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• Poker House Cast

One of the highlights of this poker house is a dedicated media room which is equipped with five high-end TVs and a 120-inch high-def projector screen in front of which Voulgaris can kick back. The Poker House Favorite Movie Button Overview; Movie Times + Tickets; Synopsis; Movie Reviews; More. Photos + Posters; Cast + Crew; June 20, 2008.

Alice Ivers Duffield Tubbs Huckert (February 17, 1851 – February 27, 1930), better known as Poker Alice, Poker Alice Ivers or Poker Alice Tubbs, was an English poker player in the American West.

Her family moved from Devon, England, where she was born, to Virginia, United States, where she was reared and educated. As an adult, Ivers moved to Leadville, Colorado, where she met her first husband, Frank Duffield. He got Ivers interested in poker, but he was killed a few years after they married. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games in places like Silver City, New Mexico, and even working at a saloon in Creede, Colorado, that was owned by Bob Ford, the man who killed Jesse James.^[1]

Early life[edit]

'Poker' Alice Ivers was born in England, to Irish immigrants. Her family moved to Virginia when Alice was twelve. As a young woman, she went to boarding school in Virginia to become a refined lady. While in her late teens, her family moved to Leadville, a city in the then Colorado Territory.

Personal life[edit]

It was in Leadville that Alice met Frank Duffield, whom she married at a young age. Frank Duffield was a mining engineer who played poker in his spare time. After just a few years of marriage, Duffield was killed in an accident while resetting a dynamite charge in a Leadville mine.

Ivers was known for splurging her winnings, as when she won a lot of money in Silver City and spent it all in New York. After all of her big wins, she would travel to New York and spend her money on clothes. She was very keen on keeping up with the latest fashions and would buy dresses to wear to play poker, partly as a business investment to distract her opponents.

Alice met her next husband around 1890 when she was a dealer in Bedrock Tom's saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. When a drunken miner tried to attack her fellow dealer Warren G. Tubbs with a knife, Alice threatened him with her .38. After this incident, Tubbs and Ivers started a romance and were married soon after.

Alice Ivers and Warren Tubbs had four sons and three daughters together. Tubbs and Ivers did not want their children to be influenced by the world of poker, so they moved to a house just northeast of Sturgis on the Moreau River in South Dakota. Tubbs was not only a dealer, but a housepainter as well. It was most likely this house painting that caused him to fall sick with tuberculosis. Warren Tubbs died in 1910 of pneumonia during a blizzard. Alice drove her husband's body in a wagon 50 miles to get him a decent burial. To pay for his funeral, she had to pawn her wedding ring, which led her back to the poker tables.

Alice's 3rd husband was George Huckert, who worked on her homestead taking care of the sheep. Huckert was constantly proposing to Ivers, yet for a while she did not agree. Eventually, however, Ivers owed Huckert $1,008, so she married him figuring that it would be cheaper than paying his back wages. Huckert died in 1913.

Poker career[edit]

After the death of her first husband, Alice started to play poker seriously. Alice was in a tough financial position. After failing in a few different jobs including teaching, she turned to poker to support herself financially. Alice would make money by gambling and working as a dealer. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games. By the time Ivers was given the name 'Poker Alice,' she was drawing in large crowds to watch her play and men were constantly challenging her to play. Saloon owners liked that Ivers was a respectable woman who kept to her values. These values included her refusal to play poker on Sundays.

As her reputation grew, so did the amount of money she was making. Some nights she would even make $6,000, an incredibly large sum of money at the time. Alice claimed that she won $250,000, which would now be worth more than three million dollars.

Ivers used her good looks to distract men at the poker table. She always had the newest dresses, and even in her 50s was considered a very attractive woman. She was also very good at counting cards and figuring odds, which helped her at the table.

Alice was known always to have carried a gun with her, preferably her .38, and frequently smoked cigars.

