What do Larry King, Larry Flynt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Evel Knievel, Minnesota Fats, Willie Nelson and Pablo Escobar have in common? Each one was hoodwinked by “Amarillo Slim,” the Texas Panhandle’s best-known gambler and arguably the most famous poker player of all time.
At least, that’s how Thomas Austin Preston Jr. would tell it. The world knew him as “Amarillo Slim.”
After winning the 1972 World Series of Poker, he quickly became the game’s leading ambassador, a silver-tongued devil who appeared regularly on television in the 1970s. Slim used his storytelling ability, his long, tall Texan persona, and his remarkable capacity for self-promotion to pull Texas Hold ’em, from smoky backrooms into the mainstream of American culture.
“[Slim] was always in character,” says Greg Dinkin, who co-authored Slim’s 2003 memoir, Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People. “Not only was he always in character, he was always trying to figure out how to make a score.” Dinkin emphasizes that the book is a memoir and not a biography. It is Slim’s story in his own words, and Slim had a tendency to … embellish, to say the least.
“People that come into celebrity, they have split personalities. I believe he was two people,” his daughter Becky Deane says. She describes him as a doting and devoted father. At the same time, she recalls a trophy that Slim’s buddies gave him which read “Bullsh—er of the Year.”
“He was extremely entertaining and had the gift of gab. He did promote poker at a time when poker needed it,” says Tom McEvoy, who won the 1983 World Series of Poker. McEvoy characterizes a lot of Slim’s stories as “B.S.” and describes himself as a “critic, not a fan of Slim,” whom he interacted with for decades on the professional poker scene.
True or not, Slim’s wild stories of hustling and hoodwinking helped establish his greatest invention: his own legend.
Arkansas to Amarillo
Amarillo Slim was born Thomas Austin Preston Jr. in 1928 in Johnson, Arkansas, the son of Thomas Austin Preston and Pearl Lila Cardwell Preston. Thomas was the only child produced by their union. The family moved frequently and Thomas Jr.’s parents divorced when he was young. The boy split his time between Arkansas, where his mother returned, and Amarillo, where his father settled.
Slim said he moved to Amarillo at age 11 and graduated from Amarillo High School in 1945, but records are otherwise sparse. A 1944 Amarillo Globe-Times article indicates he took a job in Amarillo as a messenger in a local railroad relay office. It’s the earliest newspaper reference to Thomas Austin Preston Jr.
In adulthood, Slim was not particularly close with either parent. His mother had been deeply religious, while Slim avoided church for most of his adult life. As a teenager, Slim came into frequent conflict with his father, as the adolescent sought out action in Amarillo’s pool halls.
Those local pool halls, where Slim learned to hustle, are the most prominently discussed aspect of his upbringing in his 2003 memoir. Before heading out into the city’s more rough-and-tumble establishments, Slim first hustled his peers. “He told stories about when he was in his teens and he would sneak out and go down to the pool hall and his dad would come looking for him,” Dinkin says.
“I think his childhood upbringing with his parents being divorced and not really having a stable place for many years in his life, that’s what caused his disconnect with his father and a little bit with his mom,” Deane says. She saw her paternal grandfather rarely and knew that her father and grandfather had strained relations.
“We spent more time with my mother’s family, for sure,” she says.
Becoming Slim
High school travels gave Slim his nickname. At age 16, he started venturing to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to hustle pool alongside the likes of Minnesota Fats (then known as “New York Fats”—he didn’t adopt “Minnesota” until there was a character by that name in the 1961 film, The Hustler). At the time, Hot Springs was a hotbed for horse racing and other vices. Slim learned to play poker for money and started gambling on horse racing and other sports.
The 6-foot, 4-inch, rail-thin Texan says he left Hot Springs with the “Amarillo Slim” nickname.
Like Minnesota Fats, Slim relied heavily on psychological warfare at the pool table, chatting up the opposition to keep them off-kilter. This became as much of a trademark as his belt buckles, Stetson hat, hand-tooled boots, and custom-made suits. Telling tall tales while alternately flattering and jabbing at his opposition became Slim’s signature.
