Alice Ivers Duffield Tubbs (Poker Alice)
Fifty years at the card tables of the frontier, a cigar always lit, and a rule she never broke: never play poker on Sunday.
1851–1930 · Born in Devonshire, England · Also known as Poker Alice
The Story
Alice Ivers emigrated from England as a child and discovered a gift for cards after her first husband, a mining engineer, died young, leaving her to support herself. She became one of the most successful professional gamblers of the frontier era, playing faro and poker in mining camps and cattle towns from Colorado to South Dakota over a career spanning roughly five decades, reportedly winning and losing small fortunes with equal composure. Known for smoking cigars at the table and for a strict personal rule against gambling on Sundays, she survived several marriages and, according to frontier lore, once shot a man in self-defense during a card-table dispute. She ran a saloon and brothel in Sturgis, South Dakota, in her later years and died in 1930, one of the longest-working professional gamblers the frontier produced.
