The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King

by Michael Craig

  The bear was almost always in repose. Although Howard’s competitive fire may have burned hotter than any of the other elite players, he was always quiet, cool, and analytical. Leaning far back from the table with his arms folded on his chest, he more resembled a chess player studying the board than a poker player in the heat of battle. Howard started as a chess player, running away from home as a teenager to play chess for money on the streets of New York. Poker just happened to get in the way.

  A few years later, when a girlfriend made Howard start attending Columbia College, poker again came calling. It would have been interesting to see what kind of impact a computer science major in 1985 with Howard’s drive (he maintained a 3.5 GPA his freshman year while making his first $100,000 at poker) could have had at the dawn of the Personal Computer Age, but he gave up the academic life to become “The Professor of Poker.”

  Ironically, despite Lederer’s obvious intelligence and manner (plus the nickname), he spent less time in college than nearly all of his colleagues. Barry Greenstein has only to revise and defend his long-completed dissertation to receive his Ph.D. in math from the University of Illinois. Doyle Brunson received his master’s degree in education nearly fifty years ago. Chip Reese graduated from Dartmouth. Ted Forrest quit Le Moyne College, where his father had been a professor, just short of graduation after a dispute with a professor who had feuded with his father. Jennifer Harman and Todd Brunson spent more time in college than Howard, studying to someday become, respectively, a doctor and a lawyer, before they chose poker.

  Howard Lederer came from a remarkable family. His parents were both brilliant academically and very competitive. He grew up on the campus of an elite prep school in New Hampshire, where his father was an English teacher. (Richard Lederer has written, edited, or co-written more than twenty-five books about the English language.) The family had serious contests with puzzles, card games, and board games. The most serious were the chess matches between Howard and his father.

  His mother was an alcoholic, and Howard’s and his father’s attempts to make her stop drinking caused so much tension that he ran away to New York. He was eighteen, a giant of a young man with little money and no plan. But he had an intellectual certainty in the correctness of his actions and an overwhelming desire to succeed.

  He did not succeed for a long, long time. At the chess club, he discovered the poker games in the back room that started late in the day and went on through the night. Poker replaced chess as his obsession, but there was one problem: He wasn’t any good. He lost every night.

  After Howard went through the little money he had, he was homeless for about ten days. He scraped together whatever he could by running errands for players in the poker game, then losing it back to them. He would wander the streets until morning, then lie in the grass at Washington Square Park and sleep for a few hours. He was determined not to call his father for bus fare back to New Hampshire.

  He convinced the owner of the club to let him sleep on the couch in exchange for cleaning up the place. But there was still the problem of finding money to play poker.

  “I probably borrowed two bucks more than anybody ever,” Lederer explained years later, when he could laugh about being so poor for so long. “I would run errands for the games and I’d make enough in tips so I could buy into this one-and-two-dollar game. Invariably, at the end of the night, I’d be broke and I’d borrow two bucks, enough for a pack of cigarettes and a souvlaki sandwich. That would hold me over to the game that night and I’d run errands, pay back the two bucks, and have fifteen bucks or so to buy into the game. Go broke, borrow two bucks again. I did that for two years.”

  After several months, Howard’s father tracked him down and, after talking to the owner of the club, actually supported (or at least did not try to oppose) Howard’s decision. It took a great leap of faith by Howard, his father, and the owner of the club, but, for some reason, they all believed Howard was good enough to give this a try.

  Slowly and painfully, Howard Lederer learned how to play poker. In 1982, there were no books from which he could soak up some knowledge. All he could find was a collection of tall tales by Amarillo Slim, full of stories about characters with names like Texas Dolly, Treetops, and Puggy, and poker games with names like Deuce-to-Seven No-Limit Draw. It all seemed a million miles away.

  After two years, he started beating the $1-$2 game, then the $3-$6 game. The year his girlfriend made him attend college was a grind, but a great learning experience. He would wake up at seven, be at school by eight, arrive at the Mayfair Club (then the best of New York’s underground poker clubs) by four, play until midnight, do a little homework and sleep a few hours, and start again. But the real education took place at the Mayfair. He was beating up the $50-$100 game and learning from opponents like Jay Heimowitz, Steve Zolotow, Erik Seidel, Dan Harrington, and Noli Francisco. Erik, a close friend of Howard’s, went on to win six World Series of Poker bracelets. Heimowitz came close to winning the championship a couple times in the 1970s and also went on to win six bracelets. Dan Harrington won the world championship in 1995 and made it to the final table on three other occasions.

  In 1987, Howard went to Vegas to play in the World Series and finished fifth to Johnny Chan in the championship, becoming the youngest ever to make the final table. (To Howard’s chagrin, it proved to be his only final table appearance in the main event.) The next year, Erik bettered his friend, finishing second to Chan. Howard started beating the Mayfair Club game consistently and moved to Las Vegas permanently in 1992. Continuing to move up, by 2001, he was a regular in the biggest games in Vegas.