Poker's Palace and jailtime[edit]

In 1910, Ivers opened 'Poker's Palace', a saloon in Fort Meade, South Dakota, which offered gambling and liquor downstairs, and prostitution upstairs. The saloon was always closed on Sundays because of Ivers' proclaimed religious beliefs. However, in 1913, some drunken soldiers disobeyed Ivers' 'no work on Sunday' rule and started to get unruly, chaotic and destructive of the house. It was then that Ivers shot her gun, supposedly to quiet down the soldiers. The shot ended up killing one of the soldiers and injuring another, resulting in Ivers' arrest, along with the arrest of six of her prostitutes.

Ivers' time spent in jail was short, but she got through it with the help of reading the Bible and smoking cigars. At the trial, she claimed self-defense and was acquitted. After the trial, her saloon was shut down.

While in her sixties, Alice Ivers was arrested several times after the 'Poker Palace' incident for being a madam, a gambler and a bootlegger, as well as her drunkenness. She would comply with the law and pay her fines but kept her business. In 1928, she was arrested again for bootlegging and her repeated offenses of conducting a brothel. Despite this sentence to prison, Ivers did not end up confined because she was pardoned by then-GovernorWilliam J. Bulow of South Dakota, who took this action because of her old age.

Cast Of Poker House

Legacy[edit]

After being forced to retire by the anger of the military and other people who were upset with her blend of religious elements at her house in Sturgis, Alice's health began to fail her. Alice Ivers died on February 27, 1930 in Rapid City after a gallbladder operation at the age of 79. Ivers was buried at the St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sturgis, South Dakota.

In 1960, Barbara Stuart played Poker Alice in a three-part episode of the Rory CalhounCBS western series, The Texan. Calhoun as series character Bill Longley, a heroic figure rather than the real outlaw of the same name, pursues the bandit El Sombro to the fictitious corrupt community of Rio Nada. In the episodes 'The Taming of Rio Nada', 'Sixgun Street', and 'The Terrified Town', Poker Alice is shown as an unlikely frontier gambler, the mother of seven children who had once been a dealer for Bob Ford in Colorado and spent her later years in Deadwood and Sturgis, South Dakota.^[2]

Ivers has been fictionalized in several films, including the 1978 TV movieThe New Maverick with James Garner as Bret Maverick and Susan Sullivan as Poker Alice Ivers. In another television film, Poker Alice, Elizabeth Taylor plays the cigar-smoking and bordello-owning poker player. The film is so fictionalized that the character is given another surname.

References[edit]

Poker House Wiki

1. ^'OLD WEST LEGENDS;Poker Alice - Famous Frontier Gambler'.
2. ^Billy Hathorn, 'Roy Bean, Temple Houston, Bill Longley, Ranald Mackenzie, Buffalo Bill, Jr., and the Texas Rangers: Depictions of West Texans in Series Television, 1955 to 1967', West Texas Historical Review, Vol. 89 (2013), p. 111

External links[edit]

The Poker House, subsequently retitled as Behind Closed Doors, is a 2008 American drama film written and directed by Lori Petty, in her directorial debut. The film depicts a painful day in the life of a teenaged girl who is raising her two younger sisters in their mother's whorehouse. The story is based on Petty's own early life during the mid-1970s.^[1]

Plot[edit]

The film focuses on one single day in the life of three abused and neglected sisters, 14-year-old Agnes (Jennifer Lawrence), 12-year-old Bee (Sophi Bairley), and 8-year-old Cammie (Chloë Grace Moretz). Their mother, Sarah (Selma Blair), addicted to alcohol and drugs, has been coerced into prostitution to support her pimp, Duval (Bokeem Woodbine). Sarah is unable to care for the girls, forcing Agnes to take responsibility for her two younger sisters. Sarah's house has become known as the Poker House, where neighborhood pimps and criminals gather to play poker, as well as buying sex. Agnes believes Duval loves her, as a boyfriend would, despite his abuse towards her mother.

