Forget Beyonce’s Texas Hold’em, pass on Lady Gaga’s Pokerface, and even give Clint Black’s A Good Run of Bad Luck a miss. It is a universally accepted fact that Kenny Rogers recorded the best song ever about poker. In 1978, a year after Doyle ‘Texas Dolly’ Brunson won the second of his two WSOP Main Event titles, Kenny Rogers released The Gambler to a poker-crazy public.
45 years on, however, do the world-famous lyrics bear fruit or could The Gambler of the title have been the world’s worst poker player? It’s time we looked into exactly how much credit we should give to his advice.
Setting the Scene
“Something more than me wrote that song.” ~ Don Schlitz
The Gambler in the song is one of two strangers meeting on a train. The narrator of the song meets The Gambler and listens to the old man’s advice after he gives him his last drop of whiskey on a warm summer’s evening. The song, however, was neither written or originally recorded by Kenny Rogers.
Penned by the lesser-known Don Schlitz when he was just 23 years old, the song came from a deep place after the writer’s father had passed on.
“Something more than me wrote that song, I’m convinced of that,” said Schlitz about the tune. “There was something going through my head, which was my father. It was a song, and it somehow filtered through me. Six weeks later, I received the final verse. Months later it came to me that it was inspired by, and possibly a gift from, my father.”
Schlitz credited Kenny Rogers and his producer Larry Butler for bringing in several ideas that weren’t his and while many others recorded the song – including country legend Johnny Cash – it was the Rogers version of 1978 that caught fire.
The two strangers – our narrator and The Gambler – meet up on the train ‘bound for nowhere’ with both of them too tired to sleep. As they stare out of the window at the darkness, boredom turns to conversation. The Gambler explains that he has made a life out of reading people’s faces and ‘knowing what the cards were by the way they held their eyes’.
Telling the narrator that he can see he’s out of aces, The Gambler promises to offer his worldly advice for the price of a swig of whisky and a cigarette. Finishing the bottle, he tells the young man that ‘If you’re gonna play the game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right’.
Then he gives him the pearls of wisdom that almost half a century on, we can unpick.
Knowing When to Hold’em
First things first, if we’re taking the advice of a drunken old gambler who is about to fall asleep on a train carriage window, we’ve got to take them with a large chunk of salt. In 1978, the WSOP Main Event featured 42 entrants. In 2023, there were 10,043 entrants. The top prize in 1978 was $210,000, which, adjusting for inflation, represents just under a million dollars in today’s money. In 2023, Daniel Weinman won the WSOP Main Event for $12.1 million.
Poker has changed… or has it?
Oddly for a country song, the chorus kicks in before the verse, but in this case, it’s welcome. The Gambler, you see, does at least know the basics and the best part of 50 years on, most of his repeated advice rings true.
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
You never count your money
When you’re sitting at the table
There’ll be time enough for counting
When the dealing’s done.
Let’s break it down a little. Even in 2024, it’s worth knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. that’s obvious and a little basic but we all have to start somewhere. Knowing when to walk away from the table and even run is still valid advice, especially if you find yourself at the poker table with someone who is looking down at a mobile phone balanced on their crotch, for example.
What we do have issue with is the second half of the chorus, where The Gambler advises the narrator never to count his money while he’s sitting at the table. Frankly, having a blatant disregard for your stack size when chips are moving around the table is ludicrous. Stack management is such that in 2024, The Gambler would likely have gone broke and ended up, I don’t know, begging a passenger on a train going nowhere for a sip of his whiskey. Hang on…
Every Hand’s a Winner
The Gambler – now imbibed with the last dregs of our narrator’s bottle of whisky – does offer some last pearls of wisdom past repeating his advice about holding ‘em and folding ‘em. According to him, every gambler is aware that the secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep. And he’s right. When you call and when you fold is still the crux of poker and has been for the past 50 years.
Lastly, however, The Gambler touches on potentially misreadable advice by stating that ‘every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser’. On the face of it, this sounds like the confused ramblings of an inebriated old man. However, interpreted in another way, every hand, if played well, can win a hand in No Limit Hold’em and even pocket aces can be cracked, so every hand really can be a loser.
Maybe The Gambler wasn’t so drunk after all.
The narrator came into that train carriage with a bottle of whisky and apparently after offering the old man a ‘swig’, came across as mildly annoyed that The Gambler had ‘drunk down my last swallow’. Which leads to the obvious question: Had the narrator in fact consumed 90% of a bottle of whisky before asking an old man for his poker advice?
As The Gambler crushes out his cigarette (considerate, lucid) and turns back to the window (possibly ignoring the drunken narrator), he fades off to sleep. The narrator believes that his new friend, by falling asleep, has ‘broken even’, but as The Gambler himself says, ‘The best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep’.
Maybe that’s the ace we can truly keep from the unfortunate meeting of two strangers that almost half a century on, we still don’t how to fold.