If Amarillo Slim did earn a reputation on the pool circuit under that name, the press certainly didn’t take notice. Minnesota Fats, Wimpy Lassiter, Willie Mosconi, and Irving “the Deacon” Crane became celebrity pool players in the 1950s and 1960s, but the name “Amarillo Slim” did not appear in a keyword searchable newspaper until 1969. An article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on the state’s late-1960s billiards scene listed Amarillo Slim as one of the region’s best-known pool hustlers.
His first mention in an Amarillo newspaper came in a late 1971 article about the upcoming 1972 World Series of Poker.
Boot Camp and Baseball
Slim graduated early from high school in December 1945 and enlisted in the Navy in January 1946. While in boot camp in San Diego, an officer saw Slim’s pool skills and had him start putting on billiards exhibitions for his peers. Slim said he witnessed the atomic bomb explosion in Bikini Atoll while in the Navy, claiming he volunteered for the job because it gave him four days on the boat back to Hawaii to hustle all the other sailors out of their money.
In late 1947, Slim was discharged from the Navy. He reenlisted in the Army and was stationed in Stuttgart, Germany. In addition to putting on pool exhibitions for American troops, he says he made considerable money on the emerging black market—selling cigarettes, gasoline and coffee at markup to locals constrained by post-war rationing. Slim also claimed to have made a fortune fixing one of the games in the 1948 GI World Series, the culmination of the annual Army-wide baseball tournament.
He got out of the service as soon as he felt the walls caving in on his not-quite-above-board enterprises. When a Wells Fargo branch opened in Frankfurt, he deposited his money and, by his telling, returned to the United States as a millionaire.
Marriage and Partnerships
Back in Amarillo in 1949, Slim reacquainted himself with Helen Byer, an acquaintance from high school. Helen was a year older than him. He said he didn’t remember her, but he had signed her yearbook. They would soon be married by a justice of the peace in New Mexico. They purchased a home near West Hill Park when they found out Helen was pregnant.
The couple had three children, sons Thomas and Tod, and daughter Becky. Helen raised her children in a local Southern Baptist Church while their dad hit the pool hall circuit. During the 1950s, he spent months at a time on the road, sometimes even bringing his family with him.
It wasn’t just pool. Slim moved on to poker, bootlegging and bookmaking. His partners were usually Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson and Brian “Sailor” Roberts, fixtures in the early years of the World Series of Poker.
“I grew up for many years not knowing what my father did for a living,” Deane says. When asked what her father did at school, her mother told her to say “self-employed.” Slim was arrested several times for bootlegging violations, paying fines but avoiding jail.
“Whether it’s a bowling match or playing pool or shooting baskets, he was always trying to figure out how to come up with his next conquest,” Dinkin says. Slim excelled at proposition betting, in which he created elaborate scenarios on which to wager. For instance, he once won a 100-yard dash against a horse, stipulating that the race was 50 yards down and 50 yards back, making it difficult for the horse to turn back in time.
“One time, he said to me ‘This is who I am sweetheart, and I’m going to take good care of you, but this is who I am,’” Deane says.
During the 1960s, Slim, Brunson and Roberts started working their way around the American west as “rounders,” finding their way into high-stakes poker games. The trio helped introduce the relatively new game of Texas Hold ’em to poker tables across the region. By revealing five common cards over several rounds of betting, Hold ’em turned up the psychology. It played to Slim’s strengths.
In 1967, Slim and his compatriots convinced casino operator Benny Binion to start promoting Texas Hold ’em at his Las Vegas casino, Binion’s Horseshoe. By 1970, Slim had become one of the first participants in a new event: the World Series of Poker, held at Binion’s.
Slim was close with a few friends but made a lot of enemies who questioned his scruples when money was on the line. Which was regularly in his world.
Bad Reputation
McEvoy, his former competitor, says Slim was known for his poker skill but didn’t have a great personal reputation. “I’ve been around poker more than 50 years. I’ve had many dealings with Slim over the years. That highly gregarious personality he had on the surface was just that. On the surface,” McEvoy says.
The Amarillo-based gambler’s greatest moment of glory came in the Main Event of the ’72 WSOP. That tournament consisted of eight elite gamblers, a far cry from the more than 5,000 entrants at the 2025 WSOP. Over 22 hours of play, Slim’s $10,000 stake dwindled to as little as $1,700 before his luck started to change. He ended up totaling $80,000 in the Main Event.
