MovieChat Forums > Maverick (1957) Discussion > Typical winning stakes

Typical winning stakes

posted 11 years ago by Randy-144
4 replies | jump to latest

I have watched quite a few of the episodes in the last couple of months and I have noticed that one or the other of the Maverick brothers often wins $5000 to $10,000 in a poker game. $5000 in 1878 would be worth $119,014 in 2013 dollars. Assuming a Maverick cleans out three other players they would be losing an average of $40,000 each in today's money. I find it hard to believe that there would be enough gamblers in the small towns the brothers traveled through who had that kind of money.

[–] 11 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Captain_Augustus_McCrae 10 years ago

Pa Ingalls didn't play in high stakes poker games, though. For the Maverick Brothers, money was an essential tool of the trade, and was used that way. They sometimes found themselves in games with big ranchers, railroad tycoons or bankers, and they needed large amounts of cash to be competitive. Just as a hardware store owner might have 10 or 15 thousand dollars tied up in a building and inventory and lived off the earnings of his work, gamblers used money as their business tool, and derived their living from their winnings, not from spending their business stake. The sums mentioned by the OP might not be seen in every game, but they were not unheard of by any means. Take a quick look at the Time/Life book, "The Gamblers:, from the "Old West" series, and you'll see what I mean. The book is a good intro to the world of the Western gambler, and can lead you to more in-depth accounts, as well.

"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae

[–] FlushingCaps 9 years ago

I know you posted two years ago, Randy, but my answer is...

The producers of the series wanted to make it sound like the Mavericks won big money to their audiences of the late 1950s. Viewers weren't ready with charts to translate money amounts from the 1870s to 1950s dollars. If they heard the much lower figures the Mavericks would have won at MOST of their games--maybe not a few special games set up with rich gamblers--the viewers of the mid 20th Century would have been unimpressed with the winnings and it would have detracted from enjoying the series.

I believe they made the amounts larger than real in general so they would sound like big sums in the 1950s.

[–] kjguhl 9 years ago

Thanks for explaining this! I always thought while watching Maverick that it sounded more like 1950's dollar amounts than late 1800's.