On Wednesday, May 12, 2004, at 3:40 P.M., Andy Beal and Todd Brunson began the richest poker game of all time. How did Andy spend that day?
He started by wiring $15 million to the Bellagio. Then he went with Craig Singer to Binion’s Horseshoe and joined thousands of poker players who were trying to get a discount on the $10,000 buy-in for the main event by entering a $1,000 single-table satellite.
Andy entered three satellites and did not win a seat. He played well in the first one. By the second, he decided he did not like no-limit hold ’em. By the third, he remembered why he hated ring games. It was a tedious experience, mostly pursued out of curiosity. If he really wanted to play in the main event—which he did not—he would have to come up with the $10,000 buy-in out of his pocket.
The other negative aspect of the trip downtown was that he was recognized by many of the players mobbing the Horseshoe. It was like Mother Teresa in the streets of Calcutta. Andy soon found himself fielding requests to loan or stake strangers the buy-in to play in the World Series.
Ted Forrest was also at the Horseshoe on Wednesday morning. To punish himself for missing the Big Game, he decided to enter that day’s event, $1,500 buy-in no-limit hold ’em. It was a cattle call, with 834 players entering. Ted had decided to play more tournaments this year and was pleased with the decision, but he was playing this event only because he wanted to be someplace other than the Bellagio poker room. Watching the $100,000-$200,000 game and not being a part of it: That would be the real punishment.
Ironically, the one player Beal recognized did not recognize him. He saw Mike Laing, who had played him in his first games at the Bellagio more than three years earlier. Laing was not much changed: still gifted, still drinking, still erratic. He had been broke for a while, though he nearly made the final table of the main event in Tunica.
Andy had lost thirty pounds on the Atkins Diet and Laing didn’t recognize him. Andy reintroduced himself. Although flipping pennies for $2,000 might not make the top-ten list of bizarre poker stories involving Mike Laing, of course Mike remembered Andy Beal. Some of his friends still ribbed him about offering to loan a billionaire $10,000. Laing was flattered that Andy remembered him.
As if anyone could forget Mike Laing.
After Andy’s adventure at the Horseshoe, he attended a Las Vegas business meeting from 2:00 to 3:15. When he arrived back at the Bellagio, his $15 million was in the cage and Todd Brunson was ready to play. Andy signed for four racks of cranberries, $10 million in $25,000 chips. Brunson received $11.9 million in chips, but only two racks of cranberries. That was all the cranberries the Bellagio had. Security had also delivered Todd fourteen racks of flags, nearly $7 million. Stacked in a certain way, it would be almost the same amount as appeared in Andy Beal’s photo from December 2001.
But the flags weren’t for betting. Blinds would be $50,000 and $100,000—two chips and four chips. Bets would be four cranberries during the first two rounds, eight during the last two. If they bet with the $5,000 flags, it would be a twenty-flag-forty-flag game. They played with only the cranberries, and Todd could use the flags to buy back cranberries if he ran out.
If he ran out? Could he actually lose that much money in a poker game? He was not in favor of playing this high. Todd has said that it’s a horrible feeling, losing someone else’s money in a poker game. One member of the group told him, “If you lose, I’m going to kill myself.” Todd thought he was joking but wasn’t completely sure.
Later, Brunson described the encounter: “This is a guy who was battling a drug problem. I know he probably borrowed the money to get in the group because he’d been in the group before on his own money. I thought, that might actually happen. Then I got stuck $7 million.” (“Stuck” is poker-speak for losing. Nobody “wins” at poker, either. They “get winner.” Even a poker player who might have, without cards, become an English teacher, will say, “Doyle got winner for the third night in a row.”)
Actually Brunson started on top. After thirty minutes, he was ahead by $3-$4 million. In a loose heads-up game where nearly every hand was raised before the flop, just one bet after the flop meant that at least $500,000 would be riding on the hand.
They also played a lot of hands. Table One had an automatic shuffler but the dealer would manually shuffle the deck if a hand had concluded and the machine was still shuffling. (When Beal hosted heads-up games at his office, he would hire two dealers: one to deal, one to shuffle the second deck. He had previously asked the poker staff at the Bellagio about paying for another dealer to shuffle the second deck while the primary dealer dealt the cards. Management declined, citing a lack of approved policies and monitoring procedures.)
