Ferris, known as “Sarge” to those who played with him because of a stint he served in the Air Force, was from Shreveport, Louisiana and came up through the 1940s and 50s playing in road games across the South. “In my opinion, Fred Ferris was one of the great players of all time,” Baxter said. But there were a couple who gave Baxter some trouble. Few had the chops to hang in there with the sharks or the deep enough pockets to last as long as Riddle and Wyman. Most of them were chewed up and spit out. Many players came through the game over those years. The stakes were so high it was irresistible. The game ran until Major Riddle’s death in 1979, and during that time everybody in America who fancied themselves a top-tier poker player tried their hand at it. The man who is thought to have won the most money out of these multi-million dollar games, someone Amarillo Slim Preston said was the best player in the whole world, is Billy Baxter, a lifelong professional gambler and recent inductee into the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame. The lineup was a real who’s who of poker royalty: Doyle Brunson, Jack “Treetop” Strauss, Puggy Pearson, Bobby Baldwin, and eventually Chip Reese. They played with blinds of $1,000 and $2,000, and the game ran around the clock. The game was hosted by two of the Dunes’ owners, Sid Wyman and Major Riddle, who both loved to play poker and were two of the wealthiest men in the city. From 1975 until 1979, the biggest game in all of Las Vegas, and possibly all of America, was the No Limit Deuce-to-Seven game at the Dunes.
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