Lederer knew what was coming but he was at a loss for words. He had just won more than $9 million from Andy, so there was no sense saying, “Sure you have, Andy.” But Beal was a talented poker player and an interesting guy. It wasn’t losing out on a financial opportunity that made Howard suddenly sad.
Andy continued. “I hope to see you again, but it won’t be across a poker table.”
And with that, Andy Beal retired from high-stakes poker.
He shook David Grey’s hand and said, “It was a real pleasure, but I’m not going to be back.”
Grey pumped Beal’s hand in return and replied, “I’m sorry to hear that, Andy. I’ll see you in two weeks.”
Epilogue
CAUGHT BY THE FISH
Could David Grey have been right? Would Andy Beal be back?
To Howard Lederer, it was inconceivable that anyone could quit poker. “We all know as poker players that we couldn’t breathe without poker, so how could you not play?”
Besides, the pros had heard it before. In December 2001, Beal told Chip Reese he was through with poker. He stayed away for sixteen months, but he eventually came back. He became disillusioned with the game a couple of times in 2003, but he still returned. How was this different?
A Las Vegas local who was friendly with Beal and had watched him play several times agreed. “Andy has it stuck in his head that he can figure out what it takes to beat these guys. He can’t give up. He’s hooked.”
Beal insisted during the summer of 2004 that he was through with poker. “I’m officially retired from the game. I accomplished everything I set out to do. It wasn’t about trying to win a certain amount. It was about experiencing it, and trying to adapt to the challenge. To continue requires a lot of effort and attention and, because I’ve already done it all, I don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t want to do it halfway.”
For Andy Beal, it was definitely not about the money. He could easily afford the eight-figure losses he had endured over the three years. When he walked away from the aerospace business in 2000, he had no trouble sleeping with an estimated loss of $200 million.
It was always unlikely that Beal would emerge an overall winner, and he recognized this. By continually raising the stakes, however, he improved his chances of recouping his losses and also increased the pressure on the pros. At $100,000-$200,000, they had trouble playing their best game. But they remedied this by refusing to play again at those stakes.
What, indeed, did he have to prove by playing $20,000-$40,000 or $30,000-$60,000?
In addition, even for a man who has always prided himself on keeping a full schedule, it was becoming too much. Though still young, healthy, and vital, it pained him to admit he no longer had the constitution of a crazy gambler.
“I learned that I’m getting old and lazy and complacent. Twenty-five years ago, when I was playing blackjack, I brought a lot more rigor.”
Nevertheless, Beal left the door open a crack. As he focused on what went wrong—regardless of whether he played again, his brain would continue trying to figure it out—he became convinced that many of his losses were not due to the pros’ superior skill, but his failure to manage himself. Because Andy never slept well in Vegas, he would play long hours and tire himself out. “I’d routinely win for the first day or two, then by the third day or so go downhill. Part of their edge is that I play too much, for too long. My tells show a little more, and I get tired more easily.”
Consequently, through another writer, Beal told the group he would play one more game if they came to Dallas and played only four hours per day. My first visit to Beal Bank coincided with the aftermath of this offer. Although Andy repeatedly told me he had retired from poker, he excused himself from the interview a few times to check for an e-mail from Jennifer Harman. Most of the players did not favor coming to Texas; he heard she was trying to organize a bankroll to come down to play.
He never heard back from her, or, for that matter, anyone from the group.
In fact, the players had reached an agreement to play Beal together or not at all. Within the group, however, everyone had a different opinion. Jennifer Harman wanted to get on a plane and play. Jennifer’s kidney transplant appeared successful. In less than two months, she was back at Table One and showing up on the tournament circuit, and playing well. She was itching for another shot at Andy Beal, “though it was actually kind of fun last time, being laid up in a hospital bed on morphine, making money.”
Ted Forrest didn’t care what the conditions were; they had the edge and should play. Ted was also back on his game. He was still commuting between L.A. and Las Vegas, with several trips back east during the summer, and loving it. (“I hear he’s playing in some private game somewhere in Europe,” a friend of his told me when I asked where I could find Forrest.)
“I can’t wait until they perfect cloning,” Ted joked to me. “I’d like to have one of me in every game.”
On the other hand, several in the group realized the advantage over Beal wasn’t very big. Maybe they should be careful about giving him everything he wanted. Ironically, Barry Greenstein, who was marked as the villain in May for taking that position, was part of the group not rushing to Dallas. Between the rapidly expanding tournament schedule, lucrative made-for-TV events, a charitable mission he and Phil Ivey took to Guyana, and playing in his regular profitable game, putting it all on hold to go to Dallas—possibly just to watch someone else play—held little appeal. “It’s not guaranteed that we’ll win. Andy’s a pretty good player.”
Earlier, Barry had told me, “When you play him, you’re probably, at best, a two-to-one favorite, maybe even less. If you counted just wins and losses, we’re probably ahead 57 percent to 43 percent or something like that. His losses have been bigger than his wins. When he’s losing, his game deteriorates. That’s something that’s not as likely to happen when we’re losing. Plus we have the advantage of putting in new players—fresh players, players with the most success against him or whose styles match up best. When you consider that we’re the best in the world and we have those other advantages, it’s pretty even. It’s not really clear that, on skill alone, we’re better than Andy.”