Over the next hour, Andy took control, erasing the deficit and winning several million dollars. At least twice, Todd Brunson had to slide two racks of white $5,000 chips across to Beal, who gave him two stacks of $25,000 cranberries. The banker got ahead by as much as $7 million.
Brunson would not give in. Trained—if not bred—to play without a thought about the millions he had pushed to Beal during the afternoon, he staged a late comeback. He erased the deficit and actually took a small lead. (Everybody connected with the game regarded Todd’s $1.1 million profit for the session as “small” at these stakes.)
At 9:45 P.M., Beal decided to call it a day. He was getting tired and he did not want to make the mistake he had made in the past of playing too long. He had Todd Brunson on the ropes, but he knew that Todd could crush him if he played too long and became careless.
Todd considered it a victory, more psychological than financial. “He thought he was really going to crush me. When I came back and finally won, he was real, real upset. He didn’t say goodbye or anything. It’s the only time I ever saw him do that.”
Despite having over $6 million of Andy Beal’s money, the pros were in trouble, more serious trouble than they dared admit. Who would play on the second day?
Lederer was banned. Todd Brunson was exhausted. Harman was too sick. Forrest didn’t make the team. Chau Giang?
Chau informed the group that he was going to play in the $5,000 buy-in Seven Card Stud Championship starting at noon on Thursday. He was playing more events in this year’s Series, mostly to answer his oldest son’s questions about how he could be a professional poker player if he didn’t appear on TV, and had won his third bracelet (and it would appear on ESPN during the summer).
Doyle Brunson wasn’t going to play Beal on Thursday. Apart from the physical demands of staying on top of the constant action of the 7:00 A.M. game, Doyle had gastric-bypass surgery several weeks before the World Series. Although he had lost weight, he felt terrible. Even worse, he was going through the longest losing period of his poker career. It was not the time for him to step up.
Barry Greenstein would take one for the team, but no one was nominating him. He had yet to beat Andy, and the players angry about having let Beal raise the stakes had already designated Greenstein as the scapegoat if it ended badly.
Phil Ivey wouldn’t play Andy Beal at these stakes. Whether it was because he had not played Andy and did not want to learn at $100,000-$200,000 or because he wanted to play in a side game or World Series event, he did not play Beal.
Chip Reese would play on Thursday morning. After Doyle Brunson, he was the oldest, most experienced, most respected, and the best guy-you’d-want-in-any-situation-if-your-life-depended-on-it poker player in the group, if not the world. He would also wake up and come to the Bellagio at 7:00 A.M., a secondary but not irrelevant qualification for the job.
They started Day Two of the biggest game of all time at Table One just after seven o’clock in the morning. Andy Beal sat in Seat Six. Like one of the Men in Black, everything about him was designed to leave no impression whatsoever. He wore a black baseball cap, black sunglasses, white dress shirt, and black slacks. He wore big headphones, listening to instrumental music. Craig sat in Seat Eight, in front of racks of flags and cranberries.
Chip Reese sat in Seat Thre
e. He wore a powder blue sweatshirt and sunglasses. Sunglasses? What would Reese think Beal could read by looking in his eyes? Andy couldn’t help but feel a little flattered that Chip thought that highly of his observational abilities.
Although Reese thought he had beaten Beal in most of their previous games, other members of the team remember it differently, as did Beal himself. In any event, Andy Beal was not intimidated by the prospect of facing Reese, despite Reese’s well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest poker players of all time.
Beal started ahead and stayed ahead. The area around the table became increasingly active throughout the morning. At the beginning, David Grey was the only other member of the group present. Not really sweating Chip, he sat at Table Seven, facing away from the game, eating breakfast. By eight, David was watching the game, periodically making and receiving phone calls. Everyone wanted updates, and often. Lee Salem also watched most of the morning, mostly sitting in Seat One, looking somber in a dark sport jacket and white collarless shirt.
