EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT: Des Wilson reveals the story behind the 1972 World Series Of Poker when Amarillo Slim ‘won’
It’s hard to believe that the World Series of Poker Main Event could be ‘fixed’, but in 1972 – the year Amarillo Slim ‘won’ – that’s exactly what happened. Des Wilson gets the story from those involved…
As I look around the huge poker room at the Rio, at the thousands who contest the Main Event today, it’s hard to imagine what the World Series was like in its pioneer days. Back then, it was really a gathering of a small number of friends, albeit the best poker players on the planet.
In 1972 only eight players were willing to pay the $10,000 buy-in, including the former partners from the Texas roadshow – Amarillo Slim, Doyle Brunson and Sailor Roberts. It was the year when Johnny Moss had to pass on the crown [after winning the first two WSOPs in 1970 and 71]. It was Brunson who struck the fatal blow, picking up a third Ace on the river to beat the old man’s three deuces. That left only two for Brunson to beat – Amarillo Slim, who was low on chips – and Puggy Pearson, the extrovert gambler from Nashville, Tennessee.
Puggy was what’s commonly known as a ‘character’. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; well, so are ‘characters’. Depending on what you know about them – or maybe just your sense of humour – you can love or loathe them, take them or leave them. Maybe because the poker world is partly built on pretence – pretence at the table – it tends to revere rather than reject its characters. Or to reverse the words of Shakespeare, ‘The good that men do lives after them; the bad is oft interred with their bones.’
In the eyes of history this enables them to get away with murder. When he died [in 2006], he was the subject of good-natured obituaries all over the world. Pearson was a beneficiary of poker’s blind eye.
I saw him at the World Series in 2005, shortly before he died, and he was wearing a black top hat and reminded me of the old comedian W.C. Fields. (In fact, Fields could have been Puggy; when famously asked in one of his films, ‘Is poker a game of chance?’ he replied, ‘Not the way I play it.’) In other years he had turned up as a Viking and an Arabian Sheik. But he was no comic; Puggy was a hard man, a hustler.
There were similarities with Amarillo Slim: both began as pool hustlers, both loved the limelight. (Puggy was also a golf hustler.) And, like Moss and [Jack] Binion, he came up the hard way. Admittedly he could play – he won the WSOP Main Event once, albeit in 1973 when there were just 13 entries – but he was also a cheat.
Perpetuating the myth
Typical of poker itself, Pearson created his own mythology. Like Moss, he went on the record claiming to be whiter than white. In a book by the late David Spanier, he makes the same point Moss would make: you can beat a guy over and over and he’ll keep coming back, but you screw him out of just one quarter and he’ll never come back.
Another author, Michael Kaplan, tells it differently: Puggy surreptitiously scooped chips out of pots and short-changed players when he made his bets. One of Puggy’s more enduring moves, employed when he had a hand that was not necessarily the best one, was to call a final bet and push his chips to the pot, but not release his hand from the chips.
Assuming that Puggy was in, the other player would reveal his cards. At that point, if Puggy had the stronger hand, he removed his fingers from the chips, showed his cards and raked in the pot. If beaten, he pulled the chips back and insisted that he hadn’t intended to call the bet, that the other player had misread what Puggy was doing and should never have turned up his cards prematurely.
Mayhem routinely ensued, but Puggy was a master at diversion and diffusion, and he insisted (rightly) that so long as his hand remained on the chips, no bet had been made.
T.J. Cloutier acknowledges that Puggy was a cheat, but says, ‘His cheating wasn’t like other people’s… it was a kind of gamesmanship. He was a hustler, he couldn’t help himself. It was second nature to do whatever it took to win. He had more moves than a mongoose.’
Tom McEvoy, who played with Puggy many times, says he was a notorious cheat. But he used the same expression as T.J. had used: ‘Puggy couldn’t help himself.’
Puggy wouldn’t call it cheating because to him the game was about winning, and if you had a few moves of your own to do it… well, that’s what it’s all about. He wouldn’t criticise anyone else for trying, too. The classic ‘Pearson can’t help himself’ story arises from a golf match Doyle Brunson had arranged with the drug dealer Jimmy Chagra.
Doyle told Puggy: ‘We can’t lose – we can make a lot of money. So whatever you do, don’t cheat, because if anyone is caught cheating they’ll forfeit the game.’ Well, the way Doyle tells it, they were about $250,000 up and heading for a big pay day when Puggy’s ball ended up in the rough and he kicked it out. A bodyguard saw him, the game was forfeited and the money lost. Doyle was furious. ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he roared. ‘We were winning – you didn’t need to do that.’ Puggy replied: ‘I’m sorry Doyle… I couldn’t help myself.’