Doyle Brunson believed Andy Beal outnegotiated the players during his first May visit, and was not going to let that happen again. He knew that Beal was smart enough to want conditions in his favor, but attracted enough to the game that he might play when the conditions were not in his favor.
At the Bicycle Club in late August, I saw Brunson several times just before the start of the main event, a WPT tournament with a prize pool of over $3.3 million. Despite his cooperation in an earlier interview and having introduced me to Andy Beal, he seemed not to remember me. This was particularly odd because I had seen him at the Mirage poker room a few weeks earlier, in advance of its WPT tournament, and he was very friendly.
I thought, Doyle Brunson is losing his mind. Here he is, playing poker for hundreds of thousands of dollars a night, and he is not in possession of his mental faculties. He must be just giving his money away.
My assessment proved about as accurate as Custer’s about the Indians at Little Big Horn. Doyle spent the next four days plowing through the biggest field in World Poker Tour history, annihilating the final table and winning $1.2 million. I later heard from a couple of sources that Doyle was angry at another writer covering the Andy Beal game and figured the other writer’s actions were complicating the arrangements. Brunson’s mind is still stunningly accurate.
Because Beal never received a response to his offer, he continued to declare that he was finished with poker. Poker, however, was not finished with Andy Beal.
Word of the high-stakes games had been slowly leaking to the public since Andy’s first trip to the Bellagio poker room in February 2001. Because so many of the participants in the game had allowed themselves to be interviewed for this book—especially Andy Beal—the floodgates opened. No one, it seemed, wanted to miss an opportunity to talk about Andy Beal and the $1
00,000-$200,000 poker game.
Just four days after Todd Brunson played Beal in that game, he appeared in an instructional poker video produced by Michael Berk, the creator of Baywatch. The video was hosted by former Baywatch star and 2001 Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick. She introduced Brunson, along with fellow instructors David Sklansky and Mike Matusow, as follows:
“Todd Brunson has won eight major poker tournaments and recently played in the highest-stakes poker game in Las Vegas history, with one- and two-hundred-thousand dollar betting limits, and pots building up to two and three million dollars each. Now, that not only takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of poker skill. Todd, I heard you once won thirteen million dollars in one day . . .”
In September, the New York Daily News featured a story about the Table One players. Several players discussed their success against Beal. Todd Brunson was quoted as saying, “I’ve beaten him for $20 million, $20.5 million to be exact.” Chau Giang said that he once beat Beal for $6 million. Referring to Jennifer Harman, the article stated that “she has pleasant million-dollar memories, too.”
Andy Beal woke me up early in the morning after he saw the Daily News article, furious. Andy’s memory for the amounts of wins and losses for individual sessions was hazy, but the numbers were not, for the most part, inaccurate. (Todd Brunson and Jennifer Harman both told me about their individual sessions with Beal, and others confirmed their accounts. Giang, however, declined to be interviewed. Although I heard that he had both winning and losing sessions against Beal, Andy denied that Giang ever won $6 million in one session, and no one ever described such a session to me.)
Beal was, however, correct in his assessment that the comments provided an inaccurate summary of the poker games. The players did not, for example, mention that Beal won nearly $12 million in one day when the stakes were the highest, and he won half of it from Chip Reese, one of poker’s most respected and legendary players. “This makes it sound like I’m some kind of schmuck who lost a bunch of money and stopped playing because he lost so much.”
It particularly bothered him that the attitude portrayed in the article was inconsistent with their apparent refusal to play him in Dallas. If they really believe they’re so much better than me, he reasoned, why wouldn’t they take me up on my offer to come to Dallas to play me?
Fortunately for me, I wasn’t around Andy when he learned what Johnny Chan said about him in Cigar Aficionado. The October issue, featuring 2004 World Series Champion Greg Raymer on the cover, did mention that Beal beat Chip Reese for $6 million. But Chan refused to give Beal credit. “I guarantee you Andy got lucky on Chip. The deck ran cold [for Chip]. Andy started catching gut-shot straights and making flushes.” Although the article did not mention it, and Chan may not have mentioned it, he was not present while Reese and Beal played. He also denigrated Beal’s ability in general. “Let me put it this way,” Chan was quoted as saying, “you can’t bluff a sucker.”
Beal wanted to go public, an extraordinary step for someone so private, especially regarding something like poker. He asked my advice, though I begged off. I genuinely like Andy Beal but what was good for him here was the opposite of what was good for my book. I told him a complaining billionaire wasn’t likely to attract much sympathy, but the publicity would probably help me sell books.
I thought he might agree with my point about not expecting much public support until he asked, “What would you want to do if someone talked about you that way?”
His answer was contained in the next issue of Card Player magazine, dated October 8, 2004. A short article by the publisher, Barry Shulman, included a letter Beal asked Shulman to publish in the magazine, directed to sixteen of the players who had played Beal or been part of the group over the previous three years.
