The players Beal defeated that weekend probably played more limit hold ’em over the past several years than Doyle, or Chip, or any of the members of the group. But, although Andy lacked the lifetime of poker experience his opponents shared, he was rapidly catching up in the specialized area of heads-up hold ’em.
Andy had played against the best poker players in the world for nearly 300 hours. He had spent at least that much time playing talented amateurs who visited him in Texas. Then he had at least doubled that total against Craig Singer. Despite the stories that circulated around poker rooms about the live ones that played too high—this record producer or nightclub owner or that sports team owner or pornographer—it was impossible to stick around against this level of competition and not improve. This year’s live one might never become next year’s professional, but the gap closed pretty quickly when the winners gave the losers such a good education. As for those losers who were untrainable, they quickly gave up.
Andy was nothing if not a quick study. The players in the group were unanimous in their belief that, except for them, Beal was a favorite against nearly every hold ’em player in the world, especially heads up. He proved it that weekend.
Even though the stakes were lower than in his games against Reese, Giang, and Lederer, they were still high enough to risk rattling his opponents. Put simply, if Doyle Brunson let you play cards with a half-million dollars, how would you feel if you had to tell him you lost the money?
The pros trained themselves to ignore the value of the chips during the game. Brunson himself said, “You have to be able to just sit down and play without realizing the value of the chips. I don’t look at it as money until I get up from the table.”
But an exception might be when they were someone else’s chips. It was an adjustment, even for the most experienced members of the group. Todd Brunson has had no trouble sleeping after losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. “‘That’s it. I’ve done the best I could.’ But I’ve lost other times, when somebody else was involved, and it’s a horrible feeling.”
This renewed Andy’s faith in the belief that he could rattle the group if he could get them playing high enough. He started playing members of the group again, but for slightly smaller stakes. He had built up his depleted bankroll with his wins over the pinch hitters and was trying to make a statement that he would not bring out the big bucks until they played him in a $50,000-$100,000 game.
On September 30, Andy lost against David Grey. Although some members of the group thought Grey’s conservative approach to hold ’em didn’t stand a chance against Beal’s aggressive style, the result again suggested that matching Andy with even more aggression was not the way to win.
Beal got some revenge against Doyle Brunson that evening. Playing $20,000-$40,000, Brunson was running out of players and had to play Andy himself. He couldn’t use Todd or Jennifer. Chau Giang had already put in two long sessions. Barry Greenstein didn’t seem to be able to win. Grey had already played that day. Some other members had posted their money and were either out of town or unreachable.
Earlier, Doyle had a run where Andy felt like he hadn’t picked up a playable hand for an hour. Whenever Beal would try to make a play at a pot, Brunson would raise him and chase him out or show down a big hand. He considered it a triumph of patience that he had managed to keep his losses to a minimum.
This evening, Andy was the one getting the cards, and Doyle was becoming frustrated by the combination of Beal’s relentless raises and a lack of firepower to fight back. Brunson seemed short-tempered, though Andy thought some of that was a performance for his benefit.
On one hand, Beal raised and Brunson looked at his hole cards and threw them toward the dealer in disgust.
“I’m not playing these today.”
They flipped up in the dealer’s tray. Ten-deuce.
In poker, many hands have names. Everyone knows the obvious ones, like “pocket rockets” or “American Airlines” for ace-ace. A pair of kings are “cowboys.” Two jacks are “hooks.” Two queens? Before Roy Horn was mauled by a tiger, Vegas players called that hand “Segfried and Roy.” Generically, two queens are “the sisters,” formerly “the Gabor sisters,” occasionally now “the Hilton sisters.”
Some of the less-well-known hands are part of the secret language of poker. The four of clubs and four of spades are “Darth Vader.” (Black fours = dark force.) Nine-five is “Dolly Parton,” though some players say the four of diamonds and two of diamonds (4d-2d) deserve that name. A pair of fives is known as “presto,” supposedly after a place called the Presto Club in London on 55 Victoria Street.
Everybody in poker knows that ten-deuce is “Doyle Brunson.” In both Doyle’s back-to-back world championships, the hole cards of his winning final hand were ten-deuce. But he wasn’t even going to try tonight.
Andy was tired and told Doyle he wasn’t going to play much longer. He called for security to take his chips back to the cage as they played the final hands of their game. Jennifer Harman came by and she, Brunson, and Beal talked.
“So, Doyle,” Andy asked, “how much did I win from you here?” He said it jokingly, rubbing it in a little.
“I don’t know, Andy,” said Doyle, acting as if it didn’t matter in the least. “Not much for these stakes. A million something?”
Beal turned his attention to Harman. “When are we going to play a really big game, Jennifer, like fifty-and-a-hundred-thousand? For ten million?”
Jennifer giggled. “I can’t play you for those kind of stakes. I’d go broke.”
“But you’re supposed to be the best hold ’em player in the world. That’s why I won’t play you unless we play those stakes.”
They were sparring, playfully giving each other a hard time. “Maybe if you bought me a house. Or maybe if I had Doyle’s money.”
