FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#390 – The Messy Pleasures of Poker History – Des Wilson’s GHOSTS AT THE TABLE

Posted by Editor | Filed under Books, Poker history

I met Des Wilson, who was destined to become a dear friend, at the 2005 World Series of Poker. He attended a lunch during the Main Event with Anthony Holden (who I also had recently met and who was also destined to become a close friend) and Joe Saumarez Smith (a boyish Wharton grad who became one of the UK’s leading online gaming journalists and businessmen over the last decade).

We ate a late lunch at a fish restaurant at the Rio. At the time, it was a series of delightful British stereotypes come to life: it seemed everyone had two cigarettes going, three drink orders pending, mushy fishy food they were devouring, and more stories than they could shove into one meal. The camadaraderie was remarkable; fueled by tankards of alcohol, they were simultaneously speaking some rapid, cheery foreign language. I loved it and was sad when contemplating a year in poker without the company of these men, and men like these.

My first memories of Des Wilson: shock of white hair, bushy white eyebrows, red-faced from the wine and trying to get in his stories, opinions, and digs in an accent racing along the boundaries of a language I was pretty sure (but not certain) was English.

Wilson, in his early sixties, had been a lot of places and done a lot of things. Born in New Zealand, he emigrated to Great Britain while still a teenager. Somehow – he dropped out of school at fifteen – he developed the idea that he was a newspaper reporter, and then he became one, a respected journalist and columnist for several publications on two continents. Meanwhile, he founded a housing charity, spent time as the director of public affairs for the Royal Shakespeare Company, was Chairman of Friends of the Earth UK, a political activist, Director of Corporate and Public Affairs for BAA (the company that operates airports in the UK), written novels, written books on corporate responsibility, and served as Chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board. Then he retired from all that to discover the joys of writing about and playing poker.

Other than that last sentence, my dear friend Des Wilson told me none of this.

Des Wilson is brilliant and diverse but completely unassuming. He is a great storyteller and humorist. He is a whirl of enthusiasm, activity, and disorganization.

For the last couple years, he has maintained his daily life at the World Series out of a nylon Ladbrokes.com rucksack. Through its shapelessness, numerous items have appeared, disappeared, and appeared again: notes, business cards, pens, books and magazines, credit cards.

Perhaps my favorite Des Wilson story is one he told me himself. Many many years ago, he was flying on the Concorde to New York. Sitting next to him was Carrie Fisher, star of the three highest-grossing movies of all time, a bestselling author, and in my opinion (and Wilson’s and many, many others) a beautiful, sexy, smart, funny woman.

They chatted and drank champagne, though if Wilson was bedazzled by Ms. Fisher, the feeling was apparently reciprocated. As they landed, he asked if he might contact her while he was in New York. Yes, she said, and jotted down her phone number.

Then he lost her phone number. He has since married Jane, an artist he wouldn’t trade for 10 Carrie Fishers. But c’mon? Visiting New York and having a beautiful, sexy, smart, funny, rich movie star give you her phone number and then lose it?

Gratefully, it wasn’t a year before I again crossed paths with Messrs. Holden and Wilson. I met up with Tony Holden in Las Vegas in October, then at Yale and Foxwoods in November. (Some of our time together is recounting in a pair of chapters of Bigger Deal.) Des was at Foxwoods, full of stories about how the personalities he eoncountered while researching Swimming with the Devilfish had hooked him on poker. He told me, “Michael, many of these European players have never talked to the media. I’ll be standing there with my tape recorder in their face and they’ll say things like, ‘I have another family in Thailand, you know.’”

By the 2006 Series, his first book was published and he was scheming for another poker book, a history of poker told as detective story. That became Ghosts at the Table, published in the UK last fall and now available in the US. I appear in the book – as in Holden’s Bigger Deal - in two chapters. Des quoted me at length in his investigation into the origins of the World Series of Poker and for my accounts of the titanic poker games between billionaire Andrew Beal and many of the world’s highest-stakes poker professionals.

Knowing Des Wilson as I do, and serving as a basis or partial basis for two of the chapters, I am obviously not an impartial reviewer. But I do know one thing: Des Wilson’s Ghosts at the Table is delightful, in the same was Des Wilson is delightful. Great stories and humor and adventure, enthusiasm and activity and disorganization.

Ghosts starts as a detective story but forget about that. Des raises a lot more questions than he answers and some of the answers are equivocal or unconvincing. In fact, some of the questions themselves may be less than compelling.

But none of that detracts from the joy of the book. It’s a travelogue, not a mystery. Take Wilson’s excellent first chapter, about the murder of Wild Bill Hickok. We all know the story about his poker hand, aces and eights, is forever known as “the dead man’s hand.” Des asks, did he really have aces and eights? How do we know? And what was the fifth card?

