Las Vegas, Nevada The Big Poker Freeze-Out

By John Skow

Players and rubberneckers are four hours into the big, no-limit World Series of Poker freeze-out here at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. Maybe 170 players are left of the 194 who began chasing the $835,000 first prize with $10,000 each in chips. From three tables away, a raspy Texas drawl cuts through the watery green air of Binion's cardroom. Amarillo Slim Preston is telling stories, fogging his opponents with rascally nonsense. Something about beating somebody in 312 straight games of gin rummy. Something about riding a camel through a casino in Marrakech. Preston is a tough, lanky, 61-year-old cattleman in jeans and a straw Stetson who won this tournament in 1972, and who collected $142,000 from a preliminary event here last week, enough to tide him over. He is wealthy from poker winnings, and not lacking in aggressive self-confidence.

The gods of poker are not impressed. Preston bumps a pair of queens, and the last $3,500 of his $10,000 stake, against what turns out to be a pair of kings. Now Slim is out of the action, and so is 83-year-old Johnny Moss of Odessa, Texas, a three-time champion with the smile of a crocodile. Earlier, Moss had said, "I like my chances better than anybody's. If a man can go high, I can go higher." Not this time.

The game is Texas Hold 'Em (no limit), a diamondback species of seven-card stud in which each player gets two cards down, and then five cards usable by all players are dealt face up; the first three at the same time, then the fourth, then the last. You can't bring in fresh money, so that when you run dry, you're gone, frozen out. The last two gunslingers left on the tournament's fourth day are firing from behind stacks worth a total of $1.94 million.

Best of all, for civilians with dreams of glory, anyone with $10,000 and a detectable pulse rate may enter. They won't let you sign up for Wimbledon, will they? Alas, poker is a pure gambling game only in the very short run. Beyond the quirk of a single hand, skill takes over and twirls its mustache. The trouble is that a single hand can run you out of town. Last year's winner, Phil Hellmuth Jr., 24, a tall, weedy youth whose soft face projects an unsettling expression of sweet decay, jukes and twitches to the music of his Walkman. He piles up a fortress of chips, then watches it disintegrate. The last of it backs two nines. He pulls a third nine, but his opponent gets a third queen. Television crews have filmed almost every hand he has played. Now he's gone. Dewey Tomko, who came in second here a few years ago, used to be a kindergarten teacher for migrant workers' children in Florida. He would stay up all night playing poker, he admits shyly, and when his class took its nap, he would take one too, on his very own mat, sometimes waking up long after the mammas had collected the kids. Tomko quit teaching and became a world-class poker player. But now all he can think of is getting back to Florida to play baseball with his three sons. Is that why he lost today? He's worried that he isn't worried, another good man gone wrong.

But look who's still here as play ends for the day. Diane Borger from Winnipeg is one of five women in what is still largely a man's game. She's a psychology student at California Lutheran University, of all places, where she will have to finish her master's thesis if she doesn't place well at Binion's. Borger is small and blond, and though she's 28, she looks like a little girl. When she plays, she wears a blue cap that says TOP GUN and smokes long, skinny cigars. All you can see is her little, straight-across mouth under the peak of the cap, and that evil smoke curling up.

You make your statement with what you have. Crandall Addington, slim as a whip, whose year-round gamble is oil and gas exploration in South Texas, wears an elegant suit, a diamond stickpin, alligator boots, a neatly trimmed beard and a full-rigged Stetson. Tuna Lund, a huge fellow from Reno who got his nickname from an oceanic losing streak in Carson City, Nev. (a sure loser is a fish, and a tuna is a big fish), just sits at the table looking massive. He hasn't much choice; but if he's winning (which he is, just now) and you're not, maybe your mind wanders, and you begin wondering just how much he can see through those bottle-bottom glasses, or whether the toothpick he's chewing is the same one he started the day with. This puts you in the wrong frame of mind when Lund (as he does just now) pushes 100 chips worth $1,000 each into the pot.

Poker may be the most successful U.S. export these days. Here at Binion's, where tournament poker took shape in 1970, there are good players from India, Sweden and other places that seem unlikely. Dewey Tomko estimates that there are only ten or 15 really successful players, whose lives and incomes would be comparable to those of the world's best tennis professionals. Sure, he admits when an eyebrow is raised, there are a lot of others who scuffle along at $200,000 a year, "but that's as bad as having a job."

The big stacks of chips represent big money, but money itself, an onlooker begins to understand, is almost without psychological weight to the top players. Eric Drache, who runs the cardroom at the fancy new Mirage casino here, was offered a job once when he was a full-time card player. He had to ask a civilian friend whether $150,000 was a good year's salary. It didn't sound like much to a man who was usually up or down more than that after an evening's play. Unofficial side games here routinely slosh with more money than the World Series itself. Hundred-dollar bills are banded in sheaves of 50; and sheaves are wadded in stacks of ten; and bets and raises hit the table hard, thud-thud-thud.

But bragging rights to the Series are important, even if first prize is only $835,000. By day four Diane Borger is back at college. Addington has left, beaten but unwrinkled. Jerry Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, has run through $10,000 in pocket change. Big old Doyle Brunson, a two-time World Series winner and perhaps the best poker player of all, they say here, has tossed in his last chip.

There is always one hand they talk about. It comes when only two players are left. Mansour Matloubi, a placid-seeming Iranian living in England, is down to his last $800,000 in chips. He bets it all on a pair of tens in the hole, with the rest of the cards still to come. Tuna Lund's toothpick does not tremble. He has about $1.1 million in front of him, and he calls with ace-nine, good but not great hole cards.

Dollar amounts here are deceptive; what Lund and Matloubi are really playing for is $501,000, the difference between $835,000 and the $334,000 second prize. But to win, you need all the chips. Lund looks golden after the three- card "flop" gives him another ace-nine, for a nearly unbeatable two pairs. Matloubi placidly kicks the table. He needs a third ten, a 22-to-1 shot against, or the tournament is over.

And, of course, the last up card gives the Iranian his ten, and $1.6 million in chips. A couple of hours later he erodes Tuna's last reserves and wins it all. Photos are taken with Matloubi embracing a huge pile of cash, and Tuna looking bemused. Then the watchers and players begin drifting away. The boys are looking for a poker game.