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Tournament-bound poker queen, Clonie Gowan is working toward the big table
The poker room is hidden away in a nondescript industrial park in a nondescript suburb, one of dozens of illegal card rooms spread around Dallas's sprawl.
Thirty-three players, mostly young, mostly goateed, cluster around three tables, playing a low-stakes tournament. The sounds of chips riffling through fingers and the joshing banter that surrounds card games everywhere fill the room. Posters for mob movies provide the modest decoration. The Sugar Bowl is on television in the corner.
There's one exception to the overwhelming crush of testosterone.
"Clonie" Gowen sits wrapped in a black shawl, her purse in her lap. Her blond hair is a jolt of color in the thicket of baseball caps.
She is a professional poker player, the only one in the room but early in this tournament, she doesn't act like it.
Gowen bets aggressively, plays bad hands and loses often. This Texas Hold'em tournament allows rebuys and she takes full advantage; buying $160 more in chips on top of the initial $40 buy-in. The players joke about the steak dinner that goes to the player with the most rebuys and it looks like Gowen's going to eat steak.
Her loose playing style marks her for an amateur or worse, a "land mine," a rank beginner who can stymie the pros by playing hands only a rube would play.
During a break, though, Gowen reveals her strategy. By creating the image of a reckless player, she'll lure players into betting against her later, when the hands are bigger and the stakes higher. "I'm selling the impression that I'm here to gamble," she whispered.
All the rebuys, she said, encourage others to do the same, growing a pot she fully expects to collect at the end of the evening.
Cody Smith, a friend of Gowen's who came to the tournament with her, was not surprised by Gowen's approach.
"The rest of the players are looking around at how much money they can get from the table," said Smith. "She's looking at how much money she can get from the room."
In the popular imagination, poker players don't have homes. They're rootless card sharps who drift up and down the Mississippi on paddle wheelers, or rent rooms above the saloon.
Amarillo Slim may have been from Amarillo but he sure didn't stay there. Even the more recent poker celebrities seem adrift. Stuey Ungar, the wraith-like two-time champion of the World Series of Poker, looked like he barely slept, much less owned a bed.
But Cyclona Gowen -- so named because she was born during a tropical storm -- has a home, a large, comfortable brick house in the far Dallas suburb of Sachse. She also has a dog, two kids and life that from all outward appearances is unremarkable.
Gowen, 33, is one of the dozens of pros who will toss in their chips this month at the Jack Binion World Poker Open in Tunica, the second largest poker tournament in the world.
For most of the many thousands who will play, it's a chance to try their luck in a game they love. For Gowen, it's a business trip.
It means leaving behind her 2-year-old son, Seth, with her husband, whom she's in the process of divorcing, and moving into a hotel room at the Gold Strike for a month. (Gowen also has a 12-year daughter, Morgan, who lives with her father, Gowen's first husband.)
She'll enter a handful of tournaments -- including the Jan. 24-27 main event, with its $10,000 buy-in and its multimillion-dollar purse -- but her main purpose in Tunica is to play the cash games that proliferate when so many poker players get together.
Winning tournaments is fun and lucrative, but the odds are poor. "Cash games are where I make my living expenses," Gowen said matter-of-factly.
The freedom that comes from playing poker suits her, she said. When she's not on the road at tournaments, she spends the day playing with her son and running errands. When she chooses, she can stop working for a month at a time. But playing for days on end "is a grind," Gowen said, and she's aware of what she's missing at home.
"There are times when I'm playing and I think 'Gosh, my daughter is at a horse riding competition,'" she said. "It's a very lonely lifestyle."
(Although that may be changing; she's now dating another poker professional who is with her in Tunica.)
Raised in tiny Kiowa, Okla., Gowen learned poker as a teenager and honed her skills after her first divorce, when she was 23. Alone on weekends when her daughter was with her father, Gowen would drive two hours to Shreveport, La., to play in the casinos. Before long, she was making $500 a weekend, although she was too embarrassed to tell her friends in the Junior League.
"It wasn't popular back then," she said. "I couldn't say 'I'm sorry, I can't come to dinner, I'm playing poker tonight.'"
But as her game improved and the money became more steady, Gowen realized poker could be more than a hobby, and a few years ago she gave up travel agency business to become a full-time professional.
Gowen is cagey about how much she earns but dropped a hint when she said she could have paid for her house in cash.
Along with her actual wins from playing, Gowen is sponsored by Full Tilt Poker, an online poker site that Gowen claims she plays, although without much conviction, and has a book contract with Harcourt-Brace. Her book, to be titled "Good Girls Do Make the Final Table," is due out in 2006.
Gowen burst on to the poker scene when she finished 10th in the 2002 Costa Rica Classic, a World Poker Tour event. She followed that up the next year with a win at the WPT's Ladies' Night, a made-for-television event where she beat five of the world's best women players.
Since then, her star has climbed. Along with the sponsorship and book deals, Gowen writes columns in two poker magazines, has appeared on "Good Morning America" and in Esquire magazine and turned down an offer to pose in Playboy.
While Gowen is a solid, midlevel pro, her tournament results are not commensurate with her public profile. She did not finish at the final table of any significant tournament last year and was not ranked in Card Player magazine's player of the year standings.
That has led to some uncharitable sniping on poker Internet chat rooms that her reputation is based more on her outgoing personality and beauty queen looks -- she was Miss Teen Oklahoma -- than her poker accomplishments. In a game whose public image has long been leathery, Copenhagen-stained and male, many are hoping Gowen can serve as its new face.
Her literary agent, Greg Dinkins, acknowledges as much but doesn't apologize.
His goal in signing her to the book deal was to find someone who could explain poker on women's shows like "The View," he said.
"It's a very rare combination to have someone who is beautiful, successful and likable," Dinkins said from New York.
Besides, he said, self-promotion has a long history in poker.
"Amarillo Slim was never the best player but he was a great marketer," he said. "Poker is a gossipy universe. Are people going to whisper every time she gets a feature (article)? Sure."
For her part, Gowen is content to be a successful pro who is still mastering the game, an old hand in a sport that's increasingly overrun by young guns who have trained on the Internet.
Even when she's losing, and in poker, losing is inevitable for even the most skilled players, Gowen said she still considers herself "the greatest player in the world."
"A lot of poker is having a confidence and a belief in yourself," she said. "If you lost that confidence, you lose a lot."
In the Dallas card room, two hours have passed. All but three players have been eliminated and are now playing in cash games.
Gowen is one of the three players left in the tournament. She's third in the chip count but the leader, a kid in a T-shirt and cowboy boots, is eyeing her nervously.
Unexpectedly, the second-place player suggests a three-way split of the $2,300 pot. The three agree and after a $200 tip to the dealer, they all walk away with $700. Gowen tucks the money away, now ready to play in a cash game with higher stakes.
