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The skinny on slim: after six decades of trash-talking and bookmaking, card playing and shooting pool, Thomas Austin Preston, Jr., a.k.a. Amarillo Slim, is still the world''s greatest living hustler. I am living proof.

Article Excerpt
"OH, MAN," HE SAID. "DID I LEAVE YOU with two dollars? I bought I'd bet it all. You better make a stand. Custer did, but of course you know that poor son of a bitch got massacred. So you can imagine what's fixing to happens to you."

Amarillo Slim was smiling when he said this, and I was laughing. We'd been playing his favorite poker game, no-limit Texas hold 'em, one-on-one, and the inevitable was coming to pass: After an hour and a half, he was winning my money. I was losing more or less happily, partly because the result had been so obviously foreordained and partly because Slim is such a funny guy. He is a hustler, a gambler, maybe the most famous gambler ever, and he makes losing money feel like a recreational activity. He's done that for most of his life, as a pool player, bookmaker, and seemingly random bettor on just about anything. He has cut cards with presidents Johnson and Nixon and says he won $400,000 from Willie Nelson playing dominoes. He has outrun racehorses, sort of. Once he beat a table-tennis champ while playing with Coke bottles.

Mostly, though, Slim, known by his mother as Thomas Austin Preston, Jr., is famous for bringing poker out of the smoky back rooms and into the mainstream, where it thrives--in Las Vegas, online, and at regular Wednesday night games across the country. Slim did it with a combination of smarts, corn pone, and shameless attention-grabbing. He's been called the Bobby Fischer of poker as well as the Imelda Marcos of the game, for his closetful of showy cowboy boots, most of which are stitched with his nickname. As he himself will tell you, he is "a dirty bastard." Slim has made a lot of money over the past six decades hustling people, some of whom didn't know better and many, like me, who should have. "If I'm gonna win," he writes in his memoir, Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People, due out this month from HarperCollins, "I sure as hell want to break somebody doing it."

During our game, played at his 6,800-square-foot Amarillo home in March, he kept saying it was me he was going to break. But he kept telling me a lot of things. Talk is Slim's weapon of choice--distracting his opponents with his deep drawl, getting into their heads, telling stories from a colorful life of hustles good and bad, bets made and lost. The stories usually end with some hilarious bon mot, obviously spoken many times over the years, such as, "He had as good a chance of beating me as getting a French kiss out of the Statue of Liberty." These folksy one-liners maybe part of Slim's shtick, but they somehow always sound fresh, which makes them even more outrageous. Indeed, Slim just delights in saying outrageous things. "Tighter than a nun's gadget," he...

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