Poker Alice Pictures

May 22, 1987 Directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman. With Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Skerritt, George Hamilton, Richard Mulligan. Alice Moffit, 'Poker Alice' (Dame Elizabeth Taylor), has been disowned by her Boston, Massachusetts family because of her incurable penchant for gambling. — Alice Ivers Tubbs; aka Poker Alice Perhaps the best known female poker player in the Old West, Alice Ivers Tubbs, better known as “Poker Alice”, hailed from England. Born on February 17, 1851, in Devonshire, she was the daughter of a conservative schoolmaster who moved the family to the United States when she was still a small girl.

Alice Ivers Duffield was her actual name. Born in England as Alice Ivers in 1851, she moved to the US at age 12. Her Father was a Headmaster, and she was educated in a private boarding school. After her family moved to Colorado, chasing the Silver mines, she married Frank Duffield, a mining engineer. Her husband taught her the games of poker and faro, and she proved to be enthusiastic and talented. After her husband was killed in a mining accident, she turned to the games as solaceand an income. At 5'4'
with blue eyes and a pretty face, she was soon in demand as a dealer.
A lady gambler was a rare sight in the mining camps she traveled in. At least one who wasn't prostituting on the side. She traveld and gambled all through Kansas, Arizona, New mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. Soon she had acquired the nickname , 'Poker Alice' and was well known, with a big cigar stuck between her teeth and her trademark poker face. Religious, she never played or drank on Sunday. In fact, she was a drinker but wouldn't touch the stuff while playing her skillful gambling trade. She also carried a .38 revolver, and was known to threaten to shoot cheaters in the mug.

Poker Alice Photos

She was a big draw wherever she went and was welcome in gambling halls because of her drawing power.
She made her way to Silver City, New Mexico, where she broke the bank at the Gold Dust Gambling House, winning some $6,000. This brought her fame and notoriety throughout the west. Sometime later, she made a trip to New York City, which she often did after a large win, to replenish her wardrobe of fashionable clothing. She then went to work, dealing in Bob Ford's Saloon, in Creede Colorado. This was the Bob Ford that shot and killed Jesse James.
On to Deadwood, South Dakota, where she married Warren Tubbs. She often played against Tubbs at the gaming tables, and often cleaned him out. On one occasion when a drunken miner threatened Tubbs with a knife, Alice pulled out her .38 and put a bullet into the miner's arm.
The two built a ranch nearby and raised their seven children, and slowed down the gambling habit. Then misfortune struck and Tubbs took sick and died of Pneumonia in 1910.
Nearing 60, Poker Alice went back to what she was good at and opened up casino/brothel in Fort Meade South Dakota. She had a standing policy: No gambling or whoring on Sunday. One Sunday, a drunken soldier began to cause havoc in the saloon, destroying the furniture, and causing a ruckus. Alice responded by pulling her .38 and shooting the man. She was soon arrested and jailed, spending her time smoking cigars and reading the bible while awaiting her trial. She was acquitted on the grounds of self defense.

her casino was shut down, and in her 70s, with her beauty and smart dresses long gone, Alice played on through her winter years, continuing to gamble, but now dressing in men’s clothing.

Poker Alice Tubbs

She was featured at events like the Diamond Jubilee, in Omaha, Nebraska, as a true frontier character, and regained some of her fame. She once said, 'At my age I suppose I should be knitting. But I would rather play poker with five or six 'experts' than eat.'
She continued to run a brothel in Sturgis during her later years and was often arrested for drunkenness and keeping a disorderly house. Though she paid her fines, she continued to operate the business. Finally, she was arrested for repeated convictions of running a brothel and sentenced to prison. However, Alice, who was 75 years old at the time, was pardoned by the governor.
At age 79 she was sick with a bad gall bladder and the doctors told her she needed immediate surgery, to live. She returned to the tables instead and had the surgery afterward. She died of complications soon after, on Feb 27, 1930.
Alice claimed to have won more than $250,000 at the gaming tables and 'never once cheated'. In fact, one of her favorite sayings was: 'Praise the Lord and place your bets. I'll take your money with no regrets.'

Poker Alice - Famous Frontier Gambler

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 professional 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 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 fashions. 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. Together they had 4 sons and 3 daughters. In the interests of keeping the children out of the gambling halls, she and Tubbs moved the family out of Deadwood and onto a homestead northeast of Sturgis on the Moreau River. Somewhere along the line Tubbs had contracted tuberculosis while painting houses and Alice was also trying to nurse him back to health. She later said she really liked the peace and quiet out there on the Moreau River and never missed the saloons and gambling halls.

Poker Alice Images

In 1910, during a blizzard, Tubbs contracted pneumonia and died in Alice's arms. She then drove his frozen corpse in a horse-drawn sled to Sturgis, 48 miles away, and pawned her wedding ring to pay for his funeral. After that, she went straight into the saloon, sat at the poker table and won enough money to get her ring back. While she was gambling in Sturgis, George Huckert was hired to watch her sheep on the homestead. He kept proposing to her and finally, when his back wages totalled $1,008, she remarked 'It would be cheaper to marry him than pay him off,' so she did. The marriage was short: Huckert died in 1913. That made Alice a widow for the third time.

It was also about 1910 that Alice bought an old house near Fort Meade on Bear Butte Creek. She saw opportunities for some gaming downstairs and some girls upstairs but the house needed some work. So she went to the bank for a loan. The story goes like this (supposedly in her own words):

'I went to the bank for a $2,000 loan to build on an addition and go to Kansas City to recruit some fresh girls. When I told the banker I'd repay the loan in two years, he scratched his head for a minute then let me have the money. In less than a year I was back in his office paying off the loan. He asked how I was able to come up with the money so fast. I took a couple chaws on the end of my cigar and told him, `Well, it's this way. I knew the Grand Army of the Republic was having an encampment here in Sturgis. And I knew that the state Elks convention would be here, too. But I plumb forgot about all those Methodist preachers coming to town for a conference'.'

This was probably the most famous story ever attributed to Poker Alice and, if true, says a lot about the times. In 1913 there were a bunch of soldiers in the house getting pretty unruly and she fired off one rifle shot to quiet them down. Unfortunately, the bullet passed through two of the soldiers, killing one of them. The police closed down the house and took Alice and all six of her girls to jail. At her trial, the shooting was ruled accidental and she was acquitted but forever after, the authorities at Fort Meade were on her case.

She was in her 60's by then but they kept arresting her for drunkenness and keeping a bawdy house. She always paid her fines and went back to business as usual but eventually, she was sentenced to a term in the state pen for her repeated convictions as a madam. Being 75 years old at the time of her sentencing, she was almost immediately pardoned by the governor.

Alice was a professional gambler, never a 'soiled dove': gamblers enjoyed a much higher social status and pay scale. 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 Cemetery. 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 & Breakfast Inn.

Alice Ivers

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Poker Alice Lake City Colorado

The drawing of Alice Ivers is in the public domain. The black-and-white photo is courtesy of the South Dakota Historical Society.
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