Poker Book Reviews

Cowboys,
Gamblers and Hustlers
By Byron "Cowboy" Wolford, Cardsmith Publishing, 2002, 300 pages, $19.95

Review by Rod Allison

"Pardon me, sir, but I couldn't help noticing your outfit," said the Las Vegas tourist to the cowboy, referring to his glittery overalls with sequined playing cards spilling down the bib and his gold longhorn steer pendant draped over the top button of his starched white dress shirt. "Wherever did you get it?"

"Well, ma'am," drawled the cowboy with deadpan seriousness, "I used to pick cotton for Liberace and when he died, these overalls are all that he left me in his will."

Cowboy Wolford would be hard to overlook in any crowd, even by the ho-hum-I've-seen-it-all-before natives of Glitter Gulch. It's not just his sartorial splendor that folks notice: The 71-year-old Texan is a handsome dude with a distinctive personal style, impeccable Southern manners and a penchant for tipping big. "Did I ever tell you about the time that I tipped a waitress our last $50 when Doyle Brunson and I were on a road trip together?" he asked, referring to one of the zillion or so stories that he recounts about his life as a road gambler, hustler and rodeo performer in his new book, Cowboys, Gamblers & Hustlers.

Wolford's distinctive cardroom apparel is stitched by his equally attractive wife, Evelyn, who designed the "Benny Binion Dolls" and "World Series of Poker Quilt" that she and Byron (that's the cowboy's real moniker) presented to their friends, Benny and Teddy Jane Binion, in the 1980s.

Wolford is one of the few remaining members of an exclusive "club" of road gamblers, a vanishing breed of poker players and hustlers who crisscrossed the fabled Southern gambling circuit during the 1950s-1980s. A lot of them migrated to Las Vegas in the late '60s after Felton "Corky" McCorquodale introduced Texas hold'em to Glitter Gulch where they played in the inaugural World Series of Poker in 1970, just as they had played together for years in Texas.

Cowboy has been at the final table of the "Big One" himself, most notably in 1984 when he pulled off his famous bluff against Jesse Alto and took second place to winner Jack Keller. He has won several big buy-in deuce-to-seven lowball titles and in 1991 won the limit hold'em championship at the WSOP. And who could forget the color and competitive flair that the cowboy, all duded up in his dressiest overalls, brought to the final table when he placed third in the pot-limit hold'em championship at the WSOP in 2000?

The loquacious Texan and I sidled up to the bar at the Horseshoe, ordered a brew or two, and talked about gambling and hustling and rodeoing and about how things were in the old days in Vegas, "back when a dollar bill was a dollar bill and a man's word was his stock in trade." Wolford was born in 1930 in a tent near the East Texas oil boomtown of Tyler and became a professional calf roper at age 15.

When he was 21 years old, he set the world record for the fastest time tying a calf at the old Madison Square Garden and went on to win back-to-back calf roping championships at the Calgary Stampede in 1954-55. But by 1960 he was getting too old to rope "them muley-faced, 300-pound wild calves," so he made a significant career change and became a professional gambler.

The cowboy's dusty odyssey fading the white line from one Southern town to the next took him to illegal home games and smoky backrooms where he butted heads with famous road gamblers Titanic Thompson, Johnny Moss and Jesse Alto. Not that gambling for high stakes was anything new to the cowboy: "I always had a poker game going at the Belvedere Hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden during the rodeo," he said. "I would rent two adjoining rooms, one for playing cards and the other for my living quarters.

We played no-limit ace-to-five lowball, no joker, check and raise. All them cowboys had to pay me a dollar an hour to play, but nobody seemed to mind because the game was full around the clock. At the Garden we'd play 'red dog' in the clowns' room before the rodeo started and shoot craps in the basement. About 90 percent of cowboys in those days were natural-born gamblers, you know."

During one of his sojourns at the rodeo, Wolford won $15,000 one night in a big poker game, about twice the amount he could win for a month at rodeoing. "Bought myself six pairs of alligator shoes - brown, black, orange and even some purple ones - and some slacks, silk shirts and three sportcoats. I like to dress nice, you know." With the bulk of his win, Wolford handicapped the calf roping and bulldogging events at the rodeo and financed parlay cards complete with trifectas and daily doubles. He almost lost his boots on the deal, but through a "miracle of sports," he landed right side up, a lucky occurrence that became almost routine during his later career as a professional gambler.

"I saw Cowboy put the biggest bluff in World Series of Poker history on one of the best poker players in the world and get away with it," Bobby Baldwin, former world poker champion and now CEO of Mirage Resorts, said in his endorsement of Wolford's book. "But then, what else would you expect from an old-time cowboy gambler who used to shoot dice on bales of hay in the barns behind the rodeo?"

Of course, not even the tallest, toughest Texan can land on his feet every time. "We had a lot of things to worry about - hijackers, cheats, police," Cowboy said. "Curt Garrett and I owned a Red Men's Club in Fort Worth years ago and we had a helluva business. Then one day, the doors came tumbling down. At first I thought it was a heist, but it was the police swooping down on us with their guns drawn.

