Knights of the Green Cloth, part two: Queens and Knaves

“At my age I suppose I should be knitting. I would rather play poker with five or six experts than to eat.” “Poker" Alice Ivers (1851-1930)

Unlike other gambling women who practiced "the most ancient profession" during rough patches—Calamity Jane, Kilarney Kate, and Creede Lily—Poker Alice rejected prostitution and also refused to play on Sundays: “She met men on an equal basis, asking no quarter and granting none. She took her booze straight, smoked cigars, packed a .38 on a .45 frame, and could cuss like a mule skinner” (272).

Lottie Deno (1844-1934), the mystery woman of Fort Griffin.



A lady, a loner, a figure of wonder and speculation, Lottie Deno "would remain for more than two years in one of the wildest and wooliest hellholes every spawned on the frontier, and then suddenly vanish" (258).

John Jackson Cozad (1830-1902), so feared by faro dealers that he was barred from many establishments and who, ironically, dreamed of a vice-free city. The city he started, Cozad, failed to live up to the dream.

Jefferson Randall “Soapy” Smith



This guy was a badass. Soapy's career marked the transition from the era of the nineteenth-century sharper to the twentieth-century racketeer. “I am no ordinary gambler,” he once said. “The ordinary gambler hazards his own money in an attempt to win another's. When I stake money, it's a sure thing that I win.” He ran over forty gambling halls out of Denver and mercilessly fleeced patrons. Soapy, once called “the prince of knaves,” died in a shoot-out in Alaska (387).

The end of the frontier gambler

By the early 1900s, the heyday of the frontier gambler was over. Families moved west. Towns grew. YMCA buildings replaced dance halls and deserted saloons reopened as ice cream parlors. “The day of the get-rich-quick boomers and something-for-nothing speculators was over,” DeArment writes. “They were to be banished from this new society and with them the denizens of the sporting world who for half a century had catered to the vices of the westerner. The western frontier gambler...was doomed to extinction, his only progeny a caricature of himself firmly implanted in the popular imagination” (393).



Cliffs

Knights of the Green Cloth is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in gambling on the frontier. More than that, it's an enjoyable read. The only downside to the book, for me, is that it's jam-packed with characters. I had trouble keeping track of all the names and places. More attentive readers will gobble up this minutia, though, and DeArment should be commended for writing such a detailed history.

You heard about his upcoming new show : http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-ra...wire-treme-hbo

Also, if you haven't seen it, I highly suggest The House I live in, a documentary about the history of illicit drugs in America and in which David Simon collaborates. Pretty interesting to see that a few drugs became illegal simply to help control a certain ethnicity (weed for the latinos, opium for the Chinese).


[QUOTE=bob_124;46541197]Knights of the Green Cloth, part two: Queens and Knaves

Jefferson Randall “Soapy” Smith



This guy was a badass. Soapy's career marked the transition from the era of the nineteenth-century sharper to the twentieth-century racketeer. “I am no ordinary gambler,” he once said. “The ordinary gambler hazards his own money in an attempt to win another's. When I stake money, it's a sure thing that I win.” He ran over forty gambling halls out of Denver and mercilessly fleeced patrons. Soapy, once called “the prince of knaves,” died in a shoot-out in Alaska (387).
QUOTE]

I read a short biography of Soapy Smith, mainly on his tenure in Alaska (as you know, I lived in the Yukon for 15 years). Badass dude indeed. Most Stampeders would land in Skagway off a boat and Soapy's men would proceed to rid most of them of their valuables within a day. Pretty crazy that in Skagway gun fights would occur in open streets during broad daylight, while across the border in Dawson City (where the gold rush was actually held) people would feel safe enough to leave their gold unattended in unlocked cabins.

+1 reviews, your thread is so awesome, keep up the great work .

hey Dubn, thanks for that link. I hadn't heard of Simon's new project and look forward to checking it out. That man is a genius.

Not surprised you've heard of Soapy given your Alaska adventures!

You would enjoy Robert Kroetsch's novel, The Man from the Creeks, an entertaining account of the Yukon gold rush. Soapy Smith has a small role in the book.

Thx, I will check it out when I get back in 2 months. I really loved Pierre Berton's Klondike which gave an accurate, yet poetic account of the gold rush.

