Poker Alice

1. Poker Alice Band
2. Poker Alice Cowboy Bebop

The “Queen of the Western Gamblers” was Alice Ivers. She was both gambler and madam. She also had a religious side, closing her brothel on Sundays where she taught Sunday school lessons to her girls in the parlor where the other six days of the week were devoted to highly secular frolics.

She allegedly came from England and her real name was Alice Ivers. And supposedly she was born on February 21st, 1851 in Devonshire. Another version of her story says she was born in Virginia in 1853 to Irish immigrants and the daughter of a school teacher. One thing for certain, she was likable, pretty and intelligent.

The family followed the silver rush to Leadville, Colorado around 1870 and in her early 20’s she married a mining engineer who also loved to frequent Leadville’s gambling establishments. Not wanting to stay home along she began accompanying him, quietly studying the games. She was a keen observer and a quick learner. Pretty soon she was sitting at the tables and winning both at faro and poker.

When her husband was killed in a mining accident less than a year after they were married she was alone. There were few choices for a young widow in those frontier towns. She could open a boarding house, be a housekeeper for a mine owner or become a prostitute. Alice had a better idea and she began her life as a professional gambler and drifted to mining towns across the West. She was a natural-born calculator with long, slim fingers that could manipulate the cards deftly and surely.

United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 0 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Black & White, Interactive Menu, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: Alice Moffit, 'Poker Alice', has been disowned by her Boston family because of her incurable penchant for gambling. Poker Alice is a 1987 American made-for-television western romance film directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Skerritt and George Hamilton.The film was shot on location in Old Tucson, Arizona. Infamous Deadwood: Poker Alice Tubbs. Deadwood was a rough and tumble gaming town not fit for a fine English lady. But that’s exactly where Ms. Alice Ivers found herself. Widowed and broke, this lady began playing poker to support herself. Nicknamed “Poker Alice,” she became a cigar-smoking, straight-faced, gambler who very rarely lost.

Alice was a very pretty woman with bright blue eyes and lush brown hair. She always dressed in the latest fashions. She had a knack for counting cards and figuring the odds. Her skills at poker and dealing faro not to mention she was a sight for sore eyes to many a lonely miner kept her in demand. She was always welcome among the fraternity of both professionals and amateur gamblers. Soon she acquired the name, “Poker Alice.”

Because of her religious beliefs she never gambled on Sunday’s but she did acquire a taste for smoking long, black cheroots and packing a .38 caliber six-shooter which she was not hesitant to use.

Over her long career Alice won thousands, lost it then won it back again. With a pocket full of money she’d head back East, have a grand time, replenish her elaborate wardrobe and when she was broke, return and resume winning more. Her motto seemed to be, “Easy come, easy go.”

She worked her way north to Deadwood, North Dakota where she chanced to meet a house painter and part-time gambler named Warren Tubbs. Despite the fact she beat him often at the gaming tables the two became friends. One night a drunken miner charged him with a knife. From her table across the room she pulled her .38 pistol and shot the assailant in the arm.

Afterwards, she married Tubbs and the two made a living on her gambling and his work as a house painter. They eventually moved to a farm near Sturgis, South Dakota and had seven children, four sons and three daughters.

Poker Alice Band

Tubbs contracted tuberculosis and died of pneumonia during the great North Dakota “Blizzard of 1910.” She hauled his body in a wagon 48 miles into Sturgis and pawned her wedding ring for $25 to pay for his funeral. Then she went to the gaming tables and won enough money to retrieve her ring.

Alice hired a man named George Huckert to take care of the farm and she returned to that which she did best, gambling. Huckert proposed marriage several times and finally she relented. She owed him over a thousand dollars in back wages and figured it would be “cheaper to marry him than to pay him off.”

She would later that she those years spent on the farm were the happiest of her life. Bad luck rendered her a widow again. George died in 1913 and once again it was back to earning a living at the gaming tables. This time she opened her own establishment that also doubled as a brothel.

During Prohibition she continued to serve booze and provide gambling for the soldiers at nearby Fort Meade. One night couple of drunken soldiers tried to wreck the place and Alice pulled her .38 and shot one dead and wounded the other. While sitting in jail awaiting her trial she smoked cigars and read from her Bible. She was acquitted of all charges but her establishment was closed.

It wasn’t long before she was back in business. During an interview she said she went to a banker and asked for a $2,000 loan that she promised to pay off in two years. She headed for Kansas City to recruit some new girls and soon the place was up and running. She went to the bank and paid off the loan a year early and when he asked how she paid it off so early she said, I took a couple chaws on the end of my cigar and told him, “Well, it’s this way. I knew the Grand Army of the Republic was having an encampment here in Sturgis. And I knew that the state Elks convention would be here, too. But I plumb forgot about all those Methodist preachers coming to town for a conference.”

