The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King

by Michael Craig

  Copyright © 2005 by Michael Craig

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-53963-0

  Contents

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  PART I

  1: FLIPPING PENNIES

  2: HEADS UP

  3: THE THURSDAY GAME

  4: THE POKER CONJECTURE

  5: PICTURE DAY

  6: THE LAST LESSON OF PROFESSOR BACKWARDS

  PART II

  7: GONE

  8: JENNIFER HARMAN’S WAKE-UP CALL

  9: A LAWYER, NOT A GAMBLER

  10: THE BIG GAME

  11: THE NEXT BEST THING

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For Jo Anne, Barry, Ellie, and Val

  Four Aces

  Preface

  POCKET KINGS

  Show us your pocket kings.”

  If the cowboy at the other end of the table had pulled out a knife I would have been less unnerved. But he had shown me something more lethal than a blade: a professional poker player’s powers of observation.

  I had started playing Texas Hold ’Em, the most popular form of poker, in 1992. For a year, I cleaned up in low-stakes Las Vegas games and fantasized about my future as a free-wheeling, high-living professional poker player.

  Texas Hold ’Em seems so simple that such delusions are common. The goal is to make the best five-card poker hand out of a combination of a player’s two concealed cards, also called hole cards, and five communal cards, called the board. The first round of betting follows receipt of the hole cards. Because betting position is so important and remains the same through the hand, a large disk, called the dealer button (or just the button), passes clockwise around the table, one player per hand, denoting who acts last. To stimulate initial action, instead of antes, hold ’em imposes mandatory bets, known as the blinds, on the two players to the left of the button. The first player to the left of the button posts the small blind, half an opening bet. The next player posts the big blind, the size of the opening bet.

  After the first round of betting, the dealer turns over the first three communal cards, called the flop. After a second round of betting, the dealer turns over the fourth card, known as fourth street or the turn. A third betting round ensues, after which the dealer turns over the last card, fifth street or the river. The remaining players bet once more, and turn over their cards.

  Generally, the casino dealing (also called spreading) the game specifies the betting limits. A $3-$6 game, for example, would have opening bets and raises in increments of $3 in the first two betting rounds and $6 in the last two rounds. Texas Hold ’Em can also be played without betting limits, meaning that although the big and small blinds are set, the players may thereafter bet any amount, including everything they have on the table. No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em is only occasionally played in cash games, but is extremely popular in tournaments. (Virtually all poker games are played for table stakes, meaning the players cannot bet more than they have on the table. They can’t reach into their pockets or borrow more in the middle of a hand. But if someone bets more than an opponent has at the table, the opponent can’t be forced to fold. They can go all-in, covering as much of a bet as they have in front of them. Except for unfriendly private games and bad poker movies, no one has to cover a bet for more than they have on the table by putting up their car, house, wedding ring, or fiancée.)

  I considered myself so proficient at the game by the summer of 1993 that all I needed, to my reasoning, was to step up in class, repeat my stellar low-stakes results, and begin my new life as a globe-trotting professional gambler.

  Or should I say our new life? I had a wife, two children, a law partner, and a busy practice. No one was going to encourage (or allow) me to bet the vast sums contested in the top games. I would have to prove my mettle in a poker tournament, demonstrating to all the family, friends, and colleagues who thought I had a screw loose that I was, indeed, pro poker material.

  This brought me, in July 1993, to the Aladdin Oasis Poker Tournament and to the dead-eyed cowboy. The Aladdin of 1993 was not the posh mega-resort of today but a relic of the Rat Pack days brought forward three decades without, it seemed, a fresh coat of paint or a carpet shampoo. The decision to schedule three weeks of poker tournaments in Las Vegas in July was exactly the kind of thinking that consigned the original Aladdin to oblivion. Still, the tournament circuit in those days—before ESPN, Fox, the Travel Channel, and Bravo ran poker shows several times a week—had a big gap during the summer, so a cadre of hard-core pros attended, including World Series of Poker champions Tom “Grand Rapids” McEvoy (who was sitting to my immediate right), Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston, Walter “Puggy” Pearson, Johnny “Orient Express” Chan, Berry Johnston, Jack Keller, and Brad Daughterty. I also recognized, from old World Series of Poker videotapes I studied like the Rosetta Stone, perennial tournament winners Hans “Tuna” Lund, T. J. Cloutier, and John Bonetti.

  The no-limit hold ’em event was contested by eighty-six of these pros, plus me. Thoroughly intimidated, I blundered about for a couple hours, mostly too scared to play and, therefore, get myself in serious trouble. In middle position, I looked down at my hole cards and saw two black kings. This was my best hand of the tournament. Everybody between the blinds and me had passed, so I raised the $100 and $200 blinds to $500. I tried to remain as still and calm as possible, a blank wall.

  The remaining players to the button passed. The cowboy in the small blind studied me a moment and threw in his cards. The Asian kid in the big blind peeked at his cards and immediately, forcefully, shoved all his chips in the center. “All in.”

  Could he have two aces?

