Origins
Terry Rogers once declared “I have been the greatest single factor in the worldwide spread of competitive poker.”
One of his most enduring legacies was founding the Irish Open. In the late 1970s Terry started to hold poker tournaments for charity under the auspices of the Eccentric Club. According to Liam Flood, a fellow bookmaker and friend of Terry's the games would get "anywhere between 100 and 300 players playing five-card draw for £100 to £200 per game. That was a lot of people for that kind of money at the time. Every year Terry would go to America on business. In May 1979 he had a few days off and went to Las Vegas. He saw this high stakes poker game going on and met Benny Binion and the rest is history.”
Always one to spot an opportunity Rogers cemented his relationship with Binion and his band of high-rolling players by taking bets from them on the outcome of the games, offering the type of long odds the Americans had never seen before.
“Guys like Benny Binion, Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese really held Terry in high esteem,” states World Series of Poker bracelet winner and former Irish Olympic swimmer Donnacha O'Dea. “He’d give them great odds, better than any American bookie would give, but he still made sure he had a 20% edge.”
After the 1979 World Series Terry returned to Ireland enthusing about what he’d seen. Stud and draw were the poker variants of choice in Ireland but the new variation he’d seen in Vegas, no-limit hold’em, beat them all for excitement and skill.
In the following years he returned to Vegas for the World Series with Liam Flood but his bookmaking activities brought the attention of the Las Vegas Police Department and on one occasion Terry and Liam ended up being arrested and imprisoned. The irony of being jailed for gambling in Vegas was not lost on them according to Flood.
Read more about this topic: Irish Poker Open
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)