They tore up the entire joint and loaded everybody into a paddy wagon. When I got into the cell around midnight, Sam Benson was there along with the rest of the poker players. Sam was a bookmaker that we called 'Lightning' and he was hollering at the top of his lungs, 'Let me out of this sonnabitch! I've gotta open up my book in the morning - a lot of my customers are depending on me!' That was just one of the times that my butt landed in jail."

Probably the most memorable time that Wolford was incarcerated happened several years later in 1980 when he unwittingly got caught up in an undercover sting operation aimed at snaring illegal bookies. Seems that he was visiting a bookmaker-friend at a bar in Fort Worth who introduced him to some undercover policemen. "For almost a year, the bookmakers had been making their payments (in exchange for not being hassled by the law), not knowing that every one of their transactions was being audio taped.

'You wanna book in Dallas?' they (the police) asked me.

'No, I don't book, never did,' I said. 'I just play poker in Dallas and Vegas and anywhere there's a good game.'

'Well, do you know anybody else in Dallas who wants to book?' they asked.

'No, I don't. I don't bet the sports, I just play poker.'

'The reason that I'm asking is because my wife is in the hospital and I need to make some money,' one of them said. I could tell that what he was saying wasn't right, but I made a fatal mistake anyway. Getting up from the table, I pulled $500 out of my pocket and handed it to him. 'Put this on the hospital bill,' I said and left the joint."

In Cowboys, Gamblers & Hustlers, Wolford titled this story "Tipping My Way to Jail" because as the result of the beneficent toke he gave the officer, he was convicted of bribery and sent to the penitentiary for three months. It is part of a longer chapter titled "Trouble in River City," in which he details some of the tricks that scam artists and card sharps pulled on unwitting marks during his road-gambler days.

"In the old days, every player took his turn dealing," the wary cowboy wrote. "I've seen a man who was smoking a cigarette while he was playing head-up, lay his Zippo lighter down in front of his chips so that when he dealt the cards over that bright lighter, he knew exactly what the other guy had. Another guy might have a 'shiner,' a small convex mirror, hidden in the palm of his hand just beneath his pinkie finger at the point where the cards fly over it as he deals them. Or be wearing a ring with a highly polished crown that reflects the cards."

Then there were the guys who played "top-hand" with a confederate, the men who held cards out of the deck, the players who brought in cold decks, and a slew of other poker scam artists - plus the guy who could imitate anybody's voice on the telephone and con big-bankroll players into making loans to his partner; the lady who financed her husband's gambling by pulling off "the switch" at jewelry stores; the Texans who sold dry oil leases; and the escapades of Titanic Thompson, who once was a partner of Wolford's in running a poker room in Tyler.

"Titanic was a helluva scam man, " Cowboy said. "Even at 70 years old when we had our Red Men's club in Tyler, he prowled around at night to the bowling alleys and other joints working on some kind of a proposition. Ty pulled off one of his card tricks in Dallas where the Red Men's Club was located on the top floor of a two-story building. He noticed that every evening around five o'clock, a breeze came up in front of the club causing quite an updraft and discovered that he could pitch a playing card into the air and the wind would carry it to the top of the building.

Naturally, he practiced until he could do it perfectly. Then one night while he was playing poker with the boys, he bet that he could throw a card all the way up to the rooftop. They got their bets on, took a deck of cards downstairs to the corner, picked a card, and watched open-mouthed as Ty pitched it to the rooftop. Doing it once wasn't enough proof, so they had him repeat the trick two or three times, lost about $2,000 to him on the deal. Any time it looked like you had the nuts on Ty, don't worry, brother, you couldn't win!"

During the decades that the cowboy played poker on the road, he became friends with some of the most famous poker players in the world, men such as Robert Brooks, Harlan Dean, "Broomcorn" Herring, Blondie Forbes, Bobby Baldwin, Jesse Alto, Little Red Ashey and Amarillo Slim Preston. And the granddaddy of them all, Benny Binion.

Few people seem to remember that Binion played a key role in bringing the National Finals Rodeo to Las Vegas in 1986. For years it was held in Oklahoma City and Binion regularly transported a stagecoach with a matched team of horses from his ranch in Montana to the rodeo parade. "But then one year, the officials wouldn't let him enter his stagecoach," Cowboy said. "I don't know exactly why, but I think it might've been because it advertised gambling. Benny got so hot that he promised to pay the entry fees if they'd hold the rodeo in Vegas. Benny was the kind of guy whose friends could do no wrong and his enemies could do no right, it was that simple."

Jack Binion, the late patriarch's son, commented in his endorsement of Wolford's book, "He was quite a cowboy in his rodeo days and is still a top poker player. In fact, Cowboy is one of the last of the living legends of poker."

As though in answer to Jack, Wolford wrote in the book's closing comments, "I've always been a cowboy - a cowboy, a gambler and a hustler. I was a champion calf roper and probably could have been the best that ever was if I had roped as much as I played poker."

One thing's for sure - if there were a World Championship of Poker Writers, Cowboy Wolford would be at the final table giving the rest of 'em a run for their money.