Old age was catching up on Poker Alice, she was now in her sixties and her stunning beauty was a long ago thing of the past. She continued to run her “boarding house for single women.” She was arrested a number of times for running a disorderly house and finally sent to jail. That didn’t last long as the legendary Poker Alice was pardoned by the governor. She was now seventy-five years old and her health was beginning to fail.

Poker Alice died in 1930 at the ripe old age of seventy-nine from complications after undergoing surgery for her gall bladder. She was buried in Sturgis.

It’s been estimated she won over a quarter of a million dollars gambling during her career. She once, “I would rather play poker with five or six experts than eat.” That would have made a good epitaph for her tombstone.

In 1987, ironically, the same year gambling and prostitution were outlawed in Deadwood, one of Hollywood’s most glamorous actress, Elizabeth Taylor played Poker Alice in a made for television movie. I’ll bet she would have liked that.

“I went to the bank for a $2,000 loan to build on an addition and go to Kansas City to recruit some fresh girls. When I told the banker I’d repay the loan in two years, he scratched his head for a minute then let me have the money. In less than a year I was back in his office paying off the loan. He asked how I was able to come up with the money so fast. I took a couple chaws on the end of my cigar and told him, `Well, it’s this way. I knew the Grand Army of the Republic was having an encampment here in Sturgis. And I knew that the state Elks convention would be here, too. But I plumb forgot about all those Methodist preachers coming to town for a conference’.”

This was probably the most famous story ever attributed to Poker Alice and, if true, says a lot about the times. In 1913 there were a bunch of soldiers in the house getting pretty unruly and she fired off one rifle shot to quiet them down. Unfortunately, the bullet passed through two of the soldiers, killing one of them. The police closed down the house and took Alice and all six of her girls to jail. At her trial, the shooting was ruled accidental and she was acquitted but forever after, the authorities at Fort Meade were on her case.

She was in her 60’s by then but they kept arresting her for drunkenness and keeping a bawdy house. She always paid her fines and went back to business as usual but eventually, she was sentenced to a term in the state pen for her repeated convictions as a madam. Being 75 years old at the time of her sentencing, she was almost immediately pardoned by the governor.

Alice was a professional gambler, never a “soiled dove”: gamblers enjoyed a much higher social status and pay scale. For the last 20 years of her life, in addition to running the house in Sturgis, she was an often-seen, well-known card player in Deadwood, a town which tolerated gambling and prostitution up until 1987.

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Alice Ivers Duffield Tubbs Huckert (February 17, 1851 – February 27, 1930), better known as Poker Alice, Poker Alice Ivers or Poker Alice Tubbs, was an English poker player in the American West.

Her family moved from Devon, England, where she was born, to Virginia, United States, where she was reared and educated. As an adult, Ivers moved to Leadville, Colorado, where she met her first husband, Frank Duffield. He got Ivers interested in poker, but he was killed a few years after they married. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games in places like Silver City, New Mexico, and even working at a saloon in Creede, Colorado, that was owned by Bob Ford, the man who killed Jesse James.^[1]

Early life[edit]

'Poker' Alice Ivers was born in England, to Irish immigrants. Her family moved to Virginia when Alice was twelve. As a young woman, she went to boarding school in Virginia to become a refined lady. While in her late teens, her family moved to Leadville, a city in the then Colorado Territory.

Personal life[edit]

Poker Alice Cowboy Bebop

It was in Leadville that Alice met Frank Duffield, whom she married at a young age. Frank Duffield was a mining engineer who played poker in his spare time. After just a few years of marriage, Duffield was killed in an accident while resetting a dynamite charge in a Leadville mine.

Ivers was known for splurging her winnings, as when she won a lot of money in Silver City and spent it all in New York. After all of her big wins, she would travel to New York and spend her money on clothes. She was very keen on keeping up with the latest fashions and would buy dresses to wear to play poker, partly as a business investment to distract her opponents.

Alice met her next husband around 1890 when she was a dealer in Bedrock Tom's saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. When a drunken miner tried to attack her fellow dealer Warren G. Tubbs with a knife, Alice threatened him with her .38. After this incident, Tubbs and Ivers started a romance and were married soon after.

