Lowball in a Time Capsule

Thanks to Short-Stacked Shamus for calling my attention to this fascinating article from a 1967 issue of Sports Illustrated. The writing is spectacular and evokes the atmosphere of the California cardrooms of half a century ago, doing justice to the article’s title, “Lowball in a Time Capsule”:

In Gardena, unlike the old West, a rancher cannot toss into a pot a marker for his herd of Longhorns, for the city sets a ceiling on the stakes, and $20 limit is the steepest game. But this is hardly an imposition, for the typical Gardena veterans, those 50-to 70-year-old pensioners, play for considerably smaller stakes, and their gambling blood is cold and sluggishly congealed. Indeed, gambling seems only a partial motive for their play. What matters as much to these veterans, apparently, is the sense of belonging, the respect that even a friendless dullard commands by saying, “I raise,” and the opportunity the clubs afford them to shuffle through later life with their coevals, however competitive or hostile that mingling may be. The Gardena poker tables, for these habitues, are the counterparts of the shuffleboard courts in St. Petersburg, Fla. or the brokerage offices where threadbare 20-share partners in General Motors study the tape and argue the trend of the highflyers.