Amarillo Slim plays his last hand of poker

There really wasn't anything Amarillo Slim wouldn't bet on. Elections and sports games, for sure, but crazy stuff too, from whether a cat could pick up a Coke bottle to which sugar cube a fly would land on.

He challenged Evel Knievel to a game of golf using only carpenter's hammers, beat a Taiwanese table tennis world champion using Coke bottles as paddles, and took the singer Willie Nelson for US$300,000 ($366,900) in a game of dominoes.

Yet it was as the man who popularised poker, and who brought Texas Hold'em to the masses, that Slim will be forever remembered, and it is the world of poker that is mourning his death at 83. The five-time World Series of Poker champion passed away from colon cancer in his hometown of Amarillo, Texas.

If it hadn't been for Thomas Austin Preston, standing 1.8m tall with a stetson on top of that, poker may still have been the preserve of down-at-heel hustlers. He took his nickname from his home town in Texas and he parlayed his early success travelling from town to town playing pool and poker into fame at the earliest poker tournaments.

He was the first to achieve the mix of mathematical genius and outrageous showmanship that has defined poker ever since, and his bets and challenges became as famous as his skills around the poker table.

Slim played against presidents and powerbrokers, among them Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the drug baron Pablo Escobar. He also claims to have taken Larry Flynt, the pornography tycoon, for US$1.7 million in a grudge match, though Flynt calls his old adversary a liar.

Certainly Slim was not shy of telling a tall tale, as any reader of his autobiography Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People would be able to judge. It is likely to be just a matter of time before his life story appears in movie form, and his death caused a resurgence of speculation that Nicolas Cage could be asked to play him in the biopic which was first planned in 2009. Independent