17.
The Comeback Kid
The months following passed in what Stuey himself described as a drug-addled haze. He survived, as usual, with the help of friends, who lent him money and gave him a place to stay when he was thrown out of hotels for nonpayment of rent. Eventually, he moved in with Don McNamee, whom he’d met and become friendly with in and around various poker rooms. McNamee was a strong, robust man of fifty, who’d moved to Las Vegas from the oil-rich town of Valdez, Alaska, a decade earlier. He himself had beaten nasty drug and alcohol problems, so he understood what Stuey was going through.
McNamee was a Teamster working in the convention business. With the money he made doing that work and playing poker semiprofessionally, he’d been able to buy a nice four-bedroom home away from the Strip. Stuey was welcome to use one of the bedrooms free of rent, provided he stayed clean.
“I was there for Stuey for one reason,” McNamee said. “I was his friend. I wasn’t his mother. I couldn’t look after him every second. But he was good company, and if I could help him in some way, I did it. He was an extraordinary person, without one bit of malice in his body—if you really got to know him, you saw and understood that. His main problem was that he always needed instant gratification. That was the whole deal with the drugs. Instant gratification. I’ll tell you a funny story that Stuey told me that really gives you some insight into that side of him. When he was back in New York, he decided he wanted to become a jockey. You know, he loved horse racing. Just loved it. And in New York in those days he didn’t have any trouble getting anything he wanted. So they [he and Victor Romano] go down to the racetrack, and he meets the trainer, and the guy hands him a shovel, and Stuey says, ‘What’s that for?’ and the trainer says, ‘Well, I gotta get you used to the horses.’ And Stuey says, ‘Fuck you. I just want to be a jockey.’He didn’t care that he’d never ridden a horse. He was fearless. ‘Just put me on the horse! Put me on the horse!’ That was Stuey. That was who he was. ‘Put me on the horse!’ ”
During one of Stuey’s worst drug binges, Madeline and Stefanie grew concerned because they hadn’t heard from him, so they took a trip to Vegas for a week, staying at the MGM Grand. After asking around, they were put in touch with Don McNamee. “He was a really good guy,” Madeline said. “He told Stefanie, ‘I am helping your father out and I want you to talk to him.’ So we did, we got together, but I could tell that Stuey was still far away. He wasn’t happy to see me. It was just like, ‘Oh, well.’ ”
The three of them had dinner together, and Madeline told Stuey that he couldn’t just disappear without a trace. She let him know in strong terms that he had a daughter to think of, and he hadn’t talked to her or seen her or paid any support. Stuey got defensive. It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to take care of his daughter; he just didn’t have any money. He even accused Madeline of wanting money from him for herself, not Stefanie.
It wasn’t the smoothest reunion, to say the least, but McNamee told Madeline and Stefanie to be patient with Stuey. He was doing better, give it time. At least they now had a way to contact him and stay in touch.
On St. Patrick’s Day, in March 1997, McNamee, who’d been doing all the cooking, decided that the time had come for his boarder to don the toque for a change. McNamee wanted traditional Irish corned beef and cabbage.
Stuey had never so much as boiled water, so he treated the challenge the way one might have expected—he freaked out.
“Stuey got more worked up than if he had bet fifty grand on a ball game,” his host said.
After McNamee told him what to do, Stuey put the beef into a pot of boiling water and covered it.
“What do I do now?” Stuey asked.
“Every twenty minutes, you check it to see how it’s doing.”
Five minutes later, the nervous chef asked if he should take a look.
“You just put it in, Stu.”
“But maybe it’s done. I better check it. You think I should check it? I’m going to check it.” This went on, with Stuey asking McNamee questions incessantly and running into the kitchen every couple of minutes to take a look.
When they finally sat down at the kitchen table, Stuey was thrilled with himself. “Is it good? Tell me, is it good? It’s pretty good, isn’t it?” He was desperate for approval, any kind of approval, even for something as trivial as boiling corned beef.
McNamee was sure Stuey was on the path to change, as if the adherence to the spartan lifestyle he’d set out was what Stuey had needed all along. “He was coming out of this self-destructive place to a place where life was going to make sense to him,” McNamee said.
In 1997, however, just before the World Series of Poker, Stuey moved out McNamee’s house, and McNamee lost contact with him. “It worried me,” McNamee said. “Because I knew that whenever Stuey started using again he didn’t want to be around me. At least initially. When he got really down and out and wanted to try and stop, well, then I’d get a call from him.”
At 7:30 in the morning on May 16, 1997, five hours before the world championship was to begin, Doc Earle was sitting in the coffee shop at Binion’s, finishing an early breakfast. He was surprised to see Stuey walk in. Gone were the fast gait and the manic enthusiasm that had always seemed to be such an essential part of Stuey’s persona. Just by looking at him, Earle could tell that he had been up all night, trying to raise a stake. Stuey looked strung-out and beat. He joined the doctor in his booth and immediately wolfed down two pieces of dry wheat toast that had been sitting on the edge of Earle’s plate.