Like Moss, he could be unpleasant to dealers. Once a woman dealer took off her stilettos and began hitting him over the head with them, forcing him to leave the table in disarray. But to be fair to Puggy, he had a lot of talent and was utterly fearless. He was a big-time gambler, would bet $10,000 a hole on a round of golf, $50,000 on the result of the Super Bowl. From time to time he went spectacularly broke but he always made the one crucial bet that got him back on track. He was a major Las Vegas figure for 30 years. Yes, he was a character… take him or leave him.
PR stunt
At the 1972 World Series, Puggy found himself close to breaking the Texas grip on the World Series. With Doyle Brunson in the lead and Puggy not far behind, Amarillo Slim was the short stack. Then the final took an unexpected turn. The Binion publicity machine had been at work and suddenly the players were surrounded by reporters with notebooks and even by TV cameras. Doyle Brunson didn’t like it.
Brunson had been an outlaw most of his life. He was especially sensitive about the illegality of poker in many US states. To protect his family from any fallout, he had always kept a low profile. ‘I had three children,’ he says, ‘and I didn’t want my family treated like second class citizens because of what I did.’
He also had another concern; he didn’t want the tax authorities to know the kind of money that was being won and lost. As he looked at the reporters, he began to fear that after 20 years or more earning his living in the shadows, he was about to be exposed to the sunlight and there was a real danger he would get burned. So he called a time-out and met with Jack Binion, Puggy and Slim and told them, ‘I don’t like this; I don’t want all this publicity. I don’t want to win this thing.’
Pearson, who had mixed views about publicity – he loved the limelight, but also liked to keep his dealings private – was impressed by Brunson’s reasoning. He announced he didn’t want to win either. Not so Slim. Slim was the opposite of Doyle
Brunson; he thrived on attention, loved publicity, and wanted to be champion. So when the others said they didn’t want to win, he said, ‘Well I do.’ Brunson takes up the story. ‘We said to Slim, “We’ll let you win it; we’ll just count our money now and keep the money we’ve got.” At that point Slim had almost no money. So we went back and started to let Slim win, but he couldn’t help himself and began to act up to the media and the spectators as if he was winning on merit and he made such a fool out of himself that it was embarrassing. I finally beat him in a pot just to stop him.’
Watching all this, Jack Binion was horrified. Having attracted the media, he was in danger of the whole event being discredited and its reputation ruined. Doyle says, ‘He called us over and said, “You guys can’t do this, it’s going to ruin the whole thing, you’ve got to play.” So I said, “Jack, I don’t want to play” and he replied, “Well you can withdraw; just keep your money, withdraw and let them play.” So I withdrew and took my $40,000.’ It was then announced that he had an upset stomach and he went home.
At this point the stories about the game diverge. Doyle believes that Pearson still wanted to win – that he tried his best but was beaten fair and square. Surprisingly, it is Slim who acknowledges that the result was a fix. Slim introduces a new factor. He says that Binion and his publicists, having captured the media’s imagination for the first time, wanted a suitable winner and that he, with his flair for publicity, was the obvious man.
I ask Slim about it when I’m in Amarillo and he says, ‘It was never cut-and-dried what we were going to do, until the last 30 minutes. Then, they decided – Jack Binion and his publicity guys – that if I won it, it would get some notoriety. That wasn’t me talking, it was them.’
And was Puggy still trying to win right to the end?
‘No. But he was trying right up to the last 30 minutes. That’s when it happened. They knew they couldn’t get any publicity out of it if Doyle won it. That’s not putting Doyle down – Doyle just wasn’t a talker in those days. And Puggy wouldn’t have been a good choice because about half the people he had screwed over the years were bound to say a few things. So I was the pick for winning it.’
Did Puggy say he intended to lose or did Slim just know he was going to?
‘No, I just knew they had all got together and decided it would be a lot better for poker if I won it.’
Who persuaded Puggy that he shouldn’t win it?
‘I think it was Jack Binion, because me or Doyle wouldn’t have any power over him; we couldn’t have persuaded him.’
Regrets?
It is easy to believe Slim is telling the truth because he, more than anyone else involved, has a particularly strong reason to cover the deal up – namely, that it makes a mockery of his claim to have been a world champion.
Slim is not ashamed of it, because, he says, it wasn’t his idea and the decision was not his. He believes, or has persuaded himself to believe, that it was done in the best interests of poker.
Brunson is not ashamed of it, because he publicly withdrew, and was not, therefore, involved in the sham ending.
As for Pearson, he’s not around to be ashamed.
Perhaps the one man who is ashamed is Jack Binion. That would explain why 1972 was the only year in the whole history of the World Series when a gold bracelet was not awarded to the winner.
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