"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.
22 days ago
Since 1973, Benny Binion and sons Jack and Ted had run the tournament with Eric Drache as their principal lieutenant. In '79, they established the Poker Hall of Fame, essentially a row of plaques hung along a wall of the Horseshoe -- a Wall of Fame, then, in the cathedral of tournament poker. Four of the charter members were fairly obvious choices: Johnny Moss, Nick Dandalos, Felton McCorquodale, and Wild Bill Hickok.
50 days 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.
50 days 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.
70 days ago
Massachusetts Congressman Thomas "Tip" O'Neill was no peacenik or Viet Cong sympathizer. Although his congressional district included 22 colleges, with more students and professors than any district in America, the majority of this burly Irish Democrat's votes came from the working-class precincts of Boston and Cambridge, where in the mid-1960s support for the war was close to unanimous. The result was that very few members of Congress spoke up for President Johnson's troop escalation more strongly.
77 days ago
American soldiers certainly played poker in Vietnam -- in jungle hooches, Hanoi prison cells, air-conditioned offices in Saigon -- as they have in every conflict since the Civil War. A more interesting story, perhaps, is how one of the cards in their poker decks came to be used as a weapon.