Beal started by pointing out that he won more than $10 million in the $100,000-$200,000 game, and that a majority of the sixteen players had overall losing records against him. He recognized that he was a net overall loser in the games, but “These stories have become like fisherman’s tales, in which the fish is always getting bigger every time the story is told.”
To illustrate that the matches were not as lopsided as some accounts made it appear, Beal asked the players to “put up or shut up.” “Come to Dallas and play me for four hours a day and I will play until one of us runs out of money or cries uncle. If your play is so great and your wins have been as large as you claim, you should have plenty of bankroll and be jumping at the chance to come and play another $100,000-$200,000 game and win a lot more money.” He said the players could choose locations, cards, and dealers, but, “You should provide a slate of any six or more of the above players and I will pick from your slate who plays.”
The players did not accept his offer in October or November. This proved the point he was trying to make, and which players like Barry Greenstein realized from the outset: If the pros were better than Andy, it was not by so much that they could afford to give up any of their advantages. He wasn’t some kind of sucker just begging to give his money away.
Doyle Brunson responded in the next issue of Card Player. He apologized for the fisherman’s tales, though implied the actual responsibility for them was “the way the media can distort anything they write about.” He proposed that the group play Beal, but on terms considerably more favorable to the pros: (1) Each side would raise $40 million; (2) stakes would be $30,000-$60,000, though if either side lost $20 million, it could raise the stakes to $50,000-$100,000; (3) the group would choose who would play and when; and (4) the game would take place in Las Vegas. Doyle said the first three points were nonnegotiable.
Through October and November, Beal and Brunson maintained contact. It would be unfair to characterize their talks as “negotiations” because Brunson wasn’t giving in on anything. In fact, he lowered the size of the buy-in from $40 million to $12.5 million. Andy Beal continued to listen—and continued to insist that he was done with poker.
In mid-November, the discussions took another twist that could be called bizarre for a game played for three years under poker’s version of omertà. Someone approached Doyle Brunson about paying for the TV rights to a heads-up rematch between the group and Andy Beal.
According to Beal, the amount was substantial, around $5-$10 million. He made an unusual proposal to Brunson: The loser gets the TV rights. His reasoning, though unconventional, was brilliant. “The rights will be more valuable if you lose. People will be a lot more interested in seeing me win than seeing me get beat up by the pros. And if you win, I’m going to bury the tapes and no one will ever see them.”
In the meantime, I got a chance to play poker against Andy Beal. I was surprised he accepted my challenge to play. Like the members of the group, I wouldn’t play him at stakes he considered high. We contested a nominal sum on my second visit to his office, a game of approximately five hours sandwiched between interview sessions.
I can’t say that Andy took the game as seriously as, say, the $100,000-$200,000 match against Chip Reese. On the other hand, he was clearly motivated to keep me from being able to write that I thumped him heads up. He certainly seemed to take it seriously. He hired two dealers, set up the vibrating timer in his sock, put the binder clip with the random-number-generator/
pocketwatch in front of him, and donned his sunglasses. A cigar store Indian would have been easier to read.
I started with the lead in our freeze-out, though it was simply because I picked up extremely good cards early. I had only rarely played heads up or outside a poker room. Although the conference room was large, the silence and intimacy of the surroundings gave me little to do during the play of the hands other than to stare at my opponent.
For a mediocre player, I am pretty good at reading my opponents. (Translation: I am a shade better than mediocre at it.) But there was no way to read Andy. What on earth were Howard Lederer, Todd Brunson, and Jennifer Harman finding when they looked across at Andy Beal? I saw nothing. But I kept staring.
Pro
bably because I have a good poker stare—I just imitate Howard Lederer—and enjoyed a nominal chip lead, Beal was a bit rattled.
“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me, like you’re seeing something.”
He walked to a nearby table where he had several pairs of sunglasses in a bag and changed into the giant Elvis sunglasses.
Andy became satisfied with the change in eyewear when he took over the chip lead. I found two things difficult to handle about the game. First, Beal was so aggressive that I made the same mistake almost every top player has made against him: I became more aggressive. If some of the world’s best players fell into the trap, I suppose I shouldn’t be ashamed, but I spent months learning about what worked and what didn’t against Beal, and for some reason I chose the latter.
Second, the level of focus necessary for such a game is significant. That Beal never spoke or moved made it even more difficult. During the last matches against him, both Howard Lederer and Todd Brunson brought their own music players and headphones.
As I continued to throw away chips on aggressive maneuvers, my mind wandered amid the silence. Keeping in mind that my opponent earned about a half-million dollars per day and was giving me a full day of his time—the second, in addition to numerous telephone interviews—I wanted to make the most of the time.
I started telling him stories from the book.
I told him about the four-day marathon match between Ted Forrest and Hamid Dastmalchi, which got us into a debate over whether Hamid was really pouring down cognacs and beers while he played $100,000-$200,000 hold ’em against Andy in May.
I won a couple big pots in a row.
“Okay,” Andy said, “that’s enough talking. Let’s just play.”
Ignoring his order, I mentioned the differences of opinion among the players about how they had individually fared against him. Although his recollection was generally not too good on particular sessions, he was surprised that Chip Reese claimed to have beaten him three of the five times they played.
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Page 24
