Grotenstein Jonathan - All in : the (almost) entirely true story of the World Series of Poker

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CONTENTS

For Kristen and Sara, who know all too well about deadlines and bad beats. The wives of writers have it hard; the wives of poker players have it worse. These poor women have somehow ended up married to men who are both. God help them.

FOREWORD

This book has been a long time coming, and it is one that has been sorely needed. The authors have spared no expense in delivering to readers the stories of the pioneers of the poker industry from the beginning of the World Series of Poker up to the present.

The World Series, thats where all the notoriety is, and for me its always been about getting through the first day. Thats where you run up against a lot of these strange players. One year I had the best starting hand in Texas holdem, two aces, against a 7-6. We got all the money in, and he made a flush. Another time I had A-K and he had A-Q, a big underdog to my A-K, but my opponent got a queen on the river.

Ill tell you a little story. In the 2000 World Series, I came in second. Thats where I had Chris Ferguson dead to a 9, that is, only if a 9 came could I lose the hand. In the very next tournament I played I got down to heads-up (one-on-one), and once again I had the man dead to a nine and he caught it. Then, in the Tournament of Champions, I played Brian Saltus heads-up, and I had him dead to a 9 with one card to come. He caught a 9 to make a straight. I lost three no-limit holdem final events in a row when my opponents heads-up were dead to one card and they all caught it. It was a difference of about $2 million in my pocket, and I didnt say boo. In the next six months I might have listened to two hundred bad beat stories, and all the pots in those stories together didnt add up to $2,000. I always get a kick out of that. Its just the way it goes.

A lot of people dont like how big the tournament has gotten. Before the recent explosion in the size of the fields, you used to be able to say, Well, I got a hell of a chance of winning it. Now you just hope, hope you get there deep. Me, I dont care about there being so many more players because you still have to play one table at a time. Thats all you can do.

I have known or played with almost everyone mentioned in this book, the old-timers who learned to play by fading the white lines on the highways between games and rehashing the key hands of each session with their road buddies, and the modern book- and TV-learned players who rely mostly on tutorials. I can attest to their being as unique as individuals as they are gifted as players.

I recommend this book to everyone, as it not only gives an accurate account of the World Series of Poker, but also of the many different people who have been part of its fascinating history.

T. J. Cloutier Richardson, Texas

Note from the Authors for the New Edition

If youre a serious baseball fan, youve probably heard of The Shot Heard Round the World.

If you havent, a few quick clicks on the Internet will bring you up speed. Even though Bobby Thomson hit this famous home run over sixty years ago, in a stadium that no longer exists, in a contest between two franchises that have since relocated to cities on the opposite side of the country, its easy to re-create the tableau with remarkable detail. We know, for example, that it was 3:58 in the afternoon. That Ralph Branca, the Dodgers pitcher who had already given up several home runs to Thomson that seasonincluding a game-winner in the first of the three-game seriesstarted him off with a strike down the middle of the plate. That Branca was looking to set up his curveball when he fired his second pitch, a fastball up and in. That Thomson yanked a sinking line drive toward the seventeen-foot wall in left field, its height designed to compensate for the eccentric dimensions of the Polo Grounds, whose shape resembled a bathtub.

No such records existed for the early days of poker when we set out, several years ago, with the ambitious goal of chronicling the games greatest tournament. Official recordswho won, how they won, how much they wonwere not kept until the 1980s. Newspaper reportage was often spotty and lacked detail. The only video documentation was confined to the handful of years that were actually televised, and, without the benefit of hole cameras or much in the way of context, that coverage created as much mystery as illumination. Once in a while we were lucky enough to find a written account of a particular year, like A. Alvarezs take on the 1981 tournament in The Biggest Game in Town , or James McManuss account of the 2000 contest in Positively Fifth Street , but those were exceptions, not the rule.

So we hope youll forgive us if, at times, we let the detailsmined ruthlessly from whatever far-flung sources we could unearthdominate the narrative. Tasked with providing a complete account of the tournaments history, we chose to err on the side of giving too much information rather than too little. In this we felt like astronauts, going where no man had gone before.

A lot has changed since then. The World Series has become a brand, applied to tournaments all over the country and the world. Nearly every one of them gets chronicled by bloggers, who instantly commit the details to our collective cloud memory. Individual hands now seem far less important than the people who play them, a notion ESPN has mastered with its remarkably thorough television coverage.

Oh, yeah, and the Internet. All the facts and figures we labored so hard to attain, scouring through the hundreds of articles and books listed in the previous editions sixteen-page bibliography, are now just a couple of mouse clicks away.

Its strange to consider that, in just a few short years, this bookor at least its formathas already become an artifact of a bygone era. But we hope that youll enjoy it for what it is: a love letter to the game.

Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback

November 2012

INTRODUCTION

Binions Horseshoe never looked like much from the outside. There were no pirate ship battles or erupting volcanoes to lure you inside the casino. Chances were good that a light bulb on its faade had burned out and had yet to be replaced. Like most of its competitors in downtown Las Vegas, it refused to pander to a highfalutin crowd. At the Horseshoe, what you saw was what you got, and what you got most often was a no-attitude attitude and a very practical outlook: no need to build a roller coaster on the premises when the casinos bread-and-butter clientelegamblershad much simpler means of seeking thrills.

Inside it had even less to recommend it. What was left of the threadbare carpets reeked of cigarette smoke and beer. The cocktail waitresses looked like real human beings, in stark contrast to the supernatural beauties employed along the glitzier Las Vegas Strip. The restaurants offered hot dogs and chili and not much else. The lighting remained perpetually dim, not in an elegant or romantic way, but in the seedy kind of way youd expect from an old-fashioned gambling hall.

The Horseshoe was always a fair reflection of the family that owned it. Its history was their history. Like tumbleweeds, the Binions were uprooted from their native Texas soil and drifted west with the wind, settling in Las Vegas in 1946, just as the city was discovering its vast potential as a gambling destination. As the city grew, so did the familys little casino, attracting a steady stream of customers despite, for many years, only having one real concession to tourism, a large Plexiglas horseshoe stuffed with $1 million in cash. For visitors to Las Vegas, a trip downtown wasnt complete until theyd had their picture taken in front of that famed horseshoe.