Betting Poker Strategy

Good Old Days by Doyle Brunson

The way I got to college, the only way I got off the farm, was being competitive. I was an all-state basketball player, I was state champion in the mile, so I got plenty of scholarship offers, and I was going to try my hand in the NBA, The Lakers had already been down to talk to my coach, and that's when I broke my leg. I still wanted to compete, but how do you compete with a broken leg? You can't if it's athletic.

It was devastating. My whole life had been athletics. I never had even considered doing anything besides making the NBA as a basketball player, and then afterwards I would have been a teacher and a coach. I never had good grades, didn't study, and hadn't really prepared for anything else. When I broke my leg at the end of my junior year, I came back and saw I had to change my study habits. So I started studying, it was like a new world. I'd never been around people that weren't jocks. I moved into the dorm with intellectual guys, and it was totally different. I realized there was life outside of athletics. So I studied, got my masters degree, and went to go into teaching and coaching. The pay was so bad I said, "Well, I'm not going to do that." So that's how I started out with the Burroughs Corporation.

I worked for them as a door-to-door salesman, which I wasn't very well suited for. I didn't like it at all. But that's how I got into poker. I'd go around trying to sell establishments a math machine or bookmaking equipment or cash registers or whatever, and you'd go into the back hall and see a poker game going on. So that's when I became aware of the poker community.

When I moved to Fort Worth, it was a new world to me. I was just out of college without any expectations about the dark side of gambling. When I started, it was all illegal. You'd start getting arrested, but you would meet a lot of characters. I'm talking about bad people: the thieves, the pimps, and so forth. But most of them were pretty personable. I was single, running around chasing the girls, and they were too. So consequently I got to know a lot of those guys.

In the north side of Fort Worth, there were about 30 of us. We ran around together, all about the same age. But by the time I was 40, there was only one other guy left out of that group. That guy was Sailor Roberts. The rest of them had either gotten killed or were in the penitentiary. Most of them did things other than gamble. Thank the good Lord that I never got into the drugs or the illegal activities outside of gambling.

I ran with this crew about three or four years. I called it my elementary school of gambling, and then all of a sudden I got arrested a few times with them at illegal poker games. That's when I decided to leave Fort Worth.

I had already seen five of my friends get killed on the north side of Fort Worth in a shootout on the street. One guy once came into a poker game and blew a guy's head off right in front of us. These fights were almost always over women and drugs. As much as I liked that part of the gambling world, I decided I should see if I could find a safer environment than that. So I graduated to the games where professional people played.

Fortunately, every town in Texas had them. It was just kind of what I did. I went from town to town, developed a reputation of being honest, gave a lot of action in the games, and people liked me. So there was a multitude of games to choose from, so that's when Sailor and I traveled around the country playing poker.

Obviously I have a lot of stories from back then. I don't know if we have a favorite, we shared so many good times together. We were together for six or seven years, so we had lot of good memories. Sailor and I competed very hard against each other. I even won his dog. He owed me $1,900 and he was living with me at the time. I said, "Ok, you don't have the money? I'll take your dog." The dog liked me better, anyway.