wwwwwwwwwww Me and Nina Rantala at MGM Grand, Macau. No, no poker here, lol!
Has poker been the bastion of the male for years? I don’t think so. Well, I’m here to prove that poker is fun, irrespective of your sex and age. I was 22 when I fell in love with the game, and two years down the line I am considered a pro in the circles that I move around in. We play poker mostly for fun, rarely with money, and I’m a natural winner.
Let me tell you about Poker Alice.
Alice Ivers was born on February 17, 1851 in Sudbury, England, or so she claimed. In reality, there are other reputable sources that say she was born in 1853 in Virginia to Irish immigrants. Either way, it wasn't a very auspicious beginning, but late in her teens, her family took her to Colorado where Alice met and married a mining engineer named Frank Duffield.
Frank liked playing cards and, in the beginning, Alice would just stand behind him and watch. After a while, she started sitting in on games while Frank was working and she quickly demonstrated a certain affinity for poker. After Frank was killed while resetting an unexploded dynamite charge in a mine at Leadville, Alice turned to the poker tables for a living. Soon the miners and other gamblers were calling her Poker Alice. She had a good head for counting cards, figuring odds and distracting male players with her looks: most pictures of Alice show a rough woman in her 70's with a cigar in her mouth but even into her 50's she was an attractive woman who wore only the finest clothes (poker and faro paid good and she could afford what she wanted).
Alice moved from boom town to boom town, saloon game to parlor game, just like any other gambler. In Colorado she worked gambling rooms in Alamosa, Georgetown, Trinidad, Central City and Leadville before heading south to Silver City, New Mexico. One night in Silver City she hit it big at a faro table and "broke the bank," or so she said. Some folks figure she just saved up her winnings, but either way, when she had enough cash in hand, she went to New York City to have some fun. She didn't stay long in the East and when she returned to the west, she went to Creede and did well at the
poker tables again. "I would rather play poker with five or six experts than to eat," was one of her favorite comments on life.
Fair-haired, blue-eyed, Alice liked her fashion. She also liked her small black stogies. And because of her religious upbringing, she never played (worked) on Sunday.
Like most professional card players, Alice was locked and loaded, usually carrying a .38 within easy reach. After leaving Creede around 1890, she travelled to Deadwood, South Dakota and took a job dealing in the saloon of one Bedrock Tom. At the next table the dealer was W. G. Tubbs. One night a drunken miner pulled a knife on Tubbs and Alice palmed her .38 and put a slug into the miner's arm. This action marked the beginning of the romance between Tubbs and Alice. Shortly after that, Alice Ivers Duffield married Warren G. Tubbs.
Tubbs might have been a good housepainter but he wasn't good at cards: Alice always said "he wasn't lucky," but then, next to her, who was? So she tried to keep him painting while she'd go to town and
play cards, sometimes making as much as $6,000 in a good night.
Alice was a professional gambler: gamblers enjoyed a much higher social status and pay scale in those days. For the last 20 years of her life, in addition to running the house in Sturgis, she was an often-seen, well-known card player in Deadwood, a town which tolerated gambling and prostitution up until 1987.
Alice died on February 27, 1930 after a gall bladder operation in a hospital in Rapid City. She was buried in Sturgis at the St. Aloysius Cemetary. Her house was vacant for a long time and scheduled to be demolished when a Sturgis businessman bought it and had it moved to Junction Avenue in Sturgis where it now serves as a Bed and Breakfast Inn.
She was a true
poker pro, one of the finest :)
It is hard work most of the times like a job like any other and unless I’m getting paid for it- which I am- I may not really want to do it. We entertain guest bloggers on our several blog sites. It was a few months back when the company CEO made a point in a meeting of the top management the fun part of blogging – we all decided then that we will post at least 1 article on our personal blogs every 15 days. 
I figured: maybe my blog will totally suck sometimes :) but it’s my own and I am having fun. So I write and suddenly a whole new world opens out to me where I can reach out to people reach out to my friends and make new ones. My marketing manager advised that sooner or later if your blog is honest, it will strike the right chord with quite a few people and will eventually reach a critical mass- I’ll have thus effectively caused a change in my organization- it may not be a path-breaking change yet, hey, I am getting across ideas and thoughts to thousands of people, and that’s fun! 
So, I’ll keep writing whenever I get that one free moment in the middle of my work or at home- because I love interacting with people and making friends. 