Agnes arrives home very early one morning to tidy the house and wakes Bee, after preparing her paper route for her. As Bee gets ready to leave they reveal that Cammie often stays the night at her friend Sheila's house, and before they left their father, who was a preacher, he used to beat Sarah and the girls. The four fled, and Sarah, struggling to take care of the girls on her own, became a prostitute after meeting Duval.

The day shifts from girl to girl. Little interaction occurs among the three. Bee speaks of moving into a foster home, hoping to be adopted. Cammie spends the day at a bar, making friends with Dolly (Natalie West), the bar owner, and Stymie (David Alan Grier), an alcoholic. Agnes rides through town, talking with a few friends, playing a game of basketball, and picking up a couple of paychecks from her part-time jobs.

Towards the end of the day, Agnes climbs through Bee's window, avoiding the living room, which is full of gamblers, pimps, and drunks. Bee has locked herself in her room, and like Agnes, avoids the downstairs chaos. Agnes makes Bee leave the house, telling her not to come back for a while. She then makes her way into the living room, and a stranger begins to talk to her. He asks her why she is there, and she responds by telling him that this is where she lives and that Sarah is her mother. When the man finds out that Agnes is a star basketball player for her high school team, with an important game that night, the man gives her a sympathetic look and tells her to get out of the house and go to the game, but she ignores him.

Later that evening, Duval and Agnes begin kissing again, Agnes narrates over the entire scene, after a few minutes, Duval then rapes Agnes. As Duval releases her, she runs to the bathroom to clean herself, horrified by the thoughts of the violence and possibility of pregnancy. She is completely traumatized. Her mother enters the bathroom, and as Agnes reaches for her in utter distress, Sarah refuses to touch her, and instead tells Agnes to go to the store to pick up alcohol after reminiscing on Agnes being a handful as a young child, showing intelligence even when she was a one-year-old.

Soon after, Agnes overhears Duval telling Sarah that he will begin pimping and selling Agnes, as well. Agnes threatens to shoot Duval, firing a couple of shots to prevent Duval from leaving, screaming to her mother that he raped her and deserves to be shot for what he does to Sarah, too. Sarah only tells Agnes that she will defend him. Agnes leaves for her basketball game.

Agnes scores 27 points in the second half alone, a record that lasts for years to come. However, she falls when she scores the last goal, limps to the car, and has a meltdown. She then wipes her tears and puts the horrific events of the night in the back of her mind. She drives off and finds Bee and Cammie at a nearby bridge. The two get in the car, with Agnes not telling her young sisters of events that took place that evening, and instead takes them to get dinner. Bee reveals that she went to the bar after she went to a friend's house and that she found Cammie. Cammie then plays 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough', and the movie closes as the three girls sing together.

At the start of the film credits, Agnes is revealed to have left Iowa to go to New York and become an actress and artist. Some 20 years later, she is shown to have directed the movie, and the movie is the true story of director and actress Lori Petty's childhood.

Cast[edit]

• Jennifer Lawrence as Agnes
• Selma Blair as Sarah
• Chloë Grace Moretz as Cammie
• Bokeem Woodbine as Duval
• David Alan Grier as Stymie
• Danielle Campbell as Darla
• Sophi Bairley as Bee
• Casey Tutton as Sheila

Jennifer Lawrence's father, Gary Lawrence, appears uncredited in the film as the basketball coach of the other team.^[2]

Poker House Cast

Reception[edit]

Critical response[edit]

The Poker House has received mixed reviews from film critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 63% of critics have given the film a positive review based on eight reviews, with an average score of 6.2/10.^[3]

References[edit]

1. ^Rosen, Lisa. 'AT THE MOVIES Lori Petty's hard look'. Los Angeles Times. latimes.com. Retrieved November 15, 2016.
2. ^'The Poker House (2008) – Trivia'. IMDb. Amazon.com. Retrieved September 16, 2012.
3. ^The Poker House at Rotten Tomatoes

External links[edit]

• The Poker House on IMDb
• The Poker House at Rotten Tomatoes