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Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston won the World Series of Poker main event in 1972 and spent decades as the most famous gambler in America, as much for his proposition bets as for his poker. This memoir, written with Greg Dinkin, is a run of stories from road games across Texas to high-stakes tables with celebrities and politicians. Under the tall tales is a consistent philosophy: read people closely, understand the odds better than the other side, and arrange the terms so the bet favors you before anyone sits down.
Highlights
I guess you could say I had a knack for arithmetic as a kid—as most professional gamblers do. If you’re going to make your living putting the odds in your favor, you damn well better know how to calculate them. The late, great Stuey Ungar, one of the best damn card players I ever saw, was a mathematical genius. Chip Reese, who at age forty was the youngest player ever inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, got a degree in economics from Dartmouth. And not long after he dropped out of Cal Tech, Huck Seed won the World Series of Poker in 1996. Part of the hustle may be pretending not to be smart, but behind every gambler is a razor-sharp mind.
I found a way to play pool, and I learned the first rule of hustling before I was old enough to drive: Find a game where you can win.
Sigmund Freud did research on gamblers and found that a true gambler is a loser. People who enjoy speculating—deep down—want to lose. I can’t explain it as good as old Siggy, but he had it right about certain people not feeling worthy of having any money. And that’s why most gamblers deserve the bad reputation that they get. But what most people don’t realize is that a professional gambler—or an even better word for it might be “competitor”—isn’t the same thing as an ordinary gambler.
Even back then I had one of the most important traits of any hustler: greed. I never did want to just beat somebody; I always wanted to break a sonofabitch.
I also learned that there are people who love action and others who love money. The first group is called suckers, and the second is called professional gamblers,
I’m such a talker when I gamble. I learned from Fats that the more you can get someone to want to beat you, the more likely you are to make him emotional, so that his ego gets in the way of his brain.
Even though I learned gambling talk from Fats, our hustling styles were completely different. Fats was always looking for a sucker, and I was always looking for a champion. Fats’s strategy was to find anybody with a little money, bust him, and then kick him while he was down. The problem with that was, you could only win so much off a working stiff, and once you took his money, you couldn’t show your face again in that town. That’s why I went looking for wealthy champions and treated them with respect.
“Slim, you can shear a sheep many a time, but you can skin him only once.
Remember, Amarillo Slim never makes a bet unless the bet is already won.