I’ll take your money with no regrets. — Alice Ivers Tubbs
(image via Denver Public
Library)
Some time in the 1870s, Alice 🍋 met her first husband Frank, a mining engineer
and amateur poker player. The young couple moved to Colorado, and Alice 🍋 immediately
took to frontier life. Frank taught her how to play cards, and soon Alice was trading
in on her 🍋 talent. While her husband worked in the silver mines, she made friends in the
saloons and gambling parlors.
When Frank died 🍋 in a dynamite explosion, Alice had to
find a way to make money. She turned her poker habit into a 🍋 full-time job, clearing out
visiting players and working as a dealer in local gambling houses. She eventually moved
to Leadville, 🍋 another booming mine town, to make a new life as a poker player.
From
there, Alice moved from boom town to 🍋 boom town, building her reputation as a
cigar-smoking, poker-playing hustler. She met her second husband Warren in the midst of
🍋 a saloon brawl, and she temporarily gave up the gambling life to move with him to a
small cabin, where 🍋 they raised their four children. After Warren’s death in 1910,
however, she struggled to find the money for a decent 🍋 burial. Eventually, she pawned
her wedding ring and returned to the poker table to make ends meet.
In 1910, she opened
🍋 her own place, “Poker Palace,” in the San Juan Mountains. Rumor had it she married her
third husband to settle 🍋 a poker debt, and other gossip (true or false, historians don’t
know) had her arrested for bootlegging, manslaughter and even 🍋 operating a brothel in
the upstairs of her now-legendary establishment.
Even after her third husband’s death,
Alice couldn’t stay away from 🍋 the poker table. She played alongside Wild West legends
like Jesse James and Calamity Jane, and at times her winnings 🍋 came to thousands of
dollars. Alice later faced a small stint in prison for her involvement in a Poker
Palace 🍋 murder. The governor eventually pardoned her, citing her old age, but in return
he demanded she retire from the gambling 🍋 life.
But Alice continued playing poker, even
into her supposed “retirement.” Before she died in 1930, she claimed she won one 🍋 of the
biggest sums of her career:R$250,000, which would’ve amounted to more thanR$3 million
in today’s dollars.
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