Danny Robison's an every day regular in the stud game at LA's Commerce Club Casino. He'll occasionally take a break from the Commerce to join Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's big poker game where the limits can get up to fourand eight-thousand. And on Wednesday night at the Commerce, the 61-yearold Robison never misses the Bible study group that is a must with this self-described born-again Christian, who says he has given up drugs and booze, but not poker.
His present life is a long way from those wild and crazy days of 35-40 years ago in the Dayton, Ohio, area when getting out of town in a hurry seemed like an example of sound career planning. Dayton was where Robison had done his early gambling and hustling before and after his stint at Ohio University.
Robison's problem was that the local law wanted him to bend . . . bend his sense of right and wrong enough to tell them who was the big man behind the poker Robison was regularly running. "I looked after the game for this fella when he wasn't there and was taking his cut for him."
The cops wanted Robison's friend and one night sent an undercover agent into the game. "The guy got broke pretty quick," Robison says, "and wanted to pawn his gun." Robison took the gun, emptied the bullets out, put them in one pocket and the pistol in another. But as he quickly realized, what he should have done was throw it out the window.
Minutes later, the cops charged in, slapping Robison with a gambling charge and for carrying a concealed weapon, to wit: the undercover agent's gun. They showed only limited interest in Robison's explanation of events but eventually they said they'd drop all charges if only Robison would tell them the identity and location of his friend. Robison stares the cops down, saying to him, "What friend?"
Time went by, and there were other arrests, because the cops were not going to give up pressing Robison for names and places.
Several arrests later and with Robison finally staring at a year or so in jail, Robison's attorney works out a plea deal Danny figures he'd better grab while he can. It would keep him out of jail, but it also requires that he leave Dayton for greener pastures elsewhere.
As luck would have it, this is about the time that his longtime friend David "Chip" Reese calls from Phoenix, where he was working a sales job between his graduation from Dartmouth and his expected enrollment in law school.
Reese and Robison had met on a putting green because a passion for golf was one of the things they both had in common. Neither of them had any reason to assume their relationship, that began on an Ohio golf course, would lead to one of the most interesting partnerships the poker business has ever known.
Robison has a seven-card stud bracelet from the 1995 World Series of Poker in addition to several cashes in other major tournaments such as the Super Bowl of Poker. Reese is one of the most respected cash game players ever to slide into a big money game anywhere, But all this was still ahead of them on the day on a day in the early 1970s when Reese called Robison in Ohio and suggested he get himself out to Phoenix because the gin rummy action would make the trip worthwhile. (Robison had a reputation at that time as one of the hottest gin players in the country.)
Robison went out to Phoenix, found the action Reese had pointed to and ended up beating a guy for $10,000 who paid him off with a hot check. Years later that memory rates an oh well kind of laugh.
And that was enough of Phoenix, so far as Robison was concerned, but since he was already in the neighborhood he decided to head up the highway to Las Vegas, where he figured to take a shot at some of the poker action. Maybe even play some gin.
"In Vegas," he says, "I got offered a deal by this guy who would pay me to play gin rummy with all the tourists walking around looking for some action." Robison and his backer talked about other things Robison might like to do while he was in the gambling capital of the world and Robison says, "Well, the truth is I play poker pretty good. Matter of fact, I think I'm about the best in the world . . ."
"The guy laughed at me," telling him to get rid of that kind of thinking. "He said these are all pros out here in Las Vegas." Robison shoots him a look that says, So?
"I decided I wanted a piece of whatever poker had to offer," Robison says now, remembering how it all went down. The backer thinks about that and finally says, "Tell you what, I'll loan you ten-thousand based on your gin rummy ability and you can go ahead and play poker on your own."
"I got excited" Robison says, "because that was a lot of money then back, in, oh . . . it was probably late 1972, maybe early 1973."
He called Reese and told him about the deal, urging his friend to get up to Vegas so they could play poker.
"I knew Chip could play. I taught him some of what I knew and Chip being a very smart man learned a lot on his own. Why don't you come out here, I told him. We'll split everything down the middle, take turns playing poker and take the town for a lot of money."
That was the way Robison had it figured and that's pretty much the way it happened.
The big games of that time with the four- and eight-hundred-dollar limits were a bit rich for them in the beginning, but Robison decided they could do nicely with the thirty-sixty and the fifty and a hundred limits as they worked on building a bankroll.
"We just sort of took the town by storm," Robison remembers. "We were winning every time we played.
I think we lost just one time in the first three and a half months we played . . .
We just beat it, beat it, beat it." Things were going well, as they played mostly 20-40 and 30-60 limits with occasional forays to higher limits as they built a bankroll of more than forty-thousand.
But one problem eventually reached up to grab him around the throat: Robison was developing a cocaine habit that haunted him much of the next decade until 1984. "Which is when I became a Christian." He needed some kind of helping hand. "Because when you're smoking the stuff like I was you're just a gone cookie."
Robison struggled to keep a lid on things so we could win enough to support his habit. He did that with some success because, "I was pretty much the best stud player around at that time." Robison stuck to stud as Reese was using their joint bank roll to try other games such as high-low split and razz.
They built their bankroll to about sixty thousand and then one day Reese calls his partner. He was excited, explaining that he was watching a four- and eight-hundred straight high low split game with - get this - Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson, "Puggy" Pearson and he mentioned two or three other people - all of them members in good standing of poker's "A" List at that time.
