POKER PLAYER PROFILES

     Amarillo Slim is one of the few old-time poker stars still around along with Doyle Brunson - who Slim ranks first as the player he respects the most. It's hard not to notice him with his distinctive appearance. At the table, he is tall, think, wears a cowboy hat, custom made ostrich boots, emerald buttons on his Western shirt and and always has a witty one-liner ready to keep players amused at the table. Born in 1928 in Johnson, Arkansas, he started playing poker at age 25 and won the World Series in 1972, sending his three children to college. His biography - Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People - is currently available at bookstores. He is best known for the crazy "proposition" bets he's won - including playing one-pocket pool with Minnesota Fats using a broom handle, golf with Evil Knievel using a carpenter's hammer, ping-pong with Bobby Riggs using an iron skillet, beating Larry Flynt at poker for $2,000,000, and beating Willie Nelson for $300,000 playing dominoes. He has also played poker with presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and drug lords Pablo Escobar and Jimmy Chagra. Always one to be able to spot a sucker, when asked he you could change one thing about the poker world, he replied: "More rich players".
     Amarillo has the reputation of putting poker on the map and, more than any other player, bringing respectability to poker and bringing poker out of the backrooms which is one of the reasons why he receives so much respect from poker players. Now that he is 70 years old he doesn't take gambling as seriously as other players. When asked if he enjoys the World Series as much as you used to he says he enjoys the camaraderie but when he sits down to play he feels "like he's in the electric chair -- I'd rather be anywhere else in the world. I'm pokered out." These days, he doesn't play that much poker anymore. Today he likes to golf, go quail hunting, and go to sporting events and he has his own golf course in his back yard, along with a professional tennis court and a king-sized swimming pool.
     Amarillo is also well-known for supposedly making a comment about women poker players. One year at the World Series of Poker, a lady who wasn't a very popular person had accumulated a good amount of chips and made the comment to Slim that "it's a certainty that I'm gonna win this World Series," and Slim said "If you win the World Series of Poker you can take a dull knife and cut my throat!" but he was quoted as saying "If a woman ever wins the World Series, I'll cut my throat." I didn't say that, but I caught a lot of heat from the gals, the lesser lady players, although when I told the good ones how it was, they knew Vera and understood what I meant by my remark. To this day, I'm still quoted incorrectly."