He kept playing and improving. His mother, Louise, handled the family’s investments and had purchased a rental home in Orange County, California. The tenant had moved out and she was concerned about the house being vacant. Todd offered to live there during the summer. He did not say that he would also play in the local card rooms. By this time he was beating the local college games and wanted to test himself against poker room competition.
After the summer, he stunned his parents by telling them that he wasn’t going back to school for his fourth year of college. He was going to play poker.
Louise Brunson was furious. But she couldn’t blame her husband. Doyle’s initial reaction was “I didn’t even know he knew how to play.”
Doyle was tremendously conflicted. On the one hand, Todd was an adult. He grew up in a loving, protected environment, but he was going to have to learn to make his own decisions, and this was one of them. On the other hand, his years of trying to save Todd from the hard parts of the gambling life had been in vain. Then, there was this hidden feeling of pride, which swelled when he saw Todd play and saw that he had a lot of talent.
Todd responded by asking his dad to share his wisdom. He had questions about all aspects of poker. He launched into a lengthy question, eager to be his father’s student.
Doyle lost interest before Todd even got to the question. He paid his friend Mike Caro, a collaborator on Super System who also wrote a leading poker text on reading opponents, to give Todd about ten hours of lessons. After that, when Todd had a question, Doyle would say, “Go ask Mike.”
Doyle never staked his son, either. Todd was going to have to learn for himself. Early on, Todd went broke many times in low-stakes games.
But he worked his way up, playing hold ’em in Las Vegas at every level, beating the game and moving up. If he got anything in poker from his father, it was inherited, not acquired. He did get his mother’s common sense and financial savvy. He avoided the traps to which most young, successful poker players fall prey: drugs, high-stakes casino gambling, women looking for a free ride, hangers-on trying to do the same. Instead, he squirreled away money in stocks and real estate.
It had been a much easier road to the top for Todd Brunson than for his father. If Andy Beal beat Todd for the remainder of the $10 million, it wouldn’t break either father or son. But this was still the hard part, the precarious life of the gambler. To get action, you have to give action. The unstated part of the equation, however, was that to give action, you could risk everything. If Andy Beal wasn’t making Todd risk everything, he was certainly leading him along that path.
If anyone had more of an aversion to waking up early than Jennifer Harman, it was Todd Brunson. While Jennifer liked to wake up at about noon, it was unusual for Todd to get out of bed before 4:00 P.M. To play Beal at 7:00 A.M.. felt like torture.
To keep himself awake, he drank as many cans of Red Bull as he could. Without having eaten anything, it felt like the caustic liquid was eating away at his stomach lining. The whole experience gave him an ulcer (or aggravated it if he already had one).
They played for about ten hours. Andy continued playing a solid game, but Todd started getting the better of it. Even though Beal felt he could tell when Todd was changing his style and adjust, Todd, too, proved adept at reading Andy’s changes in play. Over the course of the day, Brunson won back the money he and Jennifer had lost the day before, and then some.
By the next day, Todd was in agony from the pain in his stomach, but he was completely focused on poker. (Doyle Brunson is legendary for his retelling of the time Johnny Moss played for several days straight, and suffered a heart attack and was taken to the hospital. But he made it back to the game later that day. “It was only a mild heart attack.”)
Todd wore Andy Beal down, then maximized his return on Beal’s mistakes. He continued letting Andy be the aggressor. But when Andy overextended himself, the young pro trapped him and won a big pot. With his opponent playing less carefully, Todd was able to use the momentum on future hands. Having just gotten trapped for a bunch of chips, it was more difficult for Andy to remain aggressive in the face of Todd’s increased aggression. More important, Beal was sure that Todd was having an easier time reading when he was weak.
For the last couple million dollars, Andy felt he just gave his money away. It was as if he could play only perfectly or terribly. Once his game slipped, he felt completely exposed.
It happened so quickly on that second full day against Todd Brunson—the eleventh day of his trip—that he couldn’t look for an escape hatch. Andy had adopted the professionals’ indifference to the money, and it came back to haunt him. According to Todd, he won the group more than $13 million over two days.
