Lordy Lordy
Monday, March 23, 2009 - Gene Bromberg
This year marks the 40th World Series of Poker…and it also marks the 40th anniversary of my birth. Yeah yeah, I turned 40 a few months ago, can we please change the subject? I actually didn’t make that connection until a few days ago, that I’ve been alive roughly the same amount of time as the World Series. Not an especially interesting or relevant detail, except for me, and as I’m the one writing this post I hope you’ll forgive me for dwelling on it a bit.
Back in 1970 Benny Binion invited six of the best poker players to the Horseshoe to compete for the title of World Champion. It wasn’t a freeze-out tournament–the six voted on who they thought was the best player. They voted Johnny Moss the champion, a good choice as he also won the following year. The next year Amarillo Slim Preston won the title, followed by Puggy Pearson, and over the next decade or so the WSOP title was captured by such legendary figures as Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, and Jack Straus.
If you’ve attended the World Series the last two years you can trace it’s history through the huge posters hanging from the Amazon Room rafters. A portrait of every World Champion looms over the vast throngs who flock to the Rio to pit their skills (and luck) against the best in the world. I’m fascinated by those posters, because they show not only how the game has changed, but how much the world has changed over these 40 years.
The pictures from the 70s are almost all black-and-white, and feature rough-hewn men with sharp eyes and lined faces. A few are smoking–the idea of someone lighting up at the table is now so alien that I think people would be less shocked if someone chose to play in the nude. As time goes on the photos transform from B&W to color, but they still have that fantastic old-school feel. The clothing is dated, naturally, but the lighting isn’t optimized for television, there’s no dramatic backdrops. They could be regular guys playing in any casino in the world.
The posters of the recent champions aren’t quite as interesting. We’ve seen these guys before, on TV, in countless photos published online and in magazines. Go to the World Series of Poker and you’ll see scores of photographers flitting among the tables, and of course the fans who cluster ’round the rail either have digital cameras or cell phones with one built-in. It’s a digital world, a wired word–thousands of players qualify for Main Event by playing online, something that wasn’t even science-fiction when Benny Binion invented the WSOP. Dozens of poker sites provide live updates of the action, ESPN streams final table action over the internet, terabytes of photos and video are produced before the final bracelet is awarded. There’s so much information to digest that it’s almost too much to keep up with.
I thought about that last year as I looked at those posters and realized one name was missing. Bill Smith won the World Championship in 1985, but his name and portrait are nowhere to be found. Smith was a colorful figure even for poker’s golden years–from an interview Dana Smith did with T.J. Cloutier, who finished runner-up to Smith:
He was one of the greatest players of all time, Bill Smith was. He was the tightest player you’d ever played in your life when he was sober. And when he was halfway drunk, he was the best player I’d ever played with. But when he got past that halfway mark, he was the worst player I’d ever played. And you could always tell when he was past the halfway point because he started calling the flop. Say a flop came 7-4-10 — he’d say, “21!” When he got up to take a walk, he would have a little hop in his step, a “git-up in his gittalong” we used to call it. And then you knew he was gone. You never worried about Bill when he was sober because you knew that he played A-B-C — tight — and you knew where he was all the time. The only time you worried about him was when he was about halfway drunk, and then he’d play all the way to “H.” But he had such great timing on his hands when he was younger and wasn’t drunk … he’d make some fabulous plays, plays you couldn’t believe. Bill was a truly great player.
I asked around a bit to find out why there wasn’t a poster of Smith, who passed away in 1997. No one was 100% sure, but a few people said that there weren’t many photos of Smith, and those that did exist were the property of his family. They chose not to make them available and so there was no entry for Bill Smith in the Ring of Champions. Today it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be a photographic record of, well, anybody. But again, times have changed.
When I cover the WSOP this year I’ll have my trusty camera along and I’m going to try to re-create the feel of some of those old-time photos. It won’t be easy, I don’t think I’ll find many players wearing leisure suits with yard-wide lapels, but I’ll try to mix things up a bit, try to shoot more black-and-white stuff, play with the pixels a bit. Who knows–when Phil Hellmuth makes his grand entrance at the Main Event this year maybe he’ll go with a disco theme?
Related posts:
- Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Yesterday the WSOP Media Office released a list of facts...
- Be Prepared There is no flash photography at the World Series of...
- Two Weeks Notice Hard to believe that we’re two weeks into the 2009...
- Quick Photo Dump As you might expect there’s a big crowd watching the...
- The November Nine We thought, based on stack sizes, the blinds, the rapidly...
Tags: benny binion, bill smith, johnny moss, old-school poker, Phil Hellmuth, phil hellmuth disco, phil hellmuth main event entrance, t.j. cloutier, world series of poker, WSOP