“Stuey, you’re in no shape to enter this tournament,” Earle said. “Why don’t you pack it in and get some sleep?”
Stuey forced his eyes open wider, to seem better off than he looked.
“Doc, you gotta put me in the tournament. It’ll be the best money you ever spent. I’m in great shape. I know I don’t look it, but I’m ready.”
Earle didn’t have the $10,000 entry fee to spare, but Stuey was so adamant that he persuaded Earle to give him $600, which, added to the $500 he had already managed to scrounge from some other players, was enough to pay his way into one of the last single-table satellites.
Stuey grabbed the six $100 bills out of Earle’s hand gratefully, and raced out of the coffee shop, upstairs, and through a secret passageway that connected the old Horseshoe to the newer west side, at what used to be the Mint Hotel.
As he entered the poker room, a floor man was just calling a $1,050 buy-in satellite. “One seat left,” he announced. “Single-table ten-thousand-dollar satellite!”
Stuey raced over to the table and grabbed the last facedown card on the table, securing his seat. He handed over the money and sat down.
Earle had followed Stuey from the coffee shop, and he now pulled up a chair behind him to watch—and protect the $600 investment.
One by one, players were eliminated. Nearly an hour into the satellite, it was down to the last two survivors—Stuey and a player from Houston named Herman Zewalski. With a $10,000 seat in the World Series of Poker at stake, Stuey made a modest raise with A-Q. When Zewalski reraised all-in, Stuey immediately called. Zewalski’s jaw dropped. “You could see right away that Herman was dejected,” Earle said. “I knew Stuey had him beat.”
In fact, Zewalski was drawing to a three outer. He had Q-7, which meant that only one of the three sevens left in the deck could win for him.
The flop came without a seven. Stuey was two cards away from his seat in the World Series.
The turn was another blank. One more card to go.
Zewalski stood up, ready to shake Stuey’s hand and congratulate him.
And then it came, a seven on the river, like a spike through Stuey’s heart.
Oddly, he didn’t scream or swear, as one might have expected. He just stood up slowly and walked away without saying a word.
For most, that would have been the final blow. But there were twenty minutes still to go before the tournament started, twenty minutes to raise $10,000.
Stuey picked up the house phone and tried calling Billy Baxter. He let it ring and ring, but there was no answer. At last, he hung up, looking around the room frantically. Where was the guy? He knew Baxter was playing in the Big One. He’d seen Baxter win the seat the night before. So where the hell was he?
When a quick walk around the room failed to locate Baxter, Stuey headed toward the door and the harsh sunshine outside. Baxter had been his last hope. Just before he got to the exit, he passed another house phone and decided to try one last time.
Billy Baxter was on his way over to the Horseshoe, driving north on I-15, when he heard his cell phone ring. He fished it out of the well underneath the dashboard and pulled up the antenna with his teeth.
“Hallo,” Baxter shouted in his Georgia drawl.
“Billy, I been trying to find you everywhere.”
“Oh, hey there, Stuey,” Baxter answered guardedly.
“Billy, I can’t get into the tournament unless you put me in. You gotta put me in,” Stuey pleaded, seemingly oblivious of the fact that Baxter and everyone else had lost all faith in him.
There was a long pause, as Baxter considered the desperation in his friend’s voice and how he felt about it. “I knew Stuey was having problems and wasn’t in great shape,” Baxter said. “But he was always hard to say no to. It just seemed from his tone that he wanted to play in that tournament more than anything, and in the end I didn’t have the heart to tell him he couldn’t. What the hell—I done worse things with my money.”
A poker pro named Tommy Fisher was standing by the big board in the tournament area when Stuey’s name was added to the list, the last player registered in a field of 312, the largest in the World Series’ history. “That’s wasted money,” Fisher thought to himself.
Stuey certainly didn’t look like the same player who had once struck fear into anyone unlucky enough to be seated at his table. He was perilously gaunt, with his belt cinched tight. His bangs were ragged; his hair was salted with gray. His caved-in nose was partially hidden behind cobalt-blue sunglasses, the kind that John Lennon had worn in his post- Sgt. Pepper days.
Stuey took his seat, along with the rest of the players, at a few minutes before one o’clock. He hadn’t slept in nearly two days.
“I was looking across the room, and I could see Stuey,” said Doc Earle. “Every once in a while, he’d start falling off his chair, swaying to the left, then swaying to the right, his elbow slipping off his knee. He was nodding off in the middle of the tournament!”
When Baxter walked in and saw Stuey’s condition, he was furious. He leaned in close and hissed, “You son of a bitch, don’t you fall asleep!”