  How was I supposed to know? Two kings was a great two-card hand, and being all-in would obviate the need to make decisions about the hand in later betting rounds. I called his bet, pushing my chips to the middle.

  The current rule is that when someone is all-in and no further betting is possible, the players immediately turn up their cards. This prevents a cheater from passing his chips to a compatriot by calling an all-in bet, seeing his cohort’s hand at the end, and throwing in his cards unseen. But that rule did not exist in 1993 so everyone directed their attention to the empty space in the center of the table where the dealer would display the board.

  The flop produced nine-nine-six. Since I was worried that my opponent had an ace, I viewed this as positive. The turn brought the king of hearts. Even if the kid had two aces, I was home clear. This gave me a five-card hand of king-king-king-nine-nine, a full house. The river card, however, was an ace. Still, unless my opponent had ace-ace or nine-nine in the hole, he couldn’t beat me.

  To the shock of everyone at the table, the kid turned over a six and a nine. He was bluffing but he made a full house (nine-nine-nine-six-six) on the flop.

  That’s when the cowboy plunged the dagger into my neck.

  “Show us your pocket kings.”

  I can still hear that sneer today, as if I was carelessly playing the game with my cards face up.

  I sheepishly turned over my winning king-king. Morosely stacking my chips, I broke protocol and asked the cowboy, “How did you put me on kings?”

  “When the suicide king came on the turn, I thought I saw your Adam’s apple move a little.”

  It wasn’t until years later that I learned the king of hearts w
as known as the suicide king. If you look at him, he holds his broadsword behind his head (or, perhaps, pointed at it).

  Needless to say, I did not win the Aladdin Oasis no-limit hold ’em tournament, or make it as a professional poker player. If I wanted to experience the thrills of poker at the highest level, I would have to do it from the rail, like all the other suckers.

  Over the next decade, I gave up poker, and then took it up again. While playing $10-$20 hold ’em at the Mirage in October 2003, my friend Ted told me about the gossip at his table. One of the players had just returned from the Bellagio, home of not only a huge Impressionist art collection, couture shops, and a brilliant fountain display, but also the world’s best poker players and highest-stakes poker games. In the poker room, he saw “the son of a poker world champion” and “some Texas banker” playing heads-up Texas Hold ’Em with, according to a floorman present, over $15 million on the table.

  The night before, at the Mirage showroom, on his fifty-ninth birthday, illusionist Roy Horn had been mauled by a white tiger only a couple hundred feet from the poker room. The next day, the poker players in the room couldn’t have cared less, other than to grab the previously issued Siegfried & Roy $5 chips before the dealers took them out of circulation. The mauling being discussed in the room was between the bulldog of a pro and a banker, not a tiger and a magician.

  The son of the world champion had to be Todd Brunson. Todd’s father, Doyle Brunson, won the Championship Event of the World Series of Poker in 1976 and 1977. Todd was a poker prodigy, always the youngest at the table in the big cash games.

  The amounts simply would not register in my mind. I remembered, from my earlier poker days, stories about Doyle Brunson and Puggy Pearson playing rounds of golf for more money than Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino made in a year. I overheard pros describing their winnings in inches of hundred-dollar bills. But $15 million on the table? This much cash would weigh over 250 pounds. (Don’t ask how I know this; suffice to say that people who weigh bundles of $100 bills keep a low profile.) Although they were using chips and not bushels of currency, it just seemed like more money than even a phenomenal poker player could accumulate, much less risk, in one game.

  Even the banker’s place in the game didn’t make sense. “But he’s a billionaire,” another player told me when I tried writing this off as an urban legend in the making. He said it as if being a billionaire was something that came automatically with being a Texas banker, and billionaires automatically played poker for astronomical sums. Bill Gates had been known to stop by the Mirage poker room when he was in town, but he played $3-$6 hold ’em. Even if the banker could throw around that kind of money, why would he?

  That curiosity started me on the road to the richest poker game of all time, and took me inside the world of high-stakes poker. For most of a year, I learned about the unusual and impressive skills that separate the best players from the rest of the field, the enormity of their successes and failures, and their shortcomings, which almost always stemmed from their strengths as poker players and gamblers.

  I also had the privilege of witnessing the problem-solving skills of the Texas banker, Andrew Beal. Beal, one of the great entrepreneurial minds of the Information Age, has accumulated great wealth, yet managed to remain almost completely anonymous. (In fact, the Bellagio allowed him to register under the name “Anonymous.”) From the time he was an eleven-year-old buying broken televisions for a dollar from the Salvation Army and fixing and selling them for $30-$40, to purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds in California utilities and airlines when most investors were writing off those businesses, he has never been afraid to venture into new areas, teach himself the rules, challenge the experts and the prevailing wisdom, and measure the results.

  His approach to poker, and to risk itself, is unique. By ignoring, and even contradicting, conventional wisdom, he became extremely wealthy. His hobbies made him an important and credible figure in science and mathematics, areas in which he had no formal education. As I learned more about his improbable career and unique approach to financial and intellectual issues, I wondered, why can’t a wealthy, smart, determined person figure out a way to compete on an even footing with top professional poker players?

