Dakota Kid Presents - Deadwood Nuts

The Biggest Game in Town
Evolution of the spread limit game in Deadwood, S.D.

By
Mike Randall

Legalized gambling came to Deadwood, South Dakota in the fall of 1989 with a $5 maximum bet limit. Pryor to 1989 there were some limit and no limit games in the area. At that time I lived in Northwestern South Dakota about 120 miles from Deadwood, to far to drive to play poker on a regular basis. Lacking first hand knowledge of those early games I talked to Floyd �Mountain Man� Dahl a long time resident of Deadwood. Floyd is retired, but still runs a trap line every winter and he reminds me of the caricature with the handle bar mustache in the mountain man movie �Jeremiah Johnson�.

Floyd worked and went to collage at Black Hills State in Spearfish. �There was a big game on Friday�s when most everyone got paid and the collage students were ready to party. That�s where I learned to play tight, I could see everybody getting drunk and the game was easy to beat�. Floyd came back to the Deadwood area in 1965 and taught school in Lead. At that time the Deadwood authorities allowed low limit games to exist if they had prior permition. This was the case in most towns in western South Dakota at that time. There was a $5 lowball game at a card room on main street at that time and Floyd and his partner ran a $5 game in the basement of the Dakota Territory Saloon for seven years before gaming was legalized. They dealt qualifier, a game similar to Omaha in that there are community cards and it is high low split, and Texas holdem with a $5 limit. With 5-10 blinds and 6 betting rounds in qualifier Floyd remembers the biggest pot won being $800. Lead also had a no limit game above the Gold Dust bar on Home Stake payday, which later became a $20 spread limit game. Even in the 70�s miners liked to find a poker game on payday! The big game outside of the Deadwood-Lead area was at a bar in Alzada, Montana. �It was the toughest game you could imagine, the old time game of five card stud, No Limit! The game was on a Friday night and 70 miles away so I would drive as fast as I could, strait from work, to get there in time to get a seat� Floyd recalls with a grin. �I played in that game for two years until the bar was sold and the game broke up.�

In 1989 gaming was legalized, over 110 years after the gold rush, at a $5 bet limit. When legalized gaming first opened in Deadwood most of the casinos had 7 card stud because very few people in the area had played hold�em before, except the one�s in Floyd�s game at the Dakota Territory. Even though this was $5 limit they figured out how to make it a biggest game in town by having a $5-$10 blind which was legal because that was a five dollar raise. Then when they got in the gambling mood there would be four or five straddles, in any position making it $30 or more to call with three raises available just to see the flop. And this was $5 limit poker! The milder game was a 2-5 spread limit. These were the only limits for the next ten years.

In the early 90�s hold�em picked up in popularity and became the main game in town. For a few years a citywide tournament was held and then died out. Rumor is that the citywide tournament is coming back and will be bigger and better than ever.

In 1999 bet limits in Deadwood were raised to $100. This was the first positive change for poker since it was legalized. Now most places had the $2-$10 spread limit daily and the Gold Dust started the $10-$20 limit game. Other than the $10-$20 there were no other fixed limit games in town. After a few years the Gold Dust began to spread a $4-$8 game daily. The structured game generally made for bigger pots and gained in popularity. In the $2-$10 game if it was a tight game, didn�t get big pots, because someone would make an oversized bet and kill the action. Now if the $2-$10 game is a soft loose game then the structure don�t make a difference and favors the good player as well. Also in recent years some card rooms did a variation on the $2-$10 and made it a $2-$10 with $2-$15 on the river or advanced it to a $3-$15 game. Recently a $3-$12 game has been introduced and is gaining in popularity. Here again a little larger blind to build a pot with not to big a top limit that most players can afford.

About a year and a half ago I began to play online and at most sites the large spread limit game has become quit popular. The most common being $1 - $50 and $2 - $100 with the maximum buy in being the maximum bet. This stops some one coming in with a lot of money bulling the other players too much. With the small blinds the games are often tight with mostly small pots being won. Then last fall I traveled to Reno to play some tournaments and played the $2-$100 quit often when I wasn�t playing tournament. Here again the games were usually quit tight without many big pots. I hear they have loosened up somewhat lately since television has made pushing it �all in� the thing to do.

Early last year Cadillac Jack�s began to promote a new variation on the spread limit game with the introduction of a $5-$100 with a minimum buy in of $300 with no maximum. This had the potential of a much bigger game than the $2-$100, with the larger blind starting the action and building a bigger pot and then with the max bet of $100 and three raises or unlimited heads up betting and players buying in for as much as they wanted. The game finally got going on a regular basis last fall with either a $100 max bet or $50 max bet and is deffenetly the biggest game in Deadwood since legalized gaming began.

Floyd has been playing in it regularly and had a few comments about the game. �It was easy to beat they were playing it like a loose $2-$10 game when it started and it was really hot. The biggest pot they pushed was a little over $3000! Now they�re mostly playing the $50 max two and three times a week. One thing about that $50 bet it will make even the loosest players thinks twice about calling with a weak hand or a bad draw.�

So if you�re going to be in Deadwood and are looking for a big game it�s not going to be hard to find.