A Fresh Card Deck

By the time Hold’em reached Las Vegas in the 1960s, it was the local strain of infection, carried by men who smelled like Marlboros and unfinished divorces. By 1967, a few Texans—Crandell Addington, Doyle Brunson, and Amarillo Slim—brought Hold’em to the Golden Nugget, which was less ‘casino innovation’ and more ‘regional accent with a rake.’

Poker’s older cousins were dealt on riverboats, in saloons, and anywhere whiskey was currency and nobody asked to see ID. Those games were closer to performance art than strategy: five-card draw, faro, stud—each a different excuse for cheating politely. The cards traveled north on the Mississippi and west with the gold rush, proving that hope floats just as easily as it drowns.

Vegas didn’t birth poker; it just put it under fluorescent lighting and started charging for parking. Before the neon, games lived in back rooms where the house’s “security” policy involved a revolver and plausible deniability. When the casinos cleaned it up, poker stopped being a crime and became an industry, though the moral improvement remains under review.

Standard chip colors came along mostly to prevent bar fights. By the 1950s, most houses agreed that white was $1, red was $5, and green was $25—an attempt at order that, predictably, fell apart the moment humans got involved. Nevada finally codified chip colors in the late ’50s, when too many players were cashing out the wrong pile. The Dunes and Binion’s led the charge—proof that civilization sometimes starts with labeling your mistakes.