Alice Ivers and Warren Tubbs had four sons and three daughters together. Tubbs and Ivers did not want their children to be influenced by the world of poker, so they moved to a house just northeast of Sturgis on the Moreau River in South Dakota. Tubbs was not only a dealer, but a housepainter as well. It was most likely this house painting that caused him to fall sick with tuberculosis. Warren Tubbs died in 1910 of pneumonia during a blizzard. Alice drove her husband's body in a wagon 50 miles to get him a decent burial. To pay for his funeral, she had to pawn her wedding ring, which led her back to the poker tables.

Alice's 3rd husband was George Huckert, who worked on her homestead taking care of the sheep. Huckert was constantly proposing to Ivers, yet for a while she did not agree. Eventually, however, Ivers owed Huckert $1,008, so she married him figuring that it would be cheaper than paying his back wages. Huckert died in 1913.

Poker career[edit]

After the death of her first husband, Alice started to play poker seriously. Alice was in a tough financial position. After failing in a few different jobs including teaching, she turned to poker to support herself financially. Alice would make money by gambling and working as a dealer. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games. By the time Ivers was given the name 'Poker Alice,' she was drawing in large crowds to watch her play and men were constantly challenging her to play. Saloon owners liked that Ivers was a respectable woman who kept to her values. These values included her refusal to play poker on Sundays.

As her reputation grew, so did the amount of money she was making. Some nights she would even make $6,000, an incredibly large sum of money at the time. Alice claimed that she won $250,000, which would now be worth more than three million dollars.

Ivers used her good looks to distract men at the poker table. She always had the newest dresses, and even in her 50s was considered a very attractive woman. She was also very good at counting cards and figuring odds, which helped her at the table.

Alice was known always to have carried a gun with her, preferably her .38, and frequently smoked cigars.

Poker's Palace and jailtime[edit]

In 1910, Ivers opened 'Poker's Palace', a saloon in Fort Meade, South Dakota, which offered gambling and liquor downstairs, and prostitution upstairs. The saloon was always closed on Sundays because of Ivers' proclaimed religious beliefs. However, in 1913, some drunken soldiers disobeyed Ivers' 'no work on Sunday' rule and started to get unruly, chaotic and destructive of the house. It was then that Ivers shot her gun, supposedly to quiet down the soldiers. The shot ended up killing one of the soldiers and injuring another, resulting in Ivers' arrest, along with the arrest of six of her prostitutes.

Ivers' time spent in jail was short, but she got through it with the help of reading the Bible and smoking cigars. At the trial, she claimed self-defense and was acquitted. After the trial, her saloon was shut down.

While in her sixties, Alice Ivers was arrested several times after the 'Poker Palace' incident for being a madam, a gambler and a bootlegger, as well as her drunkenness. She would comply with the law and pay her fines but kept her business. In 1928, she was arrested again for bootlegging and her repeated offenses of conducting a brothel. Despite this sentence to prison, Ivers did not end up confined because she was pardoned by then-GovernorWilliam J. Bulow of South Dakota, who took this action because of her old age.

Legacy[edit]

After being forced to retire by the anger of the military and other people who were upset with her blend of religious elements at her house in Sturgis, Alice's health began to fail her. Alice Ivers died on February 27, 1930 in Rapid City after a gallbladder operation at the age of 79. Ivers was buried at the St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sturgis, South Dakota.

In 1960, Barbara Stuart played Poker Alice in a three-part episode of the Rory CalhounCBS western series, The Texan. Calhoun as series character Bill Longley, a heroic figure rather than the real outlaw of the same name, pursues the bandit El Sombro to the fictitious corrupt community of Rio Nada. In the episodes 'The Taming of Rio Nada', 'Sixgun Street', and 'The Terrified Town', Poker Alice is shown as an unlikely frontier gambler, the mother of seven children who had once been a dealer for Bob Ford in Colorado and spent her later years in Deadwood and Sturgis, South Dakota.^[2]

Ivers has been fictionalized in several films, including the 1978 TV movieThe New Maverick with James Garner as Bret Maverick and Susan Sullivan as Poker Alice Ivers. In another television film, Poker Alice, Elizabeth Taylor plays the cigar-smoking and bordello-owning poker player. The film is so fictionalized that the character is given another surname.

References[edit]

1. ^'OLD WEST LEGENDS;Poker Alice - Famous Frontier Gambler'.
2. ^Billy Hathorn, 'Roy Bean, Temple Houston, Bill Longley, Ranald Mackenzie, Buffalo Bill, Jr., and the Texas Rangers: Depictions of West Texans in Series Television, 1955 to 1967', West Texas Historical Review, Vol. 89 (2013), p. 111

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