Binion's Hotel and Casino hosted the 14th World Series of Poker in 1983, and it featured a Main Event with the usual bag of great storylines — like Doyle Brunson finishing third in his quest for three Main Event titles and Tom McEvoy prevailing as the first winner who qualified via satellite. It even had the first marathon heads-up finale, starting at 3:20 pm and finishing at 1:35 am with a three-hour lunch in between.
But a bigger strategy was taking on a new shape at the WSOP — the idea that poker players were more than just gamblers. Binion's started the WSOP to showcase its casino and the people who played at it, and the strategy was working. Henri Bollinger, the press agent for Binion's, pushed poker stories into magazines and newspapers all over the country. In 1983, there would be a new book about the WSOP and a syndicated documentary. A partnership with ESPN was right around the corner.
An explicit goal of Binion's and their marketing plan was to push the game, and the casino itself, to a wider audience by telling the stories of players as larger-than-life characters.
The WSOP had grown from its initial inception as a marketing gimmick to a complete series of poker tournaments that drew the best in the world. It was still a loss-leading marketing event, but it had success in establishing the Binion Family and their casino as the go-to source for "real gamblers" in the 1970s and 80s. "The only casino in the country where the gambler sets his own limits."
The Biggest Game in Town
One of the many attempts at pushing poker to a wider audience was the Al Alvarez book, The Biggest Game in Town. An on-the-ground view of the 1981 World Series, the book tells the story of the game's biggest characters and the city in which they live.
Alvarez was hardly the obvious author for a book about poker. A poet from England and a friend of Sylvia Plath, his topics generally tilted darker, like divorce, suicide, and the oil industry. But he also extended his body of work into his hobbies, which included poker and climbing mountains.
A 1983 review in GAMES Magazine called the book a "pleasure experience," citing "wonderful" anecdotes about Stu Ungar, Mickey Appleman, and Bobby Baldwin:
"The high-stakes world is brought to life by Alvarez, a distinguished British poet and critic — and also a respectable poker player — in this witty, knowing book." The book was released in May of 1983, with promotion planned throughout the WSOP and a book signing.
Excerpts appeared in The New Yorker, and a paperback version was published to coincide with the 1985 WSOP two years later. Many of its subjects were unknown at the time, but the book put both its characters and the game of poker on the popular culture map. It would go on to form a cornerstone of poker literature, laying out a blueprint for much of the character-based storytelling that poker aims for today.
The original heads-up duel
Elsewhere at the 1983 WSOP, Tom McEvoy was beating Doyle Brunson and Rod Peate in a dramatic Main Event finale after the three outlasted 108 players over four days. It was McEvoy's second bracelet of the series, having won the $1,000 Limit Hold'em event earlier in the week.
Seat draws, chip counts, and bio sheets provide insight into poker accounting at the time. Not much has changed, though the handwriting has gotten a lot worse.
Day 1 counts show 'Austin Squatty' with the chip lead. 'Squatty' was actually a man named John Holmes Jenkins, a historian and author from Texas. Jenkins was called 'Squatty' because he sat cross-legged at the poker table. He would later finish seventh. The controversial shooting death of Jenkins in Texas in 1989 is a story all its own.
Brunson had the fifth-biggest stack after Day 1, and runner-up Rod Peate was in the top ten. McEvoy was in 26th place of the remaining 69 players, the last of whom was short-stacked adult materials publisher Larry Flynt.
Day 2 had a new chip leader, F.O. Roach, and Flynt, who was near the felt after Day 1, found a miraculous spin-up to ninth place going into Day 3.
The third day flew by, starting with 25 players around noon and finishing with nine at 8 pm.
The final table reconvened the following afternoon, with the first seven players eliminated before 3:20 pm. McEvoy and Peate would go on to play what was the longest heads-up match until 2006, finally finishing at 1:35 am.
"I've done something no other poker player has ever done," McEvoy said on his post-win bio sheet. "I won both the limit and no-limit championship tournaments. And believe me, limit and no-limit are two entirely different games."
"We're going to China in 1985," the Grand Rapids native continued. "In the meantime, I'll play poker and pay a lot of taxes."
McEvoy would go on to become one of poker's pioneer strategy writers, authoring 15 books throughout his career. He would compete against an Apple computer the following year in another Binion's marketing gimmick. The WSOP hooked up with ESPN in 1987.
See more from the 1983 WSOP in the photo gallery:
Letters and artifacts obtained from Binion's Horseshoe Casino Records on Poker, 1960-2006. MS-00325. Special Collections and Archives, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