  Howard made short work of Andy, winning a million dollars in less than three hours. Howard played heads-up hold ’em even more aggressively than Andy, and the banker found himself increasingly checking and calling when Howard came charging at him. Doyle Brunson had called Lederer the best limit hold ’em player in the world a few years earlier, and he demonstrated why. If it wasn’t clear to Andy Beal before, it certainly was by now: He was far, far behind the poker professionals in every area that counted for this game.

  As Andy Beal left town, it seemed everything had gone as the professionals expected. Beal had a lot of money and “a lot of gamble”—which is a huge compliment for gamblers to pay—but not much skill. To paraphrase the namesake of the Bellagio’s next-door neighbor, Caesars Palace, “He came. He saw. He was conquered.”

  3

  THE THURSDAY GAME

  LATE MARCH 2001

  In late March 2001, about three weeks after his pasting by the poker pros, Andy Beal was back in Las Vegas. He had some bank business in town and decided to drop by the Bellagio poker room.

  No one knew he was coming, but word spread fast. Because so few new players simply dropped in to play in the highest games, members of the poker room staff would call the local pros. Many players would also alert their friends.

  To outsiders, this might sound like collusion or hustling but, in fact, the opposite is true. Players like Andy Beal want to play the top players. On a Wednesday afternoon, the biggest game in the room could be $80-$160. Beal wanted to play much higher, and he specifically wanted to test himself and his developing theories against the best players.

  When the poker room calls the top players and they call one another, it also prevents hustling. Among the pros, if everybody finds out when a new player is in town, the field among them is level. The competition to get the new guy’s money is open and fair. No one can try to arrange a private game or separate the newcomer from the others. Any possible collusion among players is also headed off by the other top pros playing in the game. If a couple of poker players want to get together to cheat an outsider—something today’s top pros, at least the ones who are the subject of this book, simply don’t do—it would be a lot easier in a shorthanded game: easier to keep secret, fewer people with whom to coordinate the cheating, and fewer confederates among whom to divide the spoils. If everybody knows that the wealthy outsider is coming t
o play, potential cheaters would have to either include everybody or hide their cheating from their world-class colleagues.

  A $2,000-$4,000 hold ’em game materialized for Beal as if by magic and quickly filled up. The waiting list grew, even as the stakes rose to $3,000-$6,000 and $4,000-$8,000. The game broke up with plans to reconvene Thursday afternoon with limits of $10,000-$20,000.

  Why didn’t Andy Beal insist on playing heads up, as he had on the previous trip (and would on all future trips)? He had not really prepared himself for the mental combat of playing heads up. He dropped by the poker room on a whim because he had an afternoon free, and then extended his trip by a day. He was still torn about how much he wanted to commit himself to poker. He relished the mental challenge of planning and executing a heads-up poker strategy but he hadn’t put in the hours to feel he had any better chance than he did three weeks earlier. In addition, he won money in the February ring games, in contrast to his performance in the heads-up matches.

  He wanted to make sure he wasn’t making a mistake by insisting on playing heads up. Finally, the stakes of the $10,000-$20,000 ring game would affect the pros more than playing at those stakes heads up. Although the pros told him that some players in the game would be playing the money of nonplayers in addition to their own, he imagined they had much more financial exposure than they did when he faced one opponent playing everyone’s money.

  The Thursday game was, by far, the highest-stakes full table poker game of all time. Amazingly, there was a waiting list. Players flew in from California, only to find they were too late to get in. They played a $2,000-$4,000 game at a neighboring table, hoping to get a seat, but no one wanted to leave.

  Ted Forrest made it back from California in time to get in. Johnny Chan, two-time World Series of Poker champion and one of the most famous players of the last twenty years, had to put his name on the list and play in the second game. (Chan lived in California but, like Ted, chased the action between Las Vegas and L.A.) Barry Greenstein also flew in from L.A., only to find the big game already filled.

  If you saw Barry Greenstein at a poker table, you’d probably want to shake him and tell him to go outside and have some fun. With his deep-set eyes, dark brows, undergrowth of beard, and long features, he could pass for a badly overworked accountant on April 14. Away from the table, however, he was one of the most charismatic figures in poker.

  At forty-six, just a couple years younger than Andy Beal, Barry considered himself in his prime as a poker player, but remained uneasy about his decision to make poker the focus of his life. It was common for top pros to begin recognizing their skills while in college, and drift toward poker until a career in gambling became inevitable. Jennifer Harman, for example, wanted a medical career. She played poker for fun while in college, but started winning and improving. When asked how she chose to become a poker player, she has replied, “Poker chose me.”

  Not so for Barry Greenstein. He took ten years to complete his work for a Ph.D. because central Illinois’s poker games were too lucrative to leave behind, but his résumé hints at worlds beyond poker: Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Illinois, one of the first programmers hired by Symantec, a one-man wrecking crew of no-limit hold ’em in Northern California, one of the top cash game players in Los Angeles, mentor to several high-stakes pros. Poker was the best way to take care of himself and his family, but he always felt that he was meant to do more.

  Over a decade ago, after he and a handful of other professionals won so much money in the Bay Area’s card rooms that there was no one left to play no-limit hold ’em (and, according to Barry, he cleaned out the other pros), he had to play limit poker 100 hours a week to make the money he made at no-limit. Barry was very conservative in appearance, but he had always been generous to his family and always lived in nice houses and driven nice cars. He concedes, “I’m hard on money.”

