The First World Series of Poker: Johnny Moss vs Nick the Greek

Q: People talk about the World Series of Poker like it started with a big tournament. Was that always how it worked?

Not at the beginning. Benny Binion, who ran the Horseshoe Casino on Fremont Street, had a simple idea in 1970: invite the best poker players he knew, let them play against each other for as long as they liked, and then have them vote on who was the best. No buy-in structure, no timed rounds, no eliminations. Just cards and respect.

The players voted Johnny Moss the winner. He received a silver cup. That was the whole of it.

Q: Who was Johnny Moss?

Moss was born in 1907 in Texas, and he had been gambling for money since he was a teenager running cards for a Dallas road-game operator. By the time Binion called him to Las Vegas, Moss had been playing poker professionally for over forty years. He had a reputation for patience and for reading people the way some men read weather. He was in his early sixties at that first gathering and was considered by most of his peers to be the best all-around player alive.

He would go on to win the WSOP championship vote again in 1971, and then the proper freeze-out tournament format in 1974 at age sixty-six. That particular detail tends to surprise people.

Q: And Nick the Greek? Who was he?

Nick Dandolos, the man everyone called Nick the Greek, was already famous long before he sat down with Moss. He was a high-stakes gambler from Crete who had won and lost fortunes several times over by the 1940s. Estimates of his lifetime gambling volume vary wildly, but figures over fifty million dollars were regularly cited in the press of his day, though no one could say exactly how much of that he had won versus lost.

He was not primarily a poker player. He preferred dice and cards of all kinds, any game where skill could influence the outcome. He was, by all accounts, a man of considerable learning and charm, and he treated winning and losing with the same philosophical detachment.

Q: I've heard about a famous match between Moss and Nick the Greek before the WSOP. What was that?

This is the part of the story that gets told around tables. In 1949, Nick the Greek reportedly approached Benny Binion with a request: he wanted to play the best poker player in the world, head to head, for as long as both men wanted. Binion called Johnny Moss.

The game ran, with breaks for sleep, for approximately five months. They played five-card stud, deuce-to-seven draw, and other variants. They played in public, at the Horseshoe, and word spread. People came to watch. The marathon became a kind of attraction.

Moss won somewhere between two and four million dollars over the course of those months, depending on which account you read. Nick the Greek's last act was to stand up from the table, bow slightly, and say, "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go."

That line has been quoted so many times it has taken on the quality of a set piece. But it likely happened. Moss told the story himself, and he was not a man known for embellishment.

Q: What does this story tell us about gambling?

Maybe that patience is its own kind of bankroll. Moss outlasted Nick the Greek not just in those five months but across a lifetime of play. Nick the Greek died in 1966, largely broke, a man who had turned an enormous capacity for risk into an eventful but ultimately expensive biography.

Moss died in 1995, still playing, still recognized.

Benny Binion built something that year, 1970, that has grown into a series that annually draws tens of thousands of entrants and pays out hundreds of millions in prize money. He started it with a vote. The cup Johnny Moss received that first year didn't have much silver in it, by some accounts. But it was the beginning of something.