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