Thanks for an informative read! I'm hoping to spend time there next year. It seems there's no definitive view on the games. But, then, again, who will ever really tell you when a game's good.

Thanks guys!

I'd be interested to hear your impressions on the games, TJ. The people I spoke with had conflicting opinions (which I tried to capture in the piece). My own very limited impression was that the games were way soft. The consensus, it seems, it that the lower-limit games are beatable/crushable--which is only part of the story, since the high rake eats a good chunk of profits.

One of A Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey “The Kid” Ungar, the World’s Greatest Poker Player, by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson (Atria Books, 316 pages)



There's an old saying in poker that at the table your worst enemy is yourself. I'll tell you one thing: in my case, truer words were never spoken.” --Stu Ungar

"Stu, or Stuey the Kid, Ungar was the swashbuckling enfant terrible of poker before it blew up into a mainstream obsession in the 1990's. The diminutive son of a Lower East Side bookmaker, he won his back-to-back World Series of Poker titles by the unheard of age of 27 and went on to win, and lose, $30 million by one estimate before his epic taste for excess left him dead, in a cheap Las Vegas motel on Nov. 22, 1998, at 45" (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/fa...anted=all&_r=0).

One of a Kind is the best account that we have of The Kid. The book was originally intended to be Ungar’s autobiography, but he tragically died before it could be written. What we do have is a collaboration of many minds: writers Dalla and Alson, who pen a compelling read; poker friends Mike Sexton, Billy Baxter, Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, and others who supported Ungar; and Madeline and Stephanie, Ungar’s wife and daughter. Stuey chimes in too: some of the book is told in his own words, which were transcribed from hours of interviews with Dalla.

Gambling Wunderkind

The book boldly calls Ungar “the world’s greatest poker player,” a tag that was debatable fifteen years ago and implausible now. But who cares that Ike Haxton would probably crush Stu? Most people know that Ungar’s best game was gin, a game in which, thanks to near-perfect recall and uncanny intuition, he was truly unbeatable. Stuey didn’t just crush his foes; he humiliated them:

Gin is a lot different from any other card game. You can’t bluff or put moves on people. Gin is a game of control. I used to break my opponents down. They’d crumble right in front of y eyes. I got a lot of satisfaction from that—seeing the smirk disappear from their faces and turn into fear. They’d come in wearing ties, with their hair neat, and after five hours with me their tie would be undone and their hair would be all over the place. They’d have this look in their eyes like they realized they couldn’t win. It was ****ing beautiful (78)

Before long everyone had heard of the young kid from Brooklyn, and no one gave him action. Hence his entree into poker. Was fun to get another account of those early WSOP days when Ungar won back-to-back titles in 1980 and 1981.

Not About the Benjamins

When Stu entered those seductive Vegas casinos, "it was not the Roman décor that intoxicated him so much as the ringing of slot machines, the whirring rattle of the roulette wheels, and the musical chatter of chips and coins. In some respects, he was like an alcoholic stumbling into a distillery” (70). The atmosphere and the sweat of a big game were more important than money. Once, after he won a massive Pick Six parlay in horsebetting and claimed not one but two tickets worth 700K each, the thrill of victory evaporated before he reached the cage. “I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “I guess reality kinda set in, that the money really wasn’t that big a deal” (187). Everything in Stu's life, from gambling to poker to women to drugs, was one long roller-coaster ride.

By the late 1990s, Ungar had become an anachronism: “barely forty years old, he was living in a city that was changing before his eyes, addicted to a drug that had been trendy years earlier, and down on his luck when the financial boom the the 1990s and a new generation of high rollers were beginning to make his five-figure sports wagers seem pedestrian” (234). Maybe worst of all, he had lost the respect of his friends and peers. After bailing Stu out of jail, Chip Reese vowed never to speak with him again. After securing a final 25K stake, Stu was fleeced at no-limit holdem by Erik Seidel, Johnny Chan, and another Kid Poker, Daniel Negreanu. Broke and unhealthy, Stu lurked around the poker room at Binion’s, begging for ten bucks here, fifteen there, and finally bilked two white chips from a busboy who’d been thrown a tip. Ouch.

