In the film Tombstone, when Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday reconnect early in the film (this just after Kurt Russell has humiliated a chubby faced, pre-Angelina Billy Bob Thornton, who has since lost as much weight as he has gained hair) and they have this exchange, more or less:
Earp: Come on, Doc, I thought you always said gambling was an honest profession.
Holiday: Why Wyatt, I said poker's an honest profession, not gambling.
That exchange, I think, is at the heart of Des Wilson's solid and entertaining Ghosts at the Table (Da Capo Press), a history of "who made poker what it is today."
Here's what most of us know (or think we know) poker is today: something that's almost always on ESPN2 when we're channel surfing. And we see these players who, if we can see their faces, look pretty intent on what's at hand. That's usually because of what's in their hand, and what's at stake. And to most of us, I'm betting, it's hard to watch, which is to say it's far from the ideal spectator sport.
But read Wilson's book and you may see poker differently and be less inclined so quickly to surf away.
In enough detail to keep us reading - too much on this particular subject would be lethal, because what's important here are the characters who made the game - Wilson opens up for us a world that's as chaotic as it is compelling. Starting with the evolution of the game in the wild west - Deadwood, notably, where Wild Bill Hickok was killed over cards - Wilson introduces us to the key personalities who have made the game what it is today: that game, specifically, would be Texas hold 'em, the game you see every time you land on the Deuce and some low-hatted, sun glassed player is pushing his chips "all in."
What’s interesting is that the most popular form of the game, Texas hold 'em, gets its name from the state that spawned some of the most colorful and daring players. That and, for all its ubiquity on the tube these days, no one seems to know the genesis of that particular version of poker. (Texas hold 'em, as Wilson points out, is the most popular form of the game; it's what's played at the World Series of Poker every year in Las Vegas.)
Two legends of the game have different theories. Amarillo Slim - one-time frequent Johnny Carson guest, and perhaps the most famous poker player in the world - remembers his first encounter with it this way: 'It was in 1959 in Brenham, Texas, a little old town between Houston and Austin. At that time one of the best poker games was played above a feed store in downtown Brenham. I remember I liked the game right off because every time a card lands on the board it changes the possible best hand…'
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