At the first break, Stuey bumped into Mike Sexton on his way to the restroom. “Mike, I don’t think I’m going to make it through this. I’m dying. I’m just not going to make it.”
“He wasn’t himself the first day,” Sexton remembered. “He just wasn’t totally there. But he got better and more comfortable as time went on.”
Though Stuey was playing with only a fraction of his abilities, his natural aggression and fearlessness still gave him a big advantage over the field. In the early stages of the tournament, almost everyone played tight. Stuey, on the other hand, seemed not to care if he went bust, and as a consequence he was able to double his chips by the first break, and then again soon after, simply by bullying the fainthearted out of pots. But he came precariously close to elimination during the fifth hour of play.
The first day was always the toughest part for me. Once I got my hands on fifty thousand in chips, going after the other three million was easy. That’s why I busted out early so many years. I never busted out in the middle. I was either out at the beginning or went on to win it.
The most important hand I played on day one was when I made O’Neil Longson lay down three sevens. I raised him on the river when the board paired the sevens. I bet out, he raised me holding a third seven in his hand, and I reraised enough to put him all-in. I knew what he had, but I also knew that he would lay that hand down if I raised him back. He’s got to give me credit for the full house. It was an impossible call to make. It wouldhave taken a kamikaze pilot to call with his hand. That was the key play for me. If I had lost that pot, I would have been down to twenty-five hundred and probably would have been knocked out of the tournament.
When you know what a guy has, he’s got to know that you know what he has. And when you reraise him, you freeze him. I mean, you completely fucking freeze him. That’s what great poker is all about. Taking a shit hand and outplaying somebody just by using your head.
The first day ended with Stuey at $41,175, seventh in chips among the seventy-seven remaining players. On Monday night, he went to a hotel room on the eighteenth floor of the Horseshoe that Baxter and Sexton had arranged for him. He didn’t say a word to anyone and went to bed around midnight.
He was up and out of the room the next morning by 9:00. Doc Earle was sitting in a booth in Binion’s coffee shop just as he had been the previous day. Twenty-four hours earlier, Stuey had looked terrible—eyelids drooping, a walking zombie. Now, he bounced into the place looking fresh and full of life. The doctor could hardly believe the transformation.
“He looked like a different person,” Earle said. “He was shaved and all cleaned up and he looked terrific. He sat down with me, ate a full breakfast that a lumberjack couldn’t have finished, and was just bubbling. Right then, I knew he was going to win it.”
“Goddamn, Stuey, what happened?” Earle asked.
“I’ll tell you, Doc, I got a full night’s sleep.”
“You what? How could you sleep? You’re right up there with the chip lead.”
“When my head hit the pillow, I was out.”
Most participants in the WSOP complain about fatigue. It’s not just the strain of the event, the energy required to sustain a high level of concentration over many hours and a number of days; it’s also the lack of sleep. Many players get so wired up that sleeping becomes nearly impossible. In their hotel rooms, they toss and turn in bed, replaying the key hands of the day, and thinking about calls they made or didn’t make, raises they should have made, and unlucky rivers that cost them precious chips. But somehow Stuey tuned it out and slept like a baby. He started the second day fresh and alert.
Play on Tuesday lasted ten long hours, and at the end of it, there were twenty-seven survivors who had made it into the money. Stuey was second in chips, with $232,000, behind a popular pro in Las Vegas, Ron “the Carolina Express” Stanley, who had $401,500. At the very least, Billy Baxter was guaranteed a small profit on his $10,000 investment. Day three would determine the six finalists who would play in front of the television cameras for the $1 million first prize.
On Wednesday morning, Stuey again joined Earle in Binion’s coffee shop. Earle watched his friend devour a Benny’s Special as they talked about the upcoming day. Stuey was excited and extremely confident. One of the topics they discussed was the reconfigured seating assignments that had Stuey sitting at the same table as his good friend and financial backer Billy Baxter. Remarkably, both men had made it into the money.
There have been instances of “soft-playing” and “chip dumping” in tournaments when two players with a shared financial interest are assigned to the same table; however, there is nothing to indicate that Baxter and Stuey did anything but play hard and square against each other.
Their table that day was arguably one of the toughest lineups ever assembled. “Stuey was on my right,” Baxter said. “Phil Hellmuth was on my left, and Doyle Brunson was straight across from me. Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson [who would go on to become world champion three years later, in 2000] was also at the table. One of these assassins would jam the pot full of chips and the next one would re-pop it. I was sitting there in the middle of it like I was watching a Ping-Pong match. I mean, you raised at your own risk. I got to watching Hellmuth and Stuey. Finally, Hellmuth quit raising. Stuey was driving him crazy coming over the top.”
