"Poker: The Story of America's National Pastime" is a special
Card Player feature written by James McManus focusing on
the origins and evolution of the game.
James McManus is the author of the classic bestseller Positively
Fifth Street and seven other books. His work appears in The New
York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Harpers, The Best American
Sports Writing and many other anthologies. He also teaches a course
on the literature and history of poker at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. These historical columns are part of McManus's
next book, which is scheduled to be published by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux in 2009.
24 days ago
The "Poker Boom" unofficially detonated on the evening of March 30, 2003, with the Travel Channel's first broadcast of the Five-Diamond World Poker Classic at Bellagio. Produced by Steven Lipscomb, the show's lavish production values blended tabletop holecard cameras, informative sidebars, and beginner-level explanations from Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten, and all of it was hosted by Playboy cover girl Shana Hiatt, who often wore just a bikini. (The commentary would become more sophisticated as casual viewers began to pick up on the tactics and lingo of tournament hold'em.) The World Poker Tour went on to average 1.1 million viewers during its first season, with reruns attracting an estimated 4 million per show.
2 months ago
In 1990, the first non-American player, an Iranian-born resident of Wales named Mansour Matloubi, won poker's world championship. Johnny Chan was born in Guangzhou, a Chinese city not far from Hong Kong, but was raised for the most part in Phoenix and Houston, where his family owned restaurants. He was an American citizen living in Las Vegas and had been playing professionally there for nine years when he first won in 1987.
2 months ago
Eric Drache's one-table satellites to the main event steadily had increased the number of entrants -- to 54 in 1979, 73 in 1980, 75 in 1981, 104 in 1982; '82 was also the year Jack "Treetop" Straus won after being down to a single chip worth 500, giving rise to the expression "all you need is a chip and a chair," the mantra of every player sitting behind a short stack. Meanwhile, next door to the Horseshoe, the Mint's poker manager, Jim Albrecht, followed suit by spreading World Series of Poker satellites of his own.
4 months ago
By the mid-1970s, poker had two distinct capitals. The Texas road gamblers' no-limit hold'em sanctuary in Downtown Las Vegas was active mainly during the World Series in April, while Gardena, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, had hundreds of five-card draw players in action every day except Christmas. While poker remained for the most part an underground national pastime, its legal status in these far-western towns was a double blast of oxygen for high-stakes professionals and recreational players alike.
4 months ago
During the 1960s, with his Horseshoe Casino on Fremont Street dominating Glitter Gulch in Downtown Las Vegas, Benny Binion still had to compete with the Rat Pack, the Folies Bergere, Elvis Presley, and all of the Jetsons-esque architecture going up a few miles south on the Strip.
