Modern Day Poker – The Beginning
For the purposes of this and following articles, we will count the beginning as the start of the World Series of Poker, as otherwise I would be going back to the Wild West and beyond. Some people recognize 1970 as the first World Series of Poker (even though the eventual winner did not win a tournament as it came down to a vote), and some recognize 1971 as the first actual WSOP competition. The truth of the matter is that the concept was inspired by 2 relatively unknown poker aficionado’s, the first being the owner of the Holiday Casino in Reno-Tom Moore, and the second being a chap by the name of Vic Vickery. They came up with the idea of the Texas Gamblers Reunion which started as an invite only High Stakes Cash Game, which lasted the course of a week.
You may have noticed it was called the Texas Gamblers REUNION, but reunion from what? Well the game Hold’em actually started off around 1900 preceeding this, the common game of poker was 5 or 7 card stud or draw. In 1963 a High Roller named Felton “Corky” McCorquodale used hold’em as his game of choice in the Califorina Club, the only players who could match or gamble with the stakes he liked playing were oil rich Texans, who had been playing hold’em for quite a while previous, such names included Johnny Moss, Amarillo Slim, and Doyle Brunson. The eventual meeting point for this game was The Golden Nugget Casino in Vegas and that one game was known as the Texan’s Hold’em game. The Nugget at the time was a shithole, and the players stopped going there eventually. But in 1969 they were all invited back by Moore and Vickery to The Dunes Casino, hence “The Reunion” and the game of what is now known as Texas Hold’em became infamous.
The players that were invited included; Rudy “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, “Amarillo Slim” Preston, Puggy Pearson, Chill Willis, Johnny Moss and Doyle Brunson. Moore and Vickery passed on the opportunity to host the same game a year later, and Benny Binion jumped on the opportunity to host it himself. It was jokingly called The World Series of Poker, but in reality no one knew about the game apart from those invited, they played cash for another week, and at the end of the week there was a ballot to determine who the best player was. The first crowned winner of this “WSoP” was Johnny Moss, and Benny Binion decided that the next year they would play it out in a $5000 tournament to give the title some credibility and possibly to advance the popularity of the game …….. History was made.
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[...] admin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptFor the purposes of this and following articles, we will count the beginning as the start of the World Series of Poker, as otherwise I would be going back to. [...]