It might have been cowboy gossip.

Wade held that there was nothing in the West as well calculated to test a boy, to prove his real character, as a game of poker.
Belllounds was a feverish better, an exultant winner, a poor loser.

His understanding of the game was rudimentary.

With him, the strong feeling beginning to be manifested to Wade was not the fun of matching wits and luck with his antagonists, nor a desire to accumulate money--for his recklessness disproved that--but the liberation of the gambling passion.
Wade recognized that when he met it.

And Jack Belllounds was not in any sense big.