  When bigger limit games sprang up in the card rooms around Los Angeles, he started flying to L.A. once or twice a month, playing for two days straight, before returning home. Then he did this once a week, then two or three times a week. It was a terrible way to live but he thought it was necessary to keep from uprooting his family. In 1999, he finally moved his family to L.A., and said goodbye to flying someplace just for a poker game.

  But here he was, stuck in Las Vegas and he couldn’t even get into the game. One table away, they were playing for the highest stakes ever, with more than $4 million on the table, another record. He and Johnny Chan joined the others at the table in watching the action between hands of their game. Their interest was more than mere curiosity.

  To Andy Beal’s disappointment, raising the stakes to $10,000-$20,000 in a ring game had less effect on his opponents than he had hoped. There was really no way to make the stakes too high for a professional poker player if he or she had an edge. The pros would just take on a financial partner, selling a percentage of their win or loss. The partner was always another poker player, someone who could evaluate whether, in fact, the player selling the action really had the advantage. A poker player having the best of it was trading a piece of a favorable opportunity for the security of reducing the amount of risk.

  The best poker players walk a tightrope between their business sense and their passion. As professionals, they seek out the most profitable opportunities and control as many factors as possible to create a positive result. As gamblers, however, they want the risk and excitement of having something important on the line with the outcome hanging in the balance. The high-stakes professionals differ when it comes to judgment calls along the security-risk continuum.

  Most great poker players share a common background, both with one another and millions of losing gamblers: competitive interests and families, a high tolerance for risk, and a lot of losing. Elite poker players are drawn from a pool of gamblers, not problem solvers or people readers. These particular gamblers gravitate toward poker (along with millions of other losing gamblers), usually at an early age, and usually showing some skill. Nevertheless, they still start off losing like everybody else.

  At some point, the young professional poker player (who may not yet have realized they are on the road to becoming a “professional poker player”) stops being like every other gambler. The pro is devoting a lot of time to gambling, but is winning, and developing a recognizable edge. From that point on, the poker pro has more in common with the casino than with other bettors. Like the casino, the professionals, with their edge, merely have to allow enough trials to even out the role of luck.

  It’s profitable being the casino, having the best of it, but is it fun? Is it exciting?

  This is the paradox for nearly all the world’s best poker players. They start playing poker because the gambling aspect is fun and exciting. They stick with it because, unlike other gambling activities (except for sports betting, and many high-stakes poker players are winning sports bettors), they can win. But winning removes the risk. How do they handle losing that element of excitement when poker is about controlling risks, rather than experiencing them? And how do they react when poker becomes risky?

  Ted Forrest was the king of the risk-takers. “The first time I ever played $15-$30 stud,” Ted explained, “my heart started thumping out of my chest. I don’t get that feeling anymore when I sit down at a normal game. When I sat down at that $10,000-$20,000 game with Chip and Andy, my heart was thumping. It takes a really big game to make my heart pump like that.” He had no trouble taking all the money in his safe deposit box and sitting down at that game. The difficult thing would have been to pass it up.

  Frequently, Todd Brunson was at the other end of the continuum. Brunson was not part of the group organized by his father to play Andy Beal, even though he was clearly as talented as the others and considered one of the best at limit hold ’em. Todd was capable of playing poker at the highest limits, but frequently chose not to. If Table One included some live ones—there were several very successful businessmen who played for high stakes
and the competition at Table One made them into good players, but they were at a clear disadvantage to the pros—he would play as high as they wanted for as long as they wanted. But if he thought there were too many pros and not enough “contributors,” he would play $400-$800, usually cleaning up.

  In fact, Todd didn’t play very much at all. “I’m famous for being the laziest man in poker,” he admitted. He came to the poker room to win, not to gamble, and his business interests took up plenty of his time. Brunson was much more aggressive about hunting down good investments than good poker games, removing as much money from his bankroll as he could to buy stocks, homes, land, and pursue other business opportunities.

  Most players were somewhere in the middle, and they usually had difficulty resolving the conflict between the love of action and the need for security. Jennifer Harman, for example, got no sensory pleasure from taking risks. She found it “stressful,” not exciting, to put up the last of her bankroll to keep playing during her losing period after moving to Las Vegas in the early 1990s. On the other hand, she wasn’t satisfied as a winning $100-$200 hold ’em player, losing at bigger games for years until she could figure out how to beat them. “You have to take risks,” she explains, “or you’ll never get there.”

  The willingness to gamble is a common characteristic of the top poker players, something that initially seemed inconsistent with the image of the wily professional intent on maintaining an edge. Howard Lederer, who could swing from end to end of the risk-security spectrum, explained that the urge to gamble is practically a requirement. “There are a lot of poker players who aren’t gamblers. Those kinds of players tend to find the level where they can win and they make their living. But if you don’t have that need for action in you, you don’t push yourself to move higher up. It takes a certain amount of gambling mentality to keep pushing yourself to go beyond.”