![]() And maybe, one day, they would come without the guilt. Now he claimed he was too tired, nauseated, and dizzy to even sit at the table.Īs he turned his back on a world title, he told himself there would be other fortunes to win, other chapters of his legend to write. Here was a man known to boast that he had once played poker for five straight days without sleeping. If they found out how he really spent his days, if they knew who he spent his time with, well-Brunson was worried that his entire family would be shunned.Īnd so Texas Dolly walked out of Binion’s office, across the casino floor, and out of the Horseshoe. They knew him as the son of a farmer, a former state-champion athlete, and a master’s graduate from a Baptist college. “Jack,” Brunson explained, “I just don’t want the publicity.”īack in Longworth, the tiny, conservative West Texas town where Brunson grew up, most folks thought he made an honest living. “You’re going to cause a big scandal here,” Binion said. He paused the game and marched the players into a private office, where he tore into Brunson. Jack Binion, the casino’s president, saw what was happening. That’s when Brunson started to lose, folding each hand without even trying to win. The field was whittled down one player after another, and, bit by bit, Brunson amassed a war chest of chips. An article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described the event: “In the clockless world of gambling, peopled as it is with optimists, liars, fools and lunatics, it is the lot of the poker player to be set apart and regarded as a curiosity.”ĭoyle Brunson at his Las Vegas home in June 2022. This world series was a sideshow meant to drum up business for the casino, and the competitors were as strange as if Mark Twain characters had jumped off the page and found their way to the desert for a piece of the action. In 1970 there had been only fifty poker tables in the entire city. Texas Hold ’Em, now the most played poker variation in the world, had been in Vegas casinos less than a decade. This tournament wasn’t broadcast on cable TV or treated like a sport. Reporters crowded into the casino with their cameras and tape recorders, but it was nothing like the scene at today’s WSOPs. Tables were jammed together in an improvised poker room to seat eight players who had each bought in at $10,000 for a chance to win the third annual World Series of Poker. It was May 1972 at Binion’s Horseshoe, in downtown Las Vegas. Instead, it starts with Brunson in retreat. He has won millions while bluffing, stared down killers in parking lots, and pried his chips-quite literally-from the hands of death.īut this saga doesn’t start there. Doyle Brunson has all those tall tales-and we’ll get to them in due time. ![]() In poker lore, the best stories tend to begin with jackpot wins, steady nerves, or the occasional threat of murder.
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