Those are amusing questions but do we really care about the answer? Probably not. But going with Des Wilson to Deadwood is worth the trip. Des plays poker in the recreated No. 10 Saloon under the gaze of the portrait of Poker Alice Tubbs, a sweet little grandmother with a cigar shoved into the side of her mouth. According to a contemporary quotation, “She was familiar with cards, guns, and men, and could handle all three.” Asked about her losing sessions, Poker Alice declared, “I’ve never seen anyone grow hump-backed carrying away the money they won from me.”

The action in the Beatles famous ballad, “Rocky Raccoon,” takes place “somewhere in the black mining hills of Dakota.” That’s where Wild Bill Hickok went with some gold-hunters in mid-July 1876, just three weeks before his death. He was apparently looking for poker action, not gold, and took up residence in a tent in Deadwood, playing daily in the No. 10 Saloon.

It’s said that you can find the answer to anything in a Beatles song if you open your mind. The femme fatale of Rocky Raccoon is his one-time woman:

Her name was Magill
and she called herself Lil
but everyone knew her as Nancy.

If there is anyplace where the truth doesn’t have to get in the way of a good story, it’s Deadwood. And if there is any activity where the truth is, like how the existence of hole cards makes it a game of “incomplete information,” almost never objective, it’s poker.

The No. 10 Saloon has, under glass, the dead man’s hand: ace of clubs, ace of spades, eight of clubs, eight of spades, nine of diamonds. But the town’s other historical attraction, a museum under the original No. 10 Saloon, claims it has the actual cards: ace of clubs, ace of diamonds, eight of hearts, eight of spaces, queen of hearts.

Wilson develops some bluster over this tiny town cashing in on Hickok’s century-and-a-quarter-old corpse, yet being unable to get its story staight. He questions the descendants of the man who claimed to snatch the cards off the table moments after Hickok’s death. He examines the stories that developed in later years claiming other cards in Hickok’s final hand. He interrogates various historical society and townspeople about what they’ve done to verify all this.

Des, who cares?

Actually, the fact that Des Wilson cares is important, because it motivated him to take this journey and bring readers along. I think it’s funny, even charming that Deadwood exists today because of the dead man’s hand and the only two places in town of any historical value claim different cards, with no particular interest in resolving the matter.

In that chapter, Wilson brings the ghosts to life, describing Hickok as a violent but generally admired lawman. Just thirty-nine when he traveled to Deadwood, he was nevertheless a melancholly figure. He had never recovered from accidentally killing a friend in a gunfight. (While firing fatally on his opponent, he saw a gun drawn in his peripheral vision and whirled and fired again. Actually, that would be a great story for Des to investigate, the firearms of the day not exactly of Glock 9 capacity and speed.) Although newly married, Wild Bill confides in a friend that he believes this will be his last camp and even writes his wife, the day before his murder, with thoughts of impending doom.

On the second page of the next chapter, “Poker in the Old West,” Wilson talks about his trip to, among other places highlighted in the chapter, Tombstone, describing its famous Bird Cage Theatre. “It claims no less than twenty-six ghosts, the spirits of the men murdered there in the eight years it was open.”

I was fascinated by the information of this chapter – Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Dodge City. And then I was pissed off. I live in Arizona. Des Wilson stayed in my condo on his way to Tombstone. I helped translate for him when he went to a Verizon store to see about getting his cell phone “topped off.”

Why didn’t I go with him? Or why didn’t I stalk him and leave his bleached bones in the desert to write the tale myself?

Wilson takes many journeys in Ghosts at the Table. He goes to Mississippi, to talk about when riverboat gambling actually took place on actual rivers. He rides the “white line” of Texas road gamblers including Doyle Brunson, Crandell Addington, Amarillo Slim, and TJ Cloutier. He reinvestigates – and sometimes investigates – stories out of the early days of the World Series of Poker. He tracks down the participants (and their descendants) of one of the strangest final tables of the World Series Main Event, the 1979 showdown between Bobby Hoff and Hal Fowler. Hoff was – and is – a top pro. Fowler was the only amateur to win the championship in its first 30 years. Both men admitted to or were observed taking narcotics during the Main Event.

Wilson caught up to Hoff, who plays professionally in California and shows up in some high profile events. He has, however, never gotten over being so close to winning the Main Event and failing. And Fowler? He disappeared from poker forever, and Des’s account of tracking down his story after his unlikely success is an interesting one.

The author finishes with chapters about the Andy Beal games, other high-stakes poker stories, and online poker. But whatever the subject, between Point A and Point B, Des Wilson may take you a dozen other places. You may never get to Point B. You may not even care about Point B. It won’t matter. You’ll enjoy the journey and learn a lot of interesting things, even if one of them is that “truth” in poker is a slippery and sometimes even unimportant concept.

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