  Most important, I learned what a capricious game poker can be, and what a difficult profession it can be for even its expert practitioners. In fact, when I started, I thought the central question of the book would be why Beal would attempt something so apparently foolhardy, taking on the best in the world at their game. By the end of the story, the more pertinent question is why the professionals continued to take up his challenge. By the time the stakes reached their peak, the pros were potentially risking everything on an edge they realized was virtually nonexistent.

  The game went on at irregular intervals in an upstairs corner of the poker room at the Bellagio, in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip, for over three years. Sometimes, Andy Beal would come to town for business and play poker for a day or two. Most of the time, he came solely to test himself against the pros, staying for as long as two weeks. Occasionally, especially at the beginning, he would play a full-table (or ring) game. But mostly, he played the pros one-on-one (known in poker as heads up). He played poker in Las Vegas on ten occasions between February 2001 and May 2004.

  Because of the size of the stakes and the interest in accommodating Beal’s request to play heads up, the players—anyone willing to post $100,000 to $1 million to purchase a share and play Beal on their collective bankroll—formed a group, taking turns playing Beal and sharing in wins and losses. The composition of the group changed during the three years. If a player was not physically present handing over their share of the bankroll before the first match, they were out. The group was composed of as few as eight players and as many as seventeen. On every occasion, it included a lineup of the world’s most skilled poker players. Every time Beal came to town, he played in the highest-stakes game of all time. After his first few visits, the only competition for highest stakes of all time was his previous visits. In fact, based on the final matches between Andy Beal and the pros, it is extremely unlikely that a bigger poker game will materialize for several decades.

  So what was the outcome? You’ll have to read on to find out, but let me assure you, fortunes were won and lost. Although a weapon in the arsenal of every good poker player—and these pros are the best in the world—is an indifference to the stakes, and their opponent was one of the wealthiest men in Texas, the outcome hanging in the balance made the game’s participants at different times sick with worry, angry with themselves (and, in the case of the pros, each other), elated, filled with self-doubt, overtaken by greed, petty, disgusted, thrilled, paranoid, and relieved.

  But reporting on a three-year series of poker games is not like reporting on three baseball seasons, or three years on Wall Street. The American obsession with numbers has pulled tournament poker into the twenty-first century. There are now tours and circuits with money rankings, player ratings, championships, and player-of-the-year awards. But the high-stakes cash games still adhere to rules reminiscent of the Old West. Rules like, “Keep your back to the wall” and “Keep your mouth shut.”

  There are numerous obstacles to finding out who won and who lost (and how much), some even more imposing than the beefy security personnel who magically appear if someone lingers too long on the rail of a high-stakes game. For numerous reasons, it is bad business to reveal the results of poker games. No one wants to brag lest the IRS be within earshot. (Most of these players are pretty honest when it comes to reporting poker income, evidenced by the meticulous records I saw of some of the players, the modern casino and Treasury Department rules for recording transactions of the size necessary for these players to take money out of play, and Doyle Brunson’s decades-long admonition that a poker player can never accumulate wealth if he doesn’t pay his taxes.)

  Bragging is also bad form. Nobody wants to rile either the losers or the poker gods, or alert the le
gions of cash-poor poker players looking for an easy touch. In addition, it’s hard enough for the top players to find opponents without spelling out how successful they are at relieving opponents of money. Chip Reese, a regular in the world’s biggest games for thirty years, told me that he loves it when people write about his losses, even better when they get the facts wrong and he actually won.

  But the opposite situation also creates a problem. We are all familiar with how the big loser in a $3-$6 game will say that he “lost a little” or “just about broke even”? (Of course, we have never done that, but you know what I’m talking about.) I can let you in on a secret: The high-stakes pros are exactly the same way. With few exceptions, neither the pros nor Beal was especially forthcoming about losses.

  All this led to some difficult reporting work. For example, I had five sources tell me different stories about one of Andy Beal’s trips:

  Source 1: Beal and the group played six $1 million freeze-outs. (A freeze-out is a game that continues until one person has all the chips.)

  Source 2: Only two players opposed Beal in heads-up matches on that trip.

  Source 3: One player won $2 million in one match.

  Source 4: One player in addition to the two listed by Source 2 played Beal and won.

  Source 5: They weren’t freeze-outs.

  Believe it or not, I was able to reconcile all this. In such situations, however, if some immaterial details could not be verified, or were in dispute, I omitted them. Every significant win and loss is described in detail, and most of the other matches are summarized. But on several trips, Andy Beal would play someone for a half-hour while waiting for his designated opponent to arrive. Or he would play someone not a part of the pros’ group for a little while for smaller stakes. While all the important battles are fully covered, these minor skirmishes are merely summarized.

  Whenever I cite a specific result and amount, I have either multiple sources independently reporting the number, or one extremely reliable source (someone present who I had already determined kept meticulous and reliable numbers) and agreement by others present and the opponent, or a lack of any basis to dispute the amount. There were no important results for which I did not get extremely specific information.