Slim won several other WSOP events over the years and became a regular on 1970s television, including episodes of I’ve Got a Secret and To Tell the Truth. He became a frequent Tonight Show guest with Johnny Carson, making 11 appearances and leaning into his wild stories and colorful catch phrases.
In spite of his fame, Slim chose to stay in Amarillo, but his house and his lifestyle got a lot bigger. “Mom and Dad bought a lot on Virginia Street. It was just a simple home at that point. That was before Dad won the World Series of Poker,” Deane says. “Then they rebuilt. They built a rather large house and a great, huge swimming pool. We had tennis courts and golf greens. We had a nice slice of life when Dad was riding the wave.” 
Slim loved hunting, horses and ranching and started spending lavishly on all three. At one point, he operated three different ranches. “Slim was a lot of fun and we did amazing things because of his celebrity. But mostly I liked it when Dad was home because he was just Dad,” Deane says.
From time to time he suggested a move to Las Vegas, but Helen always shot him down. “Mother said, ‘Absolutely not. I don’t want my children exposed to parts of that life you live in.’ And he acknowledged that. He honored that,” Deane remembers.
Entering the Mainstream
From 1979 until 1991, Slim hosted The Super Bowl of Poker in Reno, which was the game’s second most prestigious event behind the WSOP. Slim was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1992. By century’s end, his fame had started to fade just as more states opened legal casinos. Texas Hold ’em was starting to inch closer to the mainstream.
Slim reintroduced himself to the public with a surprising second-place finish in an event at the 2000 WSOP. Rick Reilly at Sports Illustrated, one of the few mainstream journalists then writing about poker, profiled Slim in those days.
Author and literary agent Greg Dinkin met Slim at the 2002 WSOP while promoting his book, The Poker MBA. After listening to Slim’s stories, Dinkin suggested Slim write a memoir. In 2003, Harper Collins published Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People, which proved to be an immediate hit, coinciding with the poker boom on cable television and the expansion of in-person and online options for people to partake in Texas Hold ’em and other games.
To promote the book’s release, Slim appeared on several early 2000s talk shows including Jimmy Kimmel, Carson Daly, and the Best Damn Sports Talk Show, Period. He was just as charming as he’d been on Carson in the ’70s.
Actor Nicholas Cage expressed serious interest in playing Slim on film, meeting with him and Dinkin at his Bel-Air home in 2003. But the project never materialized: In August 2003, Thomas Austin Preston Jr. was charged in Randall County with indecency with a minor, who was a relative. In 2004, Preston pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor assault charge in the case. In later years, Slim insisted he was innocent and said he pleaded no contest to avoid a trial and further public scrutiny of his family.
A Poker Pariah
As Dinkin notes, Slim’s strained relationship with the truth made it difficult for even his defenders to know what to believe in regard to that case. At any rate, Slim became a pariah in the poker world. “There was a really rough patch that happened in the family. We certainly wished it had been much more private than what it was,” Deane says, explaining that significant reconciliation took place in the family in subsequent years.
Nevertheless, Slim and Helen divorced after 53 years of marriage. “At the time, my brothers and I were very reactionary. We were a strong part of my mother’s decision for them to no longer be married. And that was very hard for us and for her,” Deane says.
“It all really fell apart on him. That was his moment to cash in. And he lost it all,” Dinkin says.
Slim’s life got stranger and more dangerous in his final years. In the last decade of his life, Slim was the victim of at least three armed robberies, at least one of which took place while he was trying to collect a debt. “He was a guy who was known to carry a lot of money and made a lot of enemies,” Dinkin says.
But toward the end of his life, Slim rebuilt his family relationships, including with his ex-wife. “[Slim and Helen] never didn’t see one another,” Deane says. “He came and visited mother all the time.”
Eventually he was diagnosed with colon cancer, and Slim died in Amarillo on April 29, 2012. Despite a lifetime of avoiding church, Deane says her father made his decision for Christ near the end of his life.
To this day, Slim remains one of the most recognizable figures in poker history, widely regarded as one of the game’s great popularizers.
Dinkin still hears from people regularly who are interested in optioning Slim’s story for the big screen. He hopes that one day the stories of Amarillo Slim, partly truth and partly fiction, make their way to movie theaters.