**

This book delivers. At times the writing is so crisp and gripping that I wanted to pick up Alson’s other book, Confessions of An Ivy League Bookie. Anyone read this? Dalla remains at the center of the poker world, holding court as the WSOP media director and resident wit/buffoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp9ERm-u7gE. Read One of A Kind if you want to learn more about the early WSOP days or the psychology of addiction.

A one-hour documentary, also called One of A Kind, is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pt2AOIz1wk

Played in great game in Baton Rouge on Monday. There were two catalysts: a tall black reg who, according to my friend, is one of the best players in the room. Think fearless spewy LAG who’s aware of his image, has good timing. And then a pudgy redhead who had zero clue what he was doing. Every pot was getting opened to fifty, usually by the reg, sometimes by the redhead, others would occasionally bump it to 55 and show down 66, JT, etc. It was basically a 1/3/50 heads up match with 2K effective stacks!

Two biggest hands: Pudgy guy reraises 50 open to 300 and called a shove with QJo for 500 more, gets there vs reg's AA. Reg reloads, check/raises all-in on a king-high board and gets snapped by redhead's ace-high to win 3K pot.

I also played 4/8 limit for the first time in like ten years. If the Pelicans had won, it would have been the perfect night!

How did the limit go? When I run bad especially online I may jump into a limit game to slow things down. I find it can be profitable if you are patient as the play is so lol with a great many calling down with second pair or worse all the time.

haha...it was fine. wouldn't have hopped in but another friend showed up, there were three seats, the 1/3 game died. We were goofing off. The game seemed ridiculously easy to beat as long as you can stomach the variance and practice good hand selection.

I think u hit it right on the head by having to stomach the variance as when it shifts to the dark side, limit is brutal when villain after villain hits their draws or calls with king high to beat your desperation river bluff lol.

my buddy went on tilt after 1 hour, it was hilarious.

Awesome thread. Subd

next part of my poker road trip series is up: http://www.fulltilt.com/blog/poker-r...event-hammond/

thanks, zooted! good to have you on board.

Limit tilt is quite funny when the spew is donking one bet a time. Been there, and will probably be there again soon enough

tricky preflop spot.

I have 450 effective, villain covers. my image is TAG

$6 Button straddle, the sb (100 effective) makes it 15, donk calls with 500 effective, I make it 45 to go with two queens. Sizing is on the smaller side so that if the sb shoves and donk flats (very possible) I can reshove.

Then the cutoff, a twentysomething latino guy, makes it 155 to go. Basic read = sane LAG. The guy sat down fifteen min ago with 2K, was on list for 2/5, and had 3bet/folded his very first hand.

fold or get it in?

I also considered a stop and go: flatting the 4bet and jamming non ace or king flops.

I would fold there. Just because he is 3b wide doesn't mean he is 4b anything other than KK+ and maybe AK. It's a shove or fold and I think we are deep enough to fold.

I remember seeing that 1OAK documentary a long time ago. Mr Ungar was quite an interesting character, unfortunately a tragic ending and a cautionary tale of what happens if you get wrapped up in vices.

I'd say that's a pretty clear flat. Our hand isn't really good enough to 5bet for value because we're going to fold out worse/get called by better, but given how aggressive he seems I think its still too good to fold getting almost 2.5:1. He has 12 KK+ and even if we give him just 25% of his AK/QQ-JJ, we have odds to call. Most likely, I think its safe to assume that the population of guys like your describing are slightly wider than that range, though.

yea vice sucks. I look forward to watching it soon.

Yea, it did seem like this guy in particular was capable of being a bit wider, which made folding QQ feel a bit dirty. what's your plan on the flop with < 1 PSB?

Bob what WSOP events you have planned for the summer?

playing in the Colossus just cuz. Beyond that I have nothing concrete planned. Mainly want to play cash, work on my game, meet interesting folks. u?

Focusing on sitting next to u at the Colossus FT . Maybe one or two $1500ish BIs, but mostly there to mingle a little. Thinking Ill be there ten days starting a day or two before Day 1 Colossus and will shove off for awhile and come back in late June n see what happens.

sounds like a plan

also sounds like we're on a similar schedule, I should be there through the 16th or so and may swing back in early July.