"These guys were known as the best poker players in the world," Robison says but on that afternoon at the Flamingo they were struggling with a game that was relatively new to them. It was high-low split, "not eight or better," Robison says, "but just regular highlow split." Reese wanted his partner's okay to take a shot at the game with their joint bankroll, convinced that he had just stumbled across a gold mine. "But we can lose everything we have with those limits," Robison protested. "Not with this crew we won't," Reese argued.
Robison shrugged, said okay and went over to watch Reese get into this game and almost double their bankroll, winning about fifty thousand. "We never looked back after that," Robison says.
"We just kept winning and winning . . . Of course I was doing the drugs pretty good." But their success at the poker tables kept them moving forward to the point that Brunson one day says to Robison and Reese, "It looks like you boys know how to play this poker pretty good. I want to show you a new game. You boys know anything about golf?" They tried to be cool about it, Robison saying that, yeah, he knew a little. Reese agreeing that he did too. The truth was that Robison had "about 150 golf trophies" to his credit and had given a lot of thought to turning pro at one point. So they take up playing golf with Brunson and his best buddy Horseshoe Casino owner Jack Binion.
"The thing was," Robison says, "that Doyle Brunson, as big and fat as he was, could just flat play." Robison consulted with a friend who liked the moneymaking possibilities. The friend offered to underwrite the golfing venture for Reese and Robison because no one imagined that these four gamblers were going to be spending time on the golf course because they liked all that sunshine. "Just make sure you're losing six- to ten-thousand a day for a while," the backer warned Robison.
"Lose!" Robison exploded, "What do you mean lose? We worked too hard for our bankroll!"
"No, no. You want to make sure you start out losing . . . until you start playing for the really big money."
Robison laughs, thinking about the way it went. "We listened to him, but Chip and me, we couldn't do it. We just couldn't NOT try to win. So we won every day. We won, won, won."
But that suddenly changed as each of the four established what they could shoot and they figured out who was going to have to spot what within their little foursome. "It was too much,"
Robison says now , thinking about the advice that he had ignored. "It turned out that Doyle, for the money, was a better player than me. The man did not ever choke.
When he needed a six-foot putt he made it."
Robison could see after a few months of this that they were in danger of losing on the golf course the bankroll they had worked so hard to build at the poker tables. So they backed off.
In the meantime, Robison's drug habit and daily search for the big party were wearing him down and eventually destroyed their partnership. Reese moved out of the house they had been sharing and took over the Dunes poker room as Robison found himself on the slippery slope to nowhere.
"I was a drug addict, a bad one. I finally hit the absolute bottom and no one would stake me any more." Things were desperate. Reese would not give him any more money until he was clean but did make an offer that Robison decided to accept. Reese would finance his friend's trip to a drug program that also had a tiein with a fat farm, something Reese thought would do him some good because had had been putting on weight.
Other forces were also at work on the central personalities in Robison's life.
Brunson and Reese had become fast friends. They had lots to talk about, as Robison would eventually discover.
The unexpected death of Brunson's daughter had shaken the big man badly, and he was mystified, even a bit angry, as Robison remembers, by the fact that his wife found refuge in her religious faith and the Bible.
How could she feel that way, talk that way? Brunson decided to take time away from gambling to spend time studying the Bible. Robison says Brunson liked what he found and discovered a comfort that had been lacking.
"Doyle became born again, accepting Jesus Christ as his personal savior."
Brunson subsequently persuaded Reese to take the same Big Step. But Robison wasn't about to walk down the same road . . . not yet. "I don't need to be saved," he protested. "I just want to be clean."
So they head off to the combination fat farm and drug program. To keep things interesting, they invited a couple of deep-pocketed gambling acquaintances to join them. If rumors were to be believed, according to Robison, one was a professional killer, the other was a drug dealer, the two of them flashing money they were willing to risk on golf and assorted gambling possibilities. The foursome scheduled a round of golf for sixty thousand - Reese and Robison against the drug dealer and hit man, or whoever they were. They're about half way through the round when Robison hits a tee shot that misses the fairway and comes to rest at the foot of a tree. He looks around and sees that the other half of the foursome have walked out of sight over a slight rise to where their balls were.
"The two of them had been staying pretty much together the whole morning," Robison says. He tells Chip that what he thinks he will do is kick his ball back out on to the fairway. There's no one to see it. "Chip, I can par this hole."
Reese gets a look on his face that suggests there's a big tug of war going on in his head. Robison looks at him, asking what . . . what? Reese finally says, as though he is having trouble forming the words, "Danny, I can't let you cheat."
Robison looks at his friend incredulously.
"WHAAAAAT? You can't what? Everybody cheats at golf."
"I can't let you cheat," saying it again.
Reese wouldn't budge and by the end of the round the Reese-Robison team had lost $60,000 that Reese took out of his pocket and paid without protest. Robison couldn't get the incident out of his mind. What had happened to his friend?
A week later he was at a Bible study group at Doyle's house, thinking about the changes in Doyle and Reese, willing to consider the possibility that perhaps even he could put on a new attitude. And he did, repeating himself on countless occasions.
"I got led to Jesus. Some force gave me the power to turn that (cocaine) down as badly as my body wanted it."
Now there is only the poker and that's enough for Robison.