Affording the loss was no problem, but Andy Beal valued his money much more than he demonstrated at the end of the freeze-out. He would fly commercial to save $20,000 on a private jet; that was a no-brainer. He would even fly coach to save $500. But he sat there with Todd Brunson, not doing what he trained himself to do, not having fun, and gave away the last of the $10 million in the freeze-out.
He was disgusted with himself. He had done the very thing he knew led to his defeat in the spring: allowed himself to be worn down by playing too much, then playing badly in that condition. He didn’t know whether he wanted to get away from poker forever or try again but without making such a stupid error.
10
THE BIG GAME
It’s like, oh goody. Now I get to be stressed all week. We just play so huge. We put so much at risk. But it’s exciting stress, too.
—Jennifer Harman Traniello
MAY 2004
In February 2004, an interviewer asked Barry Greenstein about Andy Beal. Word of the game had been slowly spreading through the poker community and into the public domain. John Smith, a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, wrote in December 2001 about Beal’s $5 million run and subsequent loss. Several Web sites devoted to poker news, rumors, and gossip occasionally mentioned when Andy was in town and what happened.
Greenstein was reluctant about going into detail. “It looks like he may have decided to pack it in.”
It had been four and a half months since Beal had left the Bellagio red-faced with anger at losing the $10 million freeze-out to Todd Brunson. What about the rumors he would return?
“It would be nice if Andy did come back,” Greenstein said. “He said $50,000-$100,000 was way too small, that $100,000-$200,000 would be next. Our bankroll is $10-$20 million. He wants to play a game so big that he can win that much.”
That Greenstein was even giving interviews signaled how much the poker landscape changed since Beal’s loss. Those changes probably affected no one as much as Barry Greenstein, who was fending off reporters almost daily. “Doyle gets this stuff all the time. At the table, we used to talk about girls or sports betting. Now it’s all about who’s interviewing you for what TV program.”
On January 29, 2004, Barry won the $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em Championship at the Fifth Jack Binion World Poker Open in Tunica, Mississippi. Greenstein had concluded that he was doing too well at poker to quit and get his Ph.D. He could change his mind someday, but even he regarded this as unlikely.
Medical research? That possibility was even more remote. If he was going to change the world, he would have to do it from the poker table.
That was why he went to Connecticut to play the World Poker Tour event at Foxwoods in November, to Tunica in January, and on a poker cruise later that spring. These were places he never would have gone without poker, and never would have gone even with poker if not for his commitment to donate his tournament proceeds to charity.
First prize was nearly $1.3 million, at the time one of the largest tournament poker prizes in history. After tipping the dealers, he gave it all away, mostly to Children, Inc., a charity that provided the necessities of life to children in twenty-one countries.
The Tunica finale was filmed as part of the second season of the World
Poker Tour and would air in May. The media in Mississippi (where the tournament was held), Chicago (where he grew up), and Los Angeles (where he lived), along with poker publications, jumped on the story.
Giving over $1 million to charity? (He had actually donated more than $2 million by this time.) It was so incongruous with the image of poker players that the story spread even before the Travel Channel ran the episode. Members of the media had already started calling Greenstein by the nickname given on the broadcast: the Robin Hood of Poker.
In the rush to make the forty-nine-year-old into an overnight sensation, Barry’s actual background took on the elements of myth. The basic facts were correct: brilliant math student, Ph.D. candidate, Symantec programmer, giving all his tournament money to charity.
Somehow, though, spinning that into a story led most people to believe that Greenstein was a wealthy computer programmer who lived off tens of millions of dollars of Symantec stock and that he took up tournament poker as a hobby. Tournament stars Paul Phillips and Phil Gordon had both retired young and wealthy from Internet-related companies, and people assumed Greenstein had simply done the same.
