Poker, the boldest card game of them all, has emerged from the underworld of American recreation. Formerly the sport of outlaws, roustabouts and gangsters, it has survived its old sins to become one of the country's favorite pastimes. A sign of its new-found popularity is the success of Maverick, a TV series about two guys who play poker. Good guys.

Recently, Leisure sent writer Bill Coleman out to Hollywood to interview another good guy who plays poker. Coleman found Ernie Kovacs lounging in an oversized chair in his study, the walls of which were covered with about fifty antique guns and half a dozen high powered rifles. One wall was occupied by a large fireplace. Kovacs said that he occasionally used it to broil steaks for people who came over to play cards. As he talked about his favorite game, the comedian puffed on one of his omnipresent cigars.

COLEMAN: The editors hustled me out here to get some of your zany ideas about poker.
KOVACS: Well, I have a reputation for zaniness, but it doesn't hold true in poker. The game is too good as it is to be dressed up with frills. It's the mother tongue, more or less, and it's played the same wherever you go.

COLEMAN: How often do you play?
KOVACS: Roughly once a week. Sometimes with Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Peter Lawford and Harold Mirish. Other times it's Richard Conte, a couple of attorneys and a few people not connected with show business. They're all good players and there's no quarrel ever. We have one of those very pleasant things....a nice evening, all the way around.

COLEMAN: A lot of people think a game of poker is the surest way to make enemies.
KOVACS: Edie always says, "Why do you always want to play cards? It's not right if it makes bad enemies." And I tell her, "That's not true. Cards don't make enemies; they only expose them." When you play poker it's like throwing a flashlight on somebody's face in the dark. You find out something you didn't know. You can be a guy's friend for years but until you play poker with him you don't know him at all.

COLEMAN: Many cardplayers say draw poker's the best game.
KOVACS: It's a good brand of poker. My preference, though, is five-card stud. It's a straight game and it moves along. You have to play it for a fair amount of money, though, because that's the only test for a good bluff.

COLEMAN: I've seen lots of guys tip their hands in stud.
KOVACS: There's a lot to that. People develop very revealing habits. There's one fellow I play gin with who, every time he puts a run into his hand, folds all his cards togtether, taps them on the table and spreads them out again. I've told him he does it, but he can't break the habit. Every time he's got a run on, he says, "Did I do it again?"
In stud, I catch myself constantly looking at my cards in the hole, if they're good cards. Whenever I get two good hole cards, I take a long look at them, which I think is fooling everybody into thinking I'm trying to figure out what they are. Actually, if they were lousy, I'd know in a minute. But when you see two kings, you just like to look at two kings. You say to yourself, "Oh, boy!", you savor them a little bit, then you blow out on it.

COLEMAN: I think people play poker more for the challenge of the game than for the money.
KOVACS: Right, but it's no fun to lose money. That's why I seldom drink when I'm playing. My bad losses have generally come when I had a couple of big blasts. You get reckless, and oddly enough you play great cards at first because you're so reckless you scare everyone out of the game. But there always comes a point when somebody says, "What the hell, he doesn't know what he's doing," and he stays in and kills you.

COLEMAN: Drinking isn't as bad in a poker game as a woman.
KOVACS: And a woman who plays poker doesn't deserve chivalry. I won't join a game with one of them sitting at a table. The only time I played poker with a woman, I got pretty far ahead in the first fifteen minutes. She was losing badly, so I scooped up the chips and said I was only kidding. I can't take money from a woman, and there's no joy in losing to one of them. What's more, a woman poker player -- if she's any kind of a poker player at all -- is usually a great poker player!
I don't even think women should play each other. They're terrible losers. A woman is used to accounting for money in the house, questioning the price of drapes and things, and consequently she can't make a good poker player. And I mean good in the social sense.

COLEMAN: How long do your games last?
KOVACS: Well, before I married Edie, I someitmes played in games that stretched a couple of days. That's much too long. The ideal time is to start about eight o'clock at night and play to about three or four in the morning, five at the latest. After five, it's just mechanical, drudgery, no more fun, anyway. At five o'clock you should quit, but nobody does!
There are some amusing things that happen when you play too long, eighteen or twenty hours. I remember one game in which we all got extremely tired. Somebody was dealing seven card stud. He dealt the third card around and put the deck down. Then he picked it up and dealt the fourth card and put the deck back down and eveybody bet. On the fifth round, without realizing what I was doing, I picked up the other deck from the table and started dealing. No one caught the mistake until we got to the last card and somebody said, "What the hell is this? I've got two nines of hearts!"
In New York, I used to play with one group that never knew when to stop. Edie was in "Li'l Abner" at the time and she would come in about 11:45 and say, "Now, do you want any coffee or something?" and the boys would say, "No, no, we've got to quit at midnight." Edeie has always been great about cards, but she'd tell me on the side, "I think you ought to stop before the chambermaids come in to work in the morning."
I'd say, "Oh, no, all the boys are going to quit here at twelve." In the morning, at eight o'clock, the butler and cook would come in and say, "Do you want breakfast?" and we'd say, "Okay, but we'll be going soon." At noon the cook would say, "Do you want some lunch" Edie would assume I'd gotten up early and was out and she'd come upstairs and find the same game going on in the afternoon as had been going on the night before.
The funniest thing was the phone calls. At seven o'clock in the morning, the boys would start calling home and saying, "Listen, I got held up. I'll be home in a little while." At nine o'clock, they'd be calling the office to say they got held up at home. At noon, they'd be calling the office to say they were involved in a deal away down in the business district. Then they'd start banging on the table and you'd hear them say, "Well, no you can't call me because there's a lot of noise and I can't hear you. There's a construction project going on!"
There was one fellow who used to play with us in New York who was up in Maine on a business trip. He telephones one afternoon and said, "What are you doing?" I told him we were going to play cards, and he said, "Really? I'd like to be there." So I said, "Well, I hope you don't try to come in from Maine." And he snapped, "What do you think I am, nuts?" So he showed up for the game. When he called from the airport, he said, "Don't tell my wife I'm back in town. She'll kill me if she finds out I came in and didn't call home!" He played cards all night, got back on a plane and returned to Maine in the morning. Nobody but us ever knew he was in town.

COLEMAN: I take it you don't hold to time limits?
KOVACS: Not often, but we should. Many times I've been in games where I was way ahead and the game continued. Then, when I was away behind, somebody said, "This is my last round," and I had no chance to recoup. If I'd known the last round was coming up I wouldn't have stayed in as many times. A firm time limit makes a better game.

COLEMAN: Any tips for novices?
KOVACS: Just one: don't attempt to sit in with any strange group you think has played together for a long time. You just can't walk cold into a group of people who play a good mathematical game and expect to win. It's absolutely impossible.

COLEMAN: About that cigar of yours. Does it ease you through a long night of poker?
KOVACS: No. It just helps when I turn over my hand. They can't see through the smoke. I say, "Four aces," -- and quickly mix everything up.

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