Jim Weger rode in the Pawn StarsPoker Run in Las Vegas every year and wasn't going to make an exception for last weekend's 10th-anniversary event. However, he didn't make it to the annual gathering of Las Vegas bikers.
The night before the poker run, Weger died in a motorcycle accident on his way home from work in Pahrump, a small town on the Nevada-California border. He had been registered for the Oct. 12 event, a motorcycle ride across the Las Vegas valley to raise money for The Hundley Foundation to benefit families affected by epilepsy.
Poker runs are popular events among cyclists around the country. A run consists of a ride to various checkpoints where bikers, numbering anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand, draw a playing card. At the end of the run, the bikers who have made the best and worst five-card poker hands win prizes.
PokerNewsparticipated in Saturday's rally through the Nevada desert, which included first-time riders and longtime participants like Tina Towels, Weger's daughter-in-law who, along with a close group of biker friends, made the poker run despite being hours removed from tragedy.
"He was registered to be here today," Towels said. "He usually does it every year with us. So we rode today in honor of him."
When Towels' sister got married, she quickly bonded with her new father-in-law over their shared love of motorcycles. "Jim, he's been riding his whole life. Dirt bikes, quads, whatever. And so he's a very avid motorcycle rider."
Weger was a regular in Las Vegas poker runs, riding in a group that included Towels, her husband and his dad. "We do poker runs all through the year. Mostly all the poker runs in town we do together."
"It's fun. It's a good way to be safe and get out there and have a good time and enjoy your ride. You go to different stops and it's usually a safe, nice ride."
On Friday night, Towel's sister got an alert about a road closure in Pahrump. She hadn't heard from Weger and sent her brother to investigate. They learned that Weger had collided with a commercial vehicle on Manse Road around 6 p.m., as the Pahrump Valley Timesreported on Wednesday.
According to the advocacy group Zero Fatalities, there were 313 fatal motorcycle crashes on Nevada roadways between 2017 and 2021.
Rather than resting for Saturday's poker run, Towels spent the early hours calling the morgue, speaking to medical officials and setting up a GoFundMe page for Weger's funeral costs. "It was rough. I tried to get all that taken care of before leaving."
As of Wednesday, the GoFundMe had raised $1,720 of its $2,060 goal.
The 10th annual Pawn Stars Poker Run was a joint effort between Rick Harrison of Pawn Starsfame and former NFL quarterback Brett Hundley, who now runs the epilepsy-focused Hundley Foundation. In its ten years of existence, the poker run has raised over $1 million for charity, according to Harrison, who suffered from epileptic seizures growing up.
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"There were points where I couldn't walk for weeks at a time as a kid," he told Las Vegas' KSNV. "I just wanted to help out; I want kids to know what they're going through and (that) it's not the end of the world."
More than 150 bikers arrived in the downtown parking lot outside Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in North Las Vegas around 9 a.m. They stationed their half-ton machines — a lime green Dunlop, a matte red Indian, a slasher-themed blue bike painted with the face of Hellraiser's Pinhead and a custom "NTMARE" plate, and too many Harley-Davidsons to count — before drawing their first cards, helping themselves to donuts and buying raffle tickets. The bikers, most wearing patched-up leather vests, skull caps, thick jeans and cowboy boots, then re-straddled their bikes, revved their engines and set off for the three checkpoints that could be completed in any order.
Some bikers first drove 20 miles west to Porchlight II, a bar in the Las Vegas suburbs that showed the Iowa-Washington game as bikers drew cards and received stamps on their poker hand sheets. PokerNews'Chad Holloway and Connor Richards made the run not on motorcycles but in Richards' Hyundai Elantra. After forgetting to draw cards at the pawn shop, they made their first draws and both picked up fours — same as the number of wheels they rode in on.
The poker riders then drove south out of Las Vegas and headed west on State Route 161. After ten minutes on the one-lane highway passing dirt and sagebrush, they reached Pioneer Saloon, a wooden shack in Goodsprings that boasts being the oldest bar in the Las Vegas area. Harrison drank a bottled beer inside the the refurbished saloon and chatted with a group of bikers as Holloway and Richards respectively drew an eight and four. Someone else had an even worse draw.
“I haven’t got shit!” a bald, bearded biker in a black vest told his friend.
61-year-old Randolph Lewis, a table game dealer and former Marine, pulled the king of clubs to give him three to a flush. But Lewis, who came to Vegas on a bus from Florida in 2015, was already thinking about the hands that could beat him. "If I get lucky, my best hand right now would be an ace-high flush," he told PokerNews. "I'm sure someone can beat an ace-high flush."
Lewis, in his red and black cap and with a dust-covered bandana around his neck, may have known more about poker odds than other rally participants. "I have some poker skills. I survived on poker for a little bit. It's a rough ride because you go up, you go down. And when you go down it sucks. You think you're up and then all of a sudden life comes along and then all of a sudden you lose your bankroll, you've got to pay bills."
Though it was his first-ever poker run, he has been on plenty of motorcycle runs in the past. "You know, I got a job out in Bonnie Springs Ranch just for the run, just for the ride out there. I got a job as a dishwasher so I could just ride out there."
Lewis is a veteran not only of the armed forces but of the biking world. He was neighbors with members of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club back in Daytona, though he said he's "never joined a club or anything."
"I've been around some of their parties, that was it," Lewis said. "I'm not into a club culture."
As far as biking goes, Lewis said Nevada is "much better than Florida" because "it's open" and "you're (not) in the woods and shit." He added that he's had "nothing but good experiences around bikers in Nevada."
"It grew on me. When I first got out here, everything was brown. You hear this from people who grew up around trees and grass, it's like 'oh my god, everything's brown.' But it grows on us. Because at first it was ugly as hell, but now it's like, it's beautiful."
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Holloway and Richards headed to the third stop, speeding north on the highway to Las Vegas like Hunter S. Thompson and his attorney racing to cover the Mint 400. The 40-minute drive brought them to the Harley-Davidson dealership on Las Vegas Boulevard, where they pulled and eight and a six to both be drawing to nothing.
Back at the North Las Vegas parking lot around 1:30 p.m., the bikers parked and drew their final cards before ripping into catered meat from the next-door Rollin Smoke Barbeque and inspecting long strings of blue, green and pink raffle tickets that had helped raise $65,000 for the event. Holloway and Richards drew their last two cards and made remarkably similar hands. Holloway held 4♠8♠6♦J♣4♦for a pair of fours and jack-high, while Richards made 4♦4♣8♣K♣A♥to pip him with ace-high. Neither had any hopes of having the best high hand worth $2,000 or the best low hand worth $1,000.
A jack-high flush made for the winning hand, while the losing hand was an unpaired nine-high. Lewis must've missed his king-high flush, and it would've been good after all.
Since Weger was already registered, organizers gave Towels a poker hand sheet to fill out on his behalf. Weger didn't draw much on his final poker run; he ended up with 4♦6♥7♣10♠A♦for a no-good ace-high low. But the crumpled paper representing friendship, shared passion and the open road means more to Towels than the raggedy poker hand stamped on it.
"He always said 'if I die riding, I'll die happy.'"
*Photos courtesy Tina Towels
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