Andy became more serious and asked Brunson. “How about it, Doyle? I’ll play Jennifer for ten million, fifty-hundred-thousand?”
As Jennifer walked back to her game, the last thing she heard was Doyle saying, “Maybe we can arrange it.”
Beal and Brunson were both in negotiation mode. If Beal wired $10 million to the Bellagio, they’d give him his game. Beal wanted to limit the group’s ability to substitute players. Doyle told him, at those stakes, he could use anybody he wanted, whenever he wanted. The way they left it, the group would be limited to two players a day, they would play at least six to eight hours, and Beal could stop whenever he was done for the day.
Andy was already supposed to play Chau Giang again the next morning. Would that be the start of the freeze-out?
Brunson told him it would. The security guard and the supervisor had arrived to verify the amount of chips Andy was having shipped to the cage. The largest denomination chip circulating at the Bellagio was $25,000. The high-stakes pros called it a cranberry, because of its color. Since their game in the spring, the casino had some cranberries available for the $30,000-$60,000 game.
Andy Beal was finally going to get his wish for an all-cranberry breakfast.
Between that night and the next morning, however, someone forgot to tell Chau. When he arrived, Andy told him they were playing $50,000-$100,000. Chau refused, consistent with the prior discussions about keeping Beal from kicking up the stakes. Andy, in turn, thought this was another tactic by the group to frustrate him.
They had to call Brunson and have him straighten it out. Yes, he told Chau, they had agreed to play Andy in a $50,000-$100,000 game, for $10 million, until one of them had the entire $20 million.
It was a spirited game, and Giang came out ahead, but not by very much. Beal was careful not to play too many hours and wear himself out.
The next morning, Andy Beal and Jennifer Harman started the second day of the freeze-out at seven o’clock. Harman had not picked up any appreciation for the early starting time. In fact, her malfunctioning kidney left her weak and tired, though she didn’t fully realize it at the time.
Jennifer Har
man and Andy Beal played the highest-stakes poker game in history from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. Finally, after having to repeatedly look at her hole cards to remember what she had, she decided she was too tired to continue.
Andy had won more than $3 million. It was not a giant win, not even as many bets as any of Harman’s three $3 million wins in the spring at $30,000-$60,000. But he had prevailed against one of the best limit hold ’em players in the world. He had again demonstrated that he had the game to compete at the highest level if he played his best.
Todd Brunson took over. Comfortable with his strategy and confident in his abilities, he proceeded to lose over a million additional dollars before they called it a day.
It was a stunning development for the players. Beal’s initial refusal to play Jennifer and Todd had given them a security in believing that trading their participation for higher stakes was a good deal.
It was a heady time for Beal, though he wasn’t taking anything for granted. He was ahead by $5 million for the day. Even with Chau’s win on the first day of the freeze-out, Beal was one-third of the way to winning. No one was going to lie down and just give him the rest of the $10 million, but anyone who thought he was in town to give his money away now knew better.
Each player in the group posted approximately $1 million. Putting aside the size of their nonpoker assets, that constituted (or exceeded) the entire playing bankroll of most of the pros. Several borrowed money just to post their individual shares.
It was not out of the question that Beal would win. In fact, winning $10 million at $50,000-$100,000 had to be regarded as much more likely than him winning $5.5 million at $10,000-
$20,000 and he had improved substantially since he did that back in December 2001. Therefore, the players had to contend with the real possibility that Beal winning $10 million would just be the first round and they would have to scrape up another $10 million to keep the game going. Since poker players are ingenious financiers, they no doubt could accomplish that if necessary. But then what? Losses could rack up fast at those stakes. Whether you wanted to attribute the results to luck, skill, the stakes, or the random fall of the cards, simply sitting down to a game this size required the pros to acknowledge that they could be wiped out.
How did the members of the group take this reversal of fortune? Not only did each have a different feeling, but they each had a different feeling about how their colleagues were handling it. According to Chip Reese, “When Andy gets winning, there are a lot of jokes cracked that he’s going to break everybody, that he’s going to break the poker world, but nobody was really concerned.”
Todd Brunson saw an entirely different scene. “It was like hysteria. There was crying. It was like, ‘Jesus Christ, we have to win.’ It was unbelievable.”
The true state of affairs was probably somewhere in between, and it varied from player to player. Chip Reese and Doyle Brunson, with decades of success at high-stakes poker, could lose their share of the $10 million, dust themselves off, and keep going—
not happily, but not broken. Barry Greenstein, the big winner in the 2003 cash games, could probably rebuild pretty easily but he didn’t have millions of dollars he could lose without feeling the pain. His security, if you could call it that, was that plenty of people would stake him or loan him money so he could stay in action. Just a couple years earlier, in fact, a bad month of Chinese Poker against Ted Forrest cost him over a million dollars and put him in the red.
That was the more likely scenario for most of the other pros in the group. The combination of high-stakes poker, high-stakes lifestyles, and thin capitalization had many players worried. Had the size of the stakes rattled Jennifer and Todd? If Beal won the freeze-out, they all imagined they would reup, but they would have to scramble to come up with a million dollars apiece. And what if he won again? Even though the group was still ahead (by a little) for the trip, these were the thoughts going through the players’ minds. They were in uncharted territory.
When poker players joke about their profession, they sometimes say, “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.” No one knew that better than Doyle Brunson.
Despite the great highs of this lifestyle—playing games, making friends with unusual people, taking part in adventures around the world—he had not wanted this for his only son. It might seem like poker was a lot easier way to make a living than when Doyle was a young man, but Andy Beal had proven that wrong.
Doyle Brunson learned early about handling bad beats. Growing up in a small Texas town during the Depression, he ran everywhere. In high school, he set the state record for the mile run. At Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, he was an all-conference basketball player. The Minneapolis Lakers, the first powerhouse of the National Basketball Association, considered drafting him.
An industrial accident at a summer job broke his leg so severely that he spent two years with it in a cast. But Brunson had no place for pity or regret. He dedicated himself to finishing his education, getting his master’s degree, and preparing for a career as an educator. For competition, he would have to make do with golf, and maybe some poker.
Upon completing his education, he couldn’t find a decent job at a school. He took a sales job at Burroughs Corporation and put his dream of becoming a school principal on hold.
In a customer’s backroom poker game, he made a month’s wages in a few hours. When the door had closed on his athletic career, he found a way in education. When there was no opportunity there, he moved to sales. Was poker a door that had opened for him?
In the mid-1950s, there was no such job as professional poker player. Few people had ever been to Las Vegas, then little more than a dust bowl 300 miles from anywhere with Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo, some Old West-type casino-saloons downtown, and little else.
Brunson would later tell of people in his hometown of Longworth walking on the other side of the street to avoid him because he gambled for a living. Gambling was illegal and viewed as immoral. No one saw gamblers back then as independents living on their wits, or as outlaws surviving outside the system. They were hustlers, lowlifes, crooks.
They were also perpetually on the run. It would be a decade before Brunson would play poker in a place where the game was legal—and then he and his colleagues were cheated out of all their money. Until then, he was “chasing the white line,” driving around Texas to the places where insiders knew good games could be found.
Doyle Brunson had to be better than his competition to win, of course. Then he had to be savvy enough to avoid being cheated. He also had to stay ahead of the local law enforcement that tried to bust the game or shake him down. Finally, he had to get away with the money, because the circuit was at least as well known to thieves as to gamblers, and everyone involved knew the players carried a lot of cash and couldn’t go to the law to complain if they were robbed.
Dewey Tomko, younger than Doyle but a veteran of the road gambling days, said, “The kids today don’t know how easy they have it, just having a place where they can show up, sit down, and play.” (Tomko, like Brunson, was an educator-turned-gambler who channeled his competitive instincts into ultra-high-stakes golf betting. His exploits were chronicled as part of Rick Reilly’s book Who’s Your Caddy?)
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Doyle met the men who took poker out of Texas and moved it to Las Vegas—Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston, Brian “Sailor” Roberts, Johnny Moss, Bob Hooks, Jack “Treetops” Straus. He allied himself with Preston and Roberts, traveling the Texas circuit together for several years, until they went broke together on their first trip to Vegas in 1964.
During the 1960s, Brunson married, had children, miraculously defeated cancer, and increasingly traveled to Vegas. He became close friends with Jack Binion, who, with his brother Ted, assisted their father, Benny, in running Binion’s Horseshoe. He enjoyed the cycle of high-stakes golf during the day and high-stakes poker at night. The other regulars from Texas started migrating to this place whe
re they could ply their trade without breaking the law or becoming prey to thieves.
For Doyle, Las Vegas was a city of dreams. He was respected as a skilled professional. His friends included casino owners and power brokers. Wealthy and influential men around the world came to play games with him, or invited him to join them in exotic locales. He was able to provide luxury and security for his family.
But this would not be the life for his son. Even in the glittering playpens of Las Vegas, gambling was not a lifestyle he wanted to encourage. He still had to remain wary of cheaters or phony friends who worked their way into his world to siphon off money from loans or business scams.
Gamblers were always one bet from oblivion. Maybe Brunson had been an exception, far ahead of his peers in skill and blessed with a wife who imposed financial discipline sufficient to provide a layer of security. But it was a profession where you either moved up or fell back. If you fell back, it was because you went broke. If you moved up, you were putting more on the line to risk going broke.
Not for Todd, he thought. Doyle could admit that he was a sick gambler who thrived in this outrageous environment, but he was going to use his success to make things better for his children. He would buy his son a better destiny.
Todd Brunson divided his childhood between family homes in Las Vegas and El Paso. While future peers like Jennifer Harman and Howard Lederer sharpened their competitive instincts as children over family card games, Todd had no such experiences. Poker was not a family activity in the Brunson home. In high school, he played football and joined the debate team. He had a quick mind and liked to compete. He wanted to be a lawyer someday.
While Todd was at college, he started playing in a local card game. According to an interview he gave to Las Vegas Life, he lost the money his father gave him for college expenses. Too ashamed to admit this, he took a job in a local restaurant to pay for school—and poker.
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Page 19