In fact, Greenstein had been in the opposite situation. He was a poker player who became a computer programmer and then returned to poker to earn a living. “Everybody thinks I made a fortune at Symantec. I was broke when I left Symantec.” He had only a fraction of the wealth of those other high-fliers who turned to poker as a hobby. It was a case where the truth was harder to believe, and more remarkable, than fiction.
The Tunica tournament had provided a glimpse of how big poker had become. Jack Binion started the World Poker Open at his Horseshoe Casino in Tunica as part of a plan to build a gaming company beyond the family-owned Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas. Although an uneasy public truce eventually followed the family fight that forced him out in 1998, most of the poker community was openly rooting for Jack’s success and could barely contain their enthusiasm whenever a negative story surfaced—regardless of its truth—about Becky Binion Behnen and her husband, Nick. For Jack Binion, living well was sufficient, if not the best, revenge. Harrah’s had agreed in September 2003 to purchase his company, Horseshoe Gaming, for over $1.4 billion.
The World Poker Open would never replace the World Series of Poker, but it was always well attended, especially by the Las Vegas pros. Jack Binion and his father were pioneers of poker in Las Vegas, and close friends with the Brunsons, Chip Reese, and Bobby Baldwin, the poker-playing president of the Bellagio.
Chip, Doyle, and a few other high-stakes players flew in a private jet with Baldwin to the tournament. This would be a reunion of several generations of poker elite. This also insured that the side action would be ultra-fast and ultra-high.
It also signaled a potential changing of the guard. Chip Reese, supposedly a big loser during the 2003 World Series side games, played in the World Poker Tour finale and made the final table. It was the first look that millions of new poker fans got of the legend. Reese never picked up good cards at the right time, however, and finished fourth. Barry Greenstein, the big winner in those 2003 side games, won the tournament and stole the show.
Barry and Phil Ivey also took down the money in the Tunica side games, with rumors swirling that Ivey won over $2.5 million. Only the players knew the actual amount, but it was clear that Ivey had a major league game to contend at the highest stakes.
The entire tournament was a poker lovefest. The event was so big that it needed two casinos, the Horseshoe and the Gold Strike, to contain it. The first hold ’em event, $500 buy-in limit hold ’em, drew 918 entries, the most ever for an event with a buy-in of $500 or more. That record lasted all of two days, when 950 players contested the first no-limit hold ’em event. In between the two hold ’em events, over 400 players turned out for an Omaha tournament. It was unheard of.
At the same time, unfortunately, the curtain came crashing down on the Behnen regime at Binion’s Horseshoe in Vegas. On January 13, 2004, U.S. marshals raided the casino, closing it down for nonpayment of taxes. The timing could not have been worse. With poker in the gold-rush mode, the place that did so much to support the game looked like it would miss out on the party.
Just as Binion’s was going through its death throes, poker rooms around Las Vegas sprang to life. The Mirage, which had struggled for years to rebuild its room after most of its business moved to its sister property, the Bellagio, had filled its room and was expanding, plowing under some adjoining keno space. In January 2004, the Mirage was short of dealers, cocktail waitresses, and even $1 chips.
The Palms, hosting a new cable program on the Bravo Channel, Celebrity Poker Showdown, had opened a poker room spreading middle-limit and no-limit games. The new owners of the Golden Nugget announced they were going to reopen their poker room during the World Series.
That was, assuming there would be a World Series. The Horseshoe shut down just three months before the Series was scheduled to start. By the end of January, Harrah’s had reached an agreement to take over the property and announced it would run the World Series at the Horseshoe on the original schedule, but no one knew what to expect. A month before the scheduled first event, the Horseshoe was still closed.
The Bellagio and the World Poker Tour threatened to marginalize the World Series of Poker. At the beginning of April, the Bellagio hosted its second Five-Star tournament, concluding with the World Poker Tour Championship.
The Five-Star started with a bang. Tournament director Jack McClelland had increased the minimum buy-in from $1,500 to $2,500. Despite the steeper price, entries for the first event rose from 203 to 361. It seemed nothing could stop the poker juggernaut.