Doyle Brunson materialized and then disappeared, a difficult feat for a man using a crutch or a motorized wheelchair to navigate the byzantine floor plan of the poker room.
After nine, Gabe Kaplan appeared, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Like Don King working both sides of the aisle at ringside, he sat between Beal and Craig Singer, then behind Craig, then behind Chip. As Reese’s losses mounted and Chip traded in more chips, the racks accumulated in front of Craig in Seat Eight.
At ten, Gus Hansen came to watch the game. Hansen showed up in a white T-shirt and what looked like boxer shorts or swim trunks. A lanky, wiry presence, he radiated manic energy, sitting at the table, walking around, talking on the phone. A house phone was mounted upstairs on a pillar near the rail. Hansen talked on the phone, twisting the cord around his hands, then his arms, then pacing and twirling the cord. He almost wrapped himself in it entirely and had to disentangle carefully, not missing any of the conversation.
Andy was obviously doing very well. The signs around the poker room indicated the result: more phone calls, more players paged, more players arriving, some clearly wearing little more than pajamas, Beal frequently selling Reese back stacks of cranberries recently lost, the long-faced and slumped posture of the pros.
Then, at 11:40 A.M., it was over. They broke for lunch.
Andy Beal had all the cranberries. He won $8 million from Chip Reese. For the trip, he was ahead only $2 million, but he had nearly cleaned out the supply of chips the pros had brought to the table less than five hours earlier. Being the biggest game in history, it was, not surprisingly, the biggest winning session in history, and he did it against one of the greatest poker players who ever lived.
Beal was in a hurry to leave the Bellagio. He had a lunch date with the guy who built it. He whispered some instructions to Craig, spoke briefly with a couple of employees from the poker room, then left. Craig spoke with some players and some of the poker room staff before he, too, left.
The players stayed behind to pick up the pieces, convening an ad hoc meeting at Table One.
Chip was done. He had other business and wanted someone else to play. Some of the players made oblique comments about how the game had gone. He later said that three members of the team critiqued his play. One said he played exactly right. The second said he played too aggressively. The third said he was not aggressive enough.
The players debated who would play Beal, who told them he would be back at 2:00 P.M. He made it clear that this would be his last day in Vegas, though he did not say how late he would play. As they criticized each other, Chip, and other potential players, Reese repeated his message from Monday night.
“What’s the big deal? Andy’s been here all this time and he’s never won. Let him take his win and we’ll take our loss and go on.”
No one else at the table wanted to do that. “Well, whatever everybody chooses to do is all right with me.” Then he left.
As the players continued their discussion and the group gradually broke up, nobody did anything with the $20 million in chips on the table. Andy and Craig had put the Lucite rack covers over his chips and some players in the group had put covers over what remained of their chips. Everyone just relied on security and the cameras to make sure the money stayed there.
Andy had lunch with Steve Wynn at Wynn’s office on the Strip. Beal Bank had been a large participant in a syndicated loan facility for his new casino. Andy had a great lunch and enjoyed Wynn’s hospitality. He had a chef in the office who prepared lunch and the men visited for a couple hours, talking mostly about Wynn’s plans for the new resort. Despite all the poker history made by these two giants of business—Wynn, over thirty years; Beal, over three years and, most significantly, over the last five hours—neither man brought up the subject of poker.
When Beal returned to the poker room from his lunch with Wynn, he was shocked to see a stranger in Chip Reese’s seat. The man was about his age, fit, with dark eyes, dark hair, and a dark complexion. He looked European or Middle Eastern. The man introduced himself as Hamid and drank what looked like cognac.
According to Beal, the rules did not allow substitutions. Craig, also back from lunch, encouraged Andy to take it up with Brunson, who was in the room. Doyle pointed out that they also agreed that either side could quit whenever they wanted. Chip wasn’t available and they wanted Hamid to play. If Andy didn’t like it, he could quit. Or if he stood on protocol, he could say they quit.
Andy didn’t want to quit. But who was this Hamid character?
