, usually online. The new economics of poker were born, and the biggest beneficiary was that most telegenic of all card games, Hold’em, where the flop sits handily beside the sponsor’s logo.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Extracted from Anthony Holden’s new poker strategy guide, HOLDEN ON HOLD’EM, published by Little, Brown on 6 November.

Bill Boyd, Sid Wyman, Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson, ‘Sailor’ Roberts, Amarillo Slim, Jack Straus, Crandell Addington – nearly all the legendary players we have already met, with the notable exception of Major Riddle, were sooner or later accorded places in the Poker Hall of Fame established in 1979. As indeed was the toughest entrepreneur of them all, if not himself much of a player, Benny Binion – none too surprising, since Binion himself founded the Hall of Fame on a suggestion from his then poker manager, Eric Drache, as a marketing ploy for an annual tournament he started in 1970 called the World Series of Poker (WSOP). In 2005 Binion’s son and successor Jack was also enrolled in the Hall of Fame, for his role in maintaining and building the World Series through the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Today, thanks to the TV and online poker ‘boom’ of the early 21st Century, the WSOP has grown into a massive annual jamboree involving some 50,000 registered players from all over the world – almost 9,000 of whom paid (or won) the $10,000 entry fee to play in the 2006 ‘main event’, a ten-day No Limit Hold’em tournament whose winner is crowned world champion, with a first prize that year of $12 million, far the largest in all sport. Of the fifty-four events at the 2008 World Series, more than forty involved some form of Hold’em.

Back in 1970, the first WSOP at Binion’s ended in a steak dinner in the Sombrero Room, where the handful of participants were asked to vote on whom they considered the best all-round player. Down to a man, of course, each player voted for himself. ‘I couldn’t understand why the fuck anybody would want to vote,’ said Amarillo Slim. ‘We played for a lot of money, and that was the vote.’ So they were all asked to vote again, this time for the player they considered the best – apart from themselves. The answer came up Johnny Moss, who thus found himself elected the first official world champion of poker.

The following year the title was decided, as it has been ever since, by a knockout tournament (or ‘freezeout’), whose entry fee of $10,000 has remained unchanged since the third WSOP in 1972. In the 1980s Eric Drache transformed the event by coming up with the idea of the ‘satellite’ – a single-table, ten-player, $1,000-entry freezeout whose winner would play in the ‘main event’ for a mere thou; 1983 saw Tom McEvoy become the first world champion to have won his way into the event via this route.

By 1991 the first prize (won that year by local pro Brad Daugherty) had become a guaranteed $1 million; as of 2000, and the arrival of internet poker, rising young professionals like Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson and Carlos ‘The Matador’ Mortensen started to win first prizes in excess of a million. In the first few years of the 21st Century, through sheer force of numbers, the centre of gravity in the WSOP ‘main event’ has shifted from pros to amateurs, with each of the nine players to reach the final table becoming dollar millionaires – and that awesome first prize, by 2006, of $12 million.

Poker mythology gives Benny Binion the credit for launching the event that has done more than any other, before the launch of television’s World Poker Tour in 2003, to make Hold’em the world’s favourite poker game. But the honours should be shared with the man who gave Binion the idea – literally handed it him, at no charge, on a silver platter – by inviting him in 1969 to a ‘Texas Gamblers Reunion’ in Reno, Nevada. Among those present was, guess who, Crandell Addington.

Tom Moore was the reason that Hold’em had, in Addington’s well-chosen word, ‘gypsied’ its way from San Antonio to Reno, Nevada, en route to Las Vegas. In 1969 Moore staged the week-long ‘reunion’ to boost the slow season at his Holiday Hotel. The twenty or so players to show up included all the usual suspects: Moss, Preston, Brunson, Roberts, McCorquodale, Addington, ‘Puggy’ Pearson, Benny and Jack Binion. Even the legendary pool player Minnesota Fats came along for the ride – as did the notorious hit-man Charles Harrelson, a convicted contract killer, father of the actor Woody.

They had such a wild time at Moore’s riverside casino, playing a series of poker games across the different disciplines, as to nickname the event ‘The World Series of Poker’. The winner that first year was Crandell Addington – who never again managed to win the world title, once it was so called, but went on to finish in the top ten no fewer than eight times, a record unequalled as of 2007. The following year Moore sold his interest in the Holiday and passed the WSOP baton to his pal Benny Binion, who put his son Jack in charge. They invited the same dozen big-time poker players – plus a few more, including the amateurs ‘Doc’ Green and Curtis ‘Iron Man’ Skinner – to come to the Horseshoe in downtown Vegas for a few days in May and play the game in all its many forms. But the ‘main event’, from the very start, gave the world title to the winner of the Texas Hold’em freezeout.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Extracted from Anthony Holden’s new poker strategy guide, HOLDEN ON HOLD’EM, published by Little, Brown on 6 November.

Where once stood the Dunes now stands the Bellagio, opened in 1998 by the one-man force behind contemporary Las Vegas, Steve Wynn, who himself fired the cannon from his latest Strip resort, Treasure Island, that appeared to trigger the implosion of the Dunes – watched by millions on live television and since immortalised in the closing credits of Wayne Kramer’s 2003 movie The Cooler. So the spot where No Limit Hold’em was first played on the Strip is now the home of Vegas’ leading card-room – rivalled only by the sleek poker room Wynn opened in 2005 in the 215-acre, $2.7 billion Wynn, the eponymous hotel-casino he built after selling his Mirage chain to Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Grand group in 2000 for $4.4 billion.

