Night before last at the Golden Nugget I had occasion to quote a bit of wisdom I once heard attributed to Amarillo Slim. The guy to my right had played a hand badly, but got away with it. He realized his mistakes, and said, "I can't believe how bad I played that." So I told him that I had heard Slim quoted as saying, "Anytime you're dragging the chips, you played it like a pro." It's not really true, of course, but it's clever and soothing.
(For purposes of this blog, I need to clarify that I don't really know if Slim said that, or something close to it, because I can no longer recall where I heard or read it, so I have no sense of how much faith to put in it. But for sociability purposes at the poker table, where I'm not likely to be asked for a specific citation, I don't mind giving him the attribution and letting it go at that.)
A young man (mid-20s, I'm guessing) a couple of seats away asked, "Who said that?" I thought he just hadn't heard the first part of my sentence, so I repeated: "Amarillo Slim." The guy scrunched up his face in puzzlement and said, "Never heard of him."
Now, this wouldn't be terribly surprising for a casual player, a tourist just stopping in to try this crazy game he saw on television. But this guy was a serious player. He knew all the angles. He was good enough to play for a living, though I don't have any idea if he does or not. He was astute in his comments about strategy. He was probably the most skilled player at the table that evening. He must have read at least several books about the game.
I cannot figure out how one could get that deeply immersed in the poker world and not have heard of "Amarillo Slim" Preston. I won't belabor his biography here (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarillo_Slim for a good summary), but he was far more important to making poker as popular as it is today than Doyle Brunson. (Brunson is more important in the history of poker strategy, for having been the first to publish the previously closely-held secrets of the professional players, but Preston got a lot more popular attention in the press.) He won the WSOP main event (plus three other bracelets), founded the Super Bowl of Poker, shows up in James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, is enshrined in the Poker Hall of Fame (ironically, just across the street from where we were sitting when this conversation took place), and, in a community of people possessed of massive egos, makes the likes of Phil Hellmuth seem absolutely meek and humble by comparison.
I don't really have much intelligent to say about the Nugget guy's whopper of a lacuna in knowledge of his poker history, but it's stunning to me. It's kind of like hearing that an up-and-coming race car driver has never heard of A.J. Foyt, or that a talented pro-prospect college basketball star doesn't recognize the name of Wilt Chamberlain. Of course, one doesn't need to have heard of Slim in order to play poker successfully; it's just hard to figure out how one could not have had this giant of the game enter one's conscious mind at some point.
Here's hoping he reads this, and takes a moment to learn about and tip his hat to a man without whom poker might still be primarily seen in the popular imagination as a seedy, underground world, rather than the above-board, all-American, ratings powerhouse that it has become.
(For purposes of this blog, I need to clarify that I don't really know if Slim said that, or something close to it, because I can no longer recall where I heard or read it, so I have no sense of how much faith to put in it. But for sociability purposes at the poker table, where I'm not likely to be asked for a specific citation, I don't mind giving him the attribution and letting it go at that.)
A young man (mid-20s, I'm guessing) a couple of seats away asked, "Who said that?" I thought he just hadn't heard the first part of my sentence, so I repeated: "Amarillo Slim." The guy scrunched up his face in puzzlement and said, "Never heard of him."
Now, this wouldn't be terribly surprising for a casual player, a tourist just stopping in to try this crazy game he saw on television. But this guy was a serious player. He knew all the angles. He was good enough to play for a living, though I don't have any idea if he does or not. He was astute in his comments about strategy. He was probably the most skilled player at the table that evening. He must have read at least several books about the game.
I cannot figure out how one could get that deeply immersed in the poker world and not have heard of "Amarillo Slim" Preston. I won't belabor his biography here (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarillo_Slim for a good summary), but he was far more important to making poker as popular as it is today than Doyle Brunson. (Brunson is more important in the history of poker strategy, for having been the first to publish the previously closely-held secrets of the professional players, but Preston got a lot more popular attention in the press.) He won the WSOP main event (plus three other bracelets), founded the Super Bowl of Poker, shows up in James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, is enshrined in the Poker Hall of Fame (ironically, just across the street from where we were sitting when this conversation took place), and, in a community of people possessed of massive egos, makes the likes of Phil Hellmuth seem absolutely meek and humble by comparison.
I don't really have much intelligent to say about the Nugget guy's whopper of a lacuna in knowledge of his poker history, but it's stunning to me. It's kind of like hearing that an up-and-coming race car driver has never heard of A.J. Foyt, or that a talented pro-prospect college basketball star doesn't recognize the name of Wilt Chamberlain. Of course, one doesn't need to have heard of Slim in order to play poker successfully; it's just hard to figure out how one could not have had this giant of the game enter one's conscious mind at some point.
Here's hoping he reads this, and takes a moment to learn about and tip his hat to a man without whom poker might still be primarily seen in the popular imagination as a seedy, underground world, rather than the above-board, all-American, ratings powerhouse that it has become.
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