Hamid Dastmalchi was a formidable presence at the poker table. He was the 1992 World Champion and a top high-stakes player, especially heads up. Although Hamid lived in San Diego, he had played all over the world since starting as a twelve-year-old in Iran. He smoked, drank, had a quick temper, and could play for days. He was Ted Forrest’s adversary in the famous 100-hour $600-$1,200 “death match” at the Mirage, the one that ended only when Hamid had to be taken off the property in an ambulance.
As the match was starting, David Grey reached Jennifer Harman at her doctor’s office with an update. “Hamid is going to play him.”
Jennifer was nonplussed. “Hamid? What is that about? I’m on my way. I’ll play him if I have to.”
Hamid played Beal from 2:00 to 4:30 P.M. For the first hour he won back $5 million, more than half the money lost by Chip in the morning session. He was also drinking heavily, ordering and consuming several Courvoisiers and Budweisers. This was not unusual for Hamid but some of the players watching were horrified. Beal and Singer thought it was a ruse. How could someone play the biggest game in history and drink like that?
Jennifer Harman came into the poker room and saw Dastmalchi with a glass in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. This is great, she thought. She watched the cocktail waitress bring him another round.
Beal regained control of the match. By 4:30 P.M. Andy had retaken the $5 million from Hamid.
Doyle Brunson knew they needed to make a change. He told Gus Hansen and Jennifer Harman that one of them had to take Dastmalchi’s place.
Gus said he was ready. “I feel good. I think I should play him.” It would be his first time playing against Beal, so he wanted to set a limit for himself. “If I lose $2 million,” he told Harman, “I’m done.”
As he sat at the table, he put aside $2 million in chips, four stacks of cranberries. When they were gone, he would be, too.
Hansen, like his predecessor, immediately took the lead on his amateur opponent, quickly winning $2 million. Hansen’s aggressive style, however, was not a good match against Beal. Gus was learning, like Ted Forrest, Howard Lederer, Jennifer Harman, and Todd Brunson before him, that you couldn’t bluff Andy, and countering his aggression with more aggression turned the match into a showdown, where the experienced pros traded skill for larger pots going to the player with the better cards. By 6:00 P.M., the Dane had lost the $2 million back to Beal, and bluffed off another $2 million as well.
Hansen go
t up from the seat. He reached his limit and wasn’t going to play anymore. Should Jennifer take over? She was so sick, from so many different causes, that she had to be the wrong choice. But it looked like she was the only choice.
Johnny Chan said, “Jennifer, go in. Just go in.”
She had less than an hour to play. The last flight before the red-eye from McCarran to DFW left at 8:15 P.M. Andy was taking his twin daughters camping on Friday, and he would not risk being late by missing that flight.
Practically debilitated from fever, high blood pressure, and kidney failure, Jennifer Harman still managed to win $5 million from Beal in a half-hour. He called for security to take away his chips; he had just a few more minutes to play.
When security arrived at 6:45 P.M., he told them he wanted to play a few more hands. That turned into five minutes, then another five minutes, then another five minutes, then just a few more hands. He realized as the scene unfolded that Jennifer might assume that he would play even more wild during the last few minutes.
Andy used this to make the most of a run of good cards. On one hand, he raised before the flop with ace-queen. (It was a natural raising hand, but in a heads-up game played in such an aggressive fashion, he could just as easily been playing king-seven the same way.) A queen and two low cards came on the flop. He could feel Harman looking at him, trying to look through him. He paused a moment, tilting his head slightly. It was a rare attempt to shift gears, from trying to give the pros no information, to giving out false information. He bet, but Harman may have taken that small movement as a signal that he was trying to make a play at the pot. She raised him back.
She was the one making the play and Andy won, pulling in a pile of cranberries. With plays like that, he erased the $5 million deficit, and then won another million and a half before finally turning over his chips to security.
He quickly counted the chips before signing the forms from the supervisor and racing to the airport. He had a total of $21.7 million in chips in front of him. For the day, he had won $11.7 million. For the two-day $100,000-$200,000 game, he was quitting ahead by over $10.6 million. Even subtracting his losses at $50,000-$100,000, he made nearly $6 million for the four days.
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Page 22