It was in the Bellagio card room, in the first few years of this century, that the biggest cash-game in the history of poker was played. A Texas banker named Andy Beal challenged a group of professionals, who called themselves The Corporation, to play heads-up, fixed-limit Hold’em for stakes so high as to lift even them beyond their comfort zone. More than merely a gifted player, Beal was also a high-calibre mathematician, especially interested in such arcane mysteries of number theory as Fermat’s Last Theorem. At home in Dallas Beal wrote a custom-built poker programme through which he ran literally millions of hands, to calculate (and memorize) the odds in any given situation. To avoid giveaway ‘tells’, he attempted to eliminate his personality by donning wraparound shades and headphones to shut out distracting noise and all backchat. Then battle commenced, with the blinds gradually escalating to an astonishing $50,000-$100,000.

It lasted, on and off, for more than three years, with sessions where Beal would win as much as $12 million, others where the pros would win more. One of Beal’s edges was to get them to play at 7 a.m., not a starting-time favoured by many of the world’s top players. But most sessions would, of course, run to marathon lengths, giving the edge back to the pros, who could take over from each other while Beal played his long, lone game. In the end, if not by much, he finished a loser; but he is made to sound like a winner in Michael Craig’s thrilling account of the episode in his 2005 book The Professor, The Banker and The Suicide King (continued in Craig’s account of a brief revival of hostilities the following year in Bluff magazine, April-May 2006).

The ‘Corporation’ that responded to Beal’s challenge was led by Doyle Brunson – yes, that same ‘Texas Dolly’, by then in his seventies, who had sat down with Crandell Addington and others in search of ‘producers’ outside the Dunes showroom back in the Sixties. To make his point about those ‘producers’, Addington describes a memorable hand involving the aforementioned Major Riddle, the Dunes boss who is the stuff of many a Vegas legend, not least as the first casino owner to stage a topless cabaret on the Strip in 1957 (‘there was initial uproar in the State Legislature,’ according to the hotel’s official history, but ‘the show set a record for attendance in a single week at 16,000.’). As the first hand of the many to be played in this book, it contains several object-lessons for beginners.

On one hand, all but Texan Johnny Moss and Major Riddle folded, leaving a huge heads-up pot. Johnny was in the lead and never checked his hand; Riddle never hesitated to call Johnny’s bets from before the flop or after the river. When all the cards came out, the board was K-K-9-9-J. Moss moved in on Riddle, and Riddle called him. Moss rolled a pair of nines out of the hole for four of a kind. Major Riddle rolled a pair of deuces out of the hole. See what I mean about the five-card stud players and their learning curve? Riddle had a wired pair, and he was not about to lay them down, not realizing that he had the worst hand possible in this situation, and could not even beat the five cards on the board.

One of the other players, an Alabaman named Joe Rubino who specialized in Kansas City lowball, registered an objection as Moss scooped in the huge pot. Since Riddle could not beat the board with his pair of deuces, argued Rubino, he should be able to take back his last bet. ‘It didn’t take but a second,’ recalls Addington, ‘for Johnny to tell him that sometimes the board is the best possible hand in Texas Hold’em, and that his comment showed how little he knew about the game.’ Oh, and Moss also told Rubino a couple of things about ‘minding his own business when he was not involved in a pot.’

As the game caught on in Vegas, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the amount required to sit down at a No Limit Texas Hold’em table soared as high as $10,000 to $100,000 – the equivalent of $60,000 to $600,000 in 2005, when Addington was recalling those early days. By 1973, with the Dunes mired in perennial financial difficulties, Sid Wyman had moved across what was then Las Vegas Boulevard (now the Strip) to the Aladdin (now Planet Hollywood). Here Johnny Moss hosted a card-room spreading NLHE not just for the handful of local professionals, but for plenty of the ‘drop-ins’ on whom they fed. ‘It was so well attended,’ says Addington, ‘that games often ran for days at a time, and fortunes changed hands.’ Among the ‘drop-ins’ was, yes, Major Riddle, whose poor play cost him so much that he lost control of the Dunes to ‘parties represented by Sid Wyman’.

Riddle then acquired control of a Strip casino called the Silverbird (formerly the Thunderbird, subsequently the El Rancho), where in the late 1970s Brunson and Eric Drache were hosting high-stakes games including NLHE. In 1976 Johnny Moss had opened the first card-room on the Strip at its oldest casino, the Flamingo, while the late Chip Reese opened a bona fide card-room at the Dunes, as opposed to that showcase table outside the showroom.

Between them, these and other Vegas entrepreneurs not merely disproved the 1940s theory that gambling could never move from downtown Las Vegas to the remote, dusty, blisteringly hot stretch of desert that eventually became known as the Strip. They also showed that neither the Golden Nugget nor Benny Binion’s downtown Horseshoe Casino – the pride of Glitter Gulch, ‘where the real gamblers go’ – held a monopoly on poker in Las Vegas, least of all on Texas Hold’em – as the game which started life as ‘Hold Me, Darling’ had by now, perhaps inevitably, became known.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Extracted from Anthony Holden’s new poker strategy guide, HOLDEN ON HOLD’EM, published by Little, Brown on 6 November.