Word: alvarez
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...Alvarez...
...fewer have seen it in action at the level of world-class play. High-stakes poker is secretive; it is illegal in most places, and embarrassing both to losers, whose associates tend to fret, and to winners, who dread the taxman. Thus the English writer and poker player A. Alvarez (author of another examination of self-destruction, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide) was beguiled when he heard that there was one card room in the world where an observer could watch no-limit, heavyweight poker without getting into the line of fire...
...simply a matter of flying to Las Vegas. In all the Vegas casinos but one, bets are strictly limited. Limit poker requires knowing the odds, playing tightly and chiseling away at whatever optimists wander into the game. In no-limit, as one poker carnivore tells Alvarez, "the target comes alive and shoots back at you." Shooting back, in one legendary five-month game years ago between Johnny Moss and Nick the Greek, came down to a five-card stud hand in which Moss, with a pair of nines, thought he had the Greek locked. Moss figured his opponent...
Moss was 74 when Alvarez met him in 1981, an old man "secure in his fame and his investments, as remorseless now as he was then, the kind of character that John Wayne was fond of portraying-true grit without forgiveness, to be admired, but from a safe distance." Moss had come to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker, at Binion's Horse shoe Casino. Binion's is the no-limit joint, famous for accepting a $777,000 bet in 1980 from a man who walked in with a suitcase full of cash, rolled...
...Alvarez explains, first prize was a good deal less than was involved in some of the unofficial side games. There players could start with more than a scrawny $10,000 and could raise the stakes as high as they liked. The card sense that poker requires is not especially rarefied; the limit chiselers at the other Vegas casinos know as much about probabilities as the sportsmen at Binion's. What distinguishes the heavyweights is that broke or flush, they can function at financial altitudes that paralyze everyone else. "The money freezes you up, and you become tight-weak...