'look Up And He's Got Your Money'

The casinos, he says, "thrive on the guy who can't control himself. A guy loses $20,000 at poker, then, instead of going out to dinner with the family, he goes to the blackjack table and blows another $50,000. 'Eating like a bird and crapping like an elephant.' You got to learn to put some in the bank when you're winning, and to walk away when you're losing. You got to learn that tomorrow really is another day. I learned that early, from Robert Dickens."

He says Dickens also tried to teach him to be a little less flamboyant, a little more careful, "but I still got busted for bookmaking three times. It didn't make much of an impression on me because I felt gambling wasn't bad. Even when I went to jail, I didn't feel guilty or anything. I used to introduce myself, 'Hey, I'm Billy Baxter of the Richmond County Correctional Institution.' My first month there I played poker, with a dollar limit, with all the black guys, took all their money and then gave it back to them. I got along fine after that. Eventually the warden let me go home weekends. I even got to go see the Foreman-Frazier fight on closed circuit. I have no regrets. I'm a gambler. It's what I do."

His sports betting, says Billy, was something that accelerated only after he got to Las Vegas and the poker began to fade. "I came out here to play poker with the right people," he says. "If I'd gotten here sooner, I'da made a fortune. It was a paradise. Sometimes the pots would go as high as a million dollars, and there were a lot of big hotel and casino owners who loved to play but couldn't play very well. Now the big corporations own the hotels and the big fish are mostly gone. Major Riddle, who was president of the Dunes, and Sid Wyman [who was chief operating officer at the Dunes under Riddle] are dead. Jimmy Chagra [who was a drug dealer] is in prison. To win at poker, you've got to have somebody you can beat. You gotta have fresh money. Larry Flynt [the former publisher of Hustler magazine] was here for a while. I took some of his money. But they don't stay like they used to. Chagra came out of nowhere one day and sat down and said, 'Deal me in.' And he stayed, and he lost a lot of money. I beat him out of $100,000 once. Turned out his money was in drugs.

"All that's left now are the piranhas, the guys who beat you as often as you beat them—Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Stu Unger, Bobby Baldwin, guys like that. There's no percentage in it."

Only the poker "tune-aments" keep Baxter's interest up. In that circle, Brunson, Baldwin and "Bluffin' Billy" Baxter are known as the Three B's. In 1981 Baxter bluffed Baldwin out of a $38,000 pot and a World Series championship in lo-ball with a pair of sixes, as Baldwin tossed in with a king high. In '82, when he won another "Series" title, Baxter's match with Baldwin took seven hours.

The private games, however, "are a lot tougher—you can go two, three days easy, 50 hours plus without stopping. To stay alert you get up, wash your face, walk around, go to the bathroom, do anything. Except take pills. I never took pills. They make you fearless, and you always should have a little fear in a high-stakes poker game. That's what keeps you awake, the bigness of it."

Luck, he says, is never a factor over a long period of time. "I never rely on luck, not in anything. The secret is to get the best of the bet. If you play scratch golf and I'm a four, and you give me three shots a side, it's not hard to figure that I've got the best of it." And in poker, he says, it takes skill to read the opposition. "If Major Riddle had a bad hand, he'd toss his bet in, just kinda flip it. If he took a good hit, he'd place his bet on the table. If he drew a paint [a face card], he'd look at it and look at it.

"The other side of that is, you worry all the time the other guy is picking up things, too. Like football scouts do. Then you're wondering if you're showing any blood—if the veins in your neck are popping out or your ears are turning red. You know your heart's pounding, but they can't see that. But if you talk, you could have a lump in your throat. The eyes are the biggest giveaway. You have to look at people without showing anything."

His style, Baxter says, "is to always be consistent. Don't do anything different. The heart of it, though, is you can't be afraid to lose. I know guys who play well until there's $40,000 or $50,000 in the pot. The collar gets tighter and tighter. It's just something you have to cope with. You know you're getting it done when you still have money and the other guys don't."

He's on the phone again, collecting scores. From the dining-room table, Julie calls him to lunch—chicken salad, fresh asparagus and hearts of palm.