TALES OF VEGAS PAST Johnny Moss Nick "The Greek" Dandalos

Thursday, May 29, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Tales of Vegas Past: Green felt duel on Fremont Street

By Gregory Crosby

In the aftermath of the triumph of the improbably named Chris Moneymaker, an amateur player who walked away with a cool $2 million and the championship after lasting out all comers in the 2003 World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe last weekend, the now-ritualized poker frenzy that descends on downtown Las Vegas every spring evaporates like a pair of pocket aces in the face of three kings on the turn. Now drawing nearly a thousand players, its final hours broadcast on ESPN and its arcana analyzed by any number of professional players and scribes, the World Series of Poker is an entrenched part of Las Vegas and gambling lore.

But long before its official founding 33 years ago, the idea of poker players going toe to toe, bluff to bluff, in an effort not just to win the pot but to decide who indeed was the best of the best, was set in motion by a legendary confrontation arranged by the ever-shrewd Benny Binion. In 1949 Binion, who had purchased the El Dorado club (the kernel of today's Horseshoe), was asked by perhaps the most famous gambler to ever grace a Vegas casino for some true no-limit action. Nearly all casinos in those years placed a limit on the amount a player could bet, but limits had little meaning to Nick "The Greek" Dandalos. Erudite, educated (purportedly with a degree from an unnamed "English university") and impeccably mannered, Nick the Greek had spent his lifetime chasing the action, winning millions at craps and poker. The Greek boasted of having broke East Coast gambling king Arnold Rothstein, and at 57 was reputed to have a bankroll in the millions.

Nick the Greek not only wanted a no-limit poker game, the "biggest game that this world could offer" (as he hyperbolically put it to Binion), he wanted to go head to head with a single player. Binion was more than happy to oblige, since he knew just the man for the game. A phone call to Dallas brought one of the greatest players in the game, Johnny Moss, directly to the green felt table that Binion set up in the casino; a table roped off but with plenty of surrounding room for the "railbirds" (spectators) who would soon crane their necks to see the duel in action. Even though Moss had just come off a four-day marathon bout of poker playing, and had never set foot in Las Vegas, he had taken the first flight out and took a cab right to the hotel, sitting down to meet the Greek in battle before his bags were unpacked.

It wasn't just a meeting of two famous gamblers, but a meeting of two different styles. Nick the Greek had spent most of his time cleaning out East Coast gamblers (his first trip to Vegas in 1940 had in fact been the occasion for a humiliating loss to a group of draw poker desert rats that the dapper Greek had unwisely underestimated). Moss, then 42, conducted his poker playing in the saloons and high-stakes private games of Texas and the South, and he sized up the Greek and his reputation as so much "high hat." With only a second-grade education and thick East Texas drawl, Moss nonetheless was the canniest player most people had ever seen, nearly supernatural in the ease with which he could predict what his opponents were holding at the table.

Moss shook hands with the Greek on that Sunday afternoon in January 1949, and the duel began: a duel that, unlike the quick-and-the-dead flash of steel between gunslingers, would drag on for five months. They would play for four or five days at a stretch, taking a break to sleep only once or twice a week. Moss would take advantage of these breaks, but Nick, more often than not, would spend his time away from their arena at the craps tables, taunting Moss with comments like "What are you going to do? Sleep your life away?" The purest sort of gambler, Nick the Greek was addicted to action. Moss understood the value of patience in this duel, instinctively knowing that he might not always outplay his opponent, but he would surely outlast him--and outlasting your opponent is one of poker's signal skills.

As it happened, it turned out precisely that way. Nick the Greek walked away with several big pots, even as the two men continually changed the game to keep it interesting: from five-card stud to draw, seven-card stud, seven card high-low split, ace-to-the-five lowball, deuce-to-the-seven lowball. Huge pots flowed back and forth, tourists and fellow gamblers watching from the sidelines as the days melted into nights and back into days, the two men breathing poker as if it was oxygen (which, to them, it was). At last, the unflappable Moss wore the Greek down to a nub. After he lost his last pot (and having lost perhaps $2 million over those months of play), Nick the Greek smiled softly, stood up and uttered one of the most gracious and simple admissions of defeat in poker lore: "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go."