And nothing could stop Howard Lederer. Lederer won that first event, along with $339,000 and a $25,000 entry into the tour championship. Two days later, his sister Annie won the third event, $2,500 buy-in limit hold ’em. Remarkably, it was the first major tournament win of her career.
On April 8 and 9, Ted Forrest won the $2,500 buy-in Seven Card Stud Hi/Lo event. Until recently, Ted Forrest had been thinking that maybe he “wasn’t allowed to win.” Traveling weekly to Larry Flynt’s stud game at the Hustler, he had lost twenty out of twenty-two sessions. Barry Greenstein and Phil Ivey had been cleaning up in that game, and Flynt himself was a recent big winner. At the same time, Ted had lost over $2 million away from the poker table, in a combination of bad business deals, bad craps habits, and staking the wrong people.
Despite the high-stakes losses and other money drains, he had somehow kept afloat. He was regularly winning in lower-stakes games, paying off the winners at the Hustler, the casinos, and the players he was staking. He kept dedicating himself to the belief that his game would come around, his luck would change, and he could plug some of his leaks. He gradually cleaned up his business affairs, stopped staking other players, and imposed limits on his gambling in the pits. The tournament win was a sign that maybe his luck had changed.
On April 10, Howard Lederer threatened to turn the Five-Star into his family bank, finishing near the lead with twelve players left in the $5,000 buy-in no-limit hold ’em event. At 1:54 A.M. on April 11, Easter Sunday, however, the Bellagio lost all but emergency backup power. Over 2,000 guests had to be relocated to other MGM Mirage properties, and the next four days’ tournament events had to be canceled. The twelve players received the remaining prize money in proportion to their chip position.
It seemed only a power outage could stop him. Two days after power was restored, the Bellagio ran the $5,000 buy-in Pot Limit Omaha event. Howard won this time, taking the first prize of $139,000. Although he went out on the third day of the WPT Championship, the Five-Star was a tremendous display of Lederer’s tournament prowess.
He had become such a dominant tournament player that he had practically given up playing cash games, reversing the course of most top pros. In addition, he was capitalizing on his decision almost two years earlier to become part of televised tournament poker. Apart from the tournament suc
cess, he received offers to do color commentary on poker tournaments for Fox SportsNet. He also released the first of a series of instructional poker DVDs.
Finally, he had taken a significant role, both in development and marketing, for an online poker site called FullTiltPoker.com. In addition to Lederer, the site hired other well-known pros, including Phil Ivey, Erick Lindgren, Erik Seidel, Phil Gordon, and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson. Full Tilt was a late arrival in an increasingly crowded field, but its top-notch roster of playing professionals and marketing campaign gave it a shot.
Lederer and Forrest were not the only high-stakes pros to shine during the Five-Star. Barry Greenstein played in the tournament—he would stay at the Bellagio from the beginning of April to the end of May, leaving only during the outage and to make a few trips back to L.A.—and won the first event after power was restored.
His victory in the $2,500 buy-in no-limit hold ’em event was one of the most bizarre in the history of tournament poker. Barry started at the final table by playing in two tournaments at the same time. Late on April 5, play broke with him in tenth place in the $2,500 event and very low on chips. At noon on April 6, three hours before he would play at the final table—and be expected to make a quick exit—he entered the $5,000 buy-in Pot Limit Omaha event.
At three o’clock, he was leading in the $5,000 event. He walked across the tournament area to the final table of the $2,500 event and went all-in on his first hand, ten-nine. After a flop of king-seven-six, he made a miracle inside straight on the turn with an eight. Later, he tried to steal the blinds by going all-in with seven-deuce, regarded as the worst hand in poker. He was called by a pair of jacks. Jack-jack vs. seven-deuce? A seven came on the flop, and the turn and river cards were both deuces, making him a winning full house. Barry won $215,000, half of which he donated to Children, Inc., and the other half to Keep Memory Alive, an Alzheimer’s charity supported by Bobby Baldwin.
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Page 20