Hellmuth would later say, “Stu’s very good at looking at a player and knowing what he has. That’s one of his strengths. I know because I personally bluffed off two hundred thousand to the guy during the tournament. In fact, my bluffing him so many times kept him going strong and knocked me out.”
Hellmuth, Ferguson, Brunson, and Baxter (who finished twenty-second) were all eliminated during the course of the day. And Hellmuth was right: Stuey was in top form, with his reads of his opponents as good as they had ever been. In one hand, for example, a player named David Roepke opened the betting for $20,000 with a suited K-10. Stuey called with a suited K-Q. The flop came 7-6-2 offsuit, and Roepke moved in with the rest of his chips, nearly $50,000. Stuey called in a flash, confident that Roepke had neither an ace nor a pair. The turn and the river failed to produce a ten, and Reopke was eliminated. “No other player at the table would have called in that spot,” Stuey bragged. “No one.”
By the day’s end, he had taken a commanding chip lead with $1,066,000 to Ron Stanley’s $694,000 and Bob Walker’s $612,000. The remaining three players—Mel Judah, a former hairdresser from London; Peter Bao, a $10- to $20-limit player; and John Strzemp, a recreational player who also happened to be the president of the Treasure Island casino—were all at $300,000 or below.
Gabe Kaplan, who was anchoring the telecast for ESPN that year, interviewed Stuey on the eve of the final. Kaplan had known Stuey for years, had played with him many times, and had obvious respect and affection for him, as Stuey did for Kaplan. Like everyone in the poker world, Kaplan was acutely aware of the rough times Stuey had been through, the problems that were still there, and the significance of his presence at the final table.
“How’s it feel, Stuey,” Kaplan asked, “leading the World Series of Poker going into the final day? Does it bring back a lot of memories?”
“Oh, it’s great, Gabe,” Stuey said. “It really is.” He appeared relaxed, with the camera and lights on him. “You know, I haven’t done well in this tournament since ’eighty-one, and I really forgot how great it is to be on TV, everybody shaking your hand and asking you how you’re doing.”
“Your life’s been like a roller-coaster ride, Stuey,” Kaplan continued, choosing his words carefully. “You’ve had some highs, some lows, some personal tragedies in your life. It must feel really good to get back in here and be competing, be in front, final day, World Series of Poker. What’s gonna be your strategy tomorrow?”
“I’m gonna be a little more disciplined,” Stuey said. “I’m not gonna tell you my strategy right now, but I’m gonna try and have half the chips and get down to heads-up with someone else—because I pretty much don’t think that anyone can beat me two-handed.”
Later that night, Billy Baxter and Mike Sexton visited Stuey in his hotel room upstairs at the Horseshoe. The memory of 1990, when Stuey had failed to show up for day three, was still vivid for Baxter, and he wasn’t taking any chances this time.
“Stuey, if you don’t show up tomorrow, I’m going to kill your ass,” he said, only half jokingly.
Stuey looked down and shuffled his feet a bit. The shame of 1990 was something he still felt. “Of course, I’m going to show up. Are you crazy?”
Baxter understood how fragile Stuey was, and how much he needed encouragement.
“Anyway, it’s over,” Baxter said.
“It’s over? What are you talking about?”
“Tomorrow. It’s all over. The rest of them—they’re playing for second place.”
The effect of Baxter’s words was more powerful than a hit of cocaine. Instantly, Stuey stood up and started bouncing around the room, like a boxer showing off his moves, as if fully realizing how close he was to doing something no other player in history had ever done—winning three world championships.
“I did that to get him psyched up,” Baxter said. “I knew that if I did that, letting him know how much confidence I had, it would elevate his mind to another level. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Local bookmakers had slated Stuey as the–140 favorite over the rest of the field, meaning that to win $100 on Stuey, one would have to bet $140. Incredible as it may seem, the oddsmakers were saying that Stuey was a favorite over the rest of the five players combined. That’s how much respect they had for his talents. Baxter told Stuey he was betting every penny he could on Stu, even at those odds, and Sexton said he was, too.
Sexton underscored the importance of Baxter’s remark and actions. “You have to appreciate the beauty of what Billy did for Stuey that night,” he said. “If you knew Stuey, you knew that would pump him up—that here’s a man willing to go out on a limb, and tell everybody that he’s laying every dollar he can on Stuey. I mean, Stuey was so fragile at the time; that comment was just the perfect boost to get him ready and keep him straight.”
On the fourth day, Stuey changed his daily ritual of meeting Earle in the coffee shop. Instead, he ordered from room service, not wanting any distractions. He didn’t arrive at the final table until just moments before play started.
For the first and only time in the history of the tournament, the final was played outside. Bleachers had been set up around the table under the giant canopy of the Fremont Street Experience, the multimillion-dollar overhead laser light show that the Downtown Association had built in the early 1990s in a futile attempt to compete with the casinos on the Strip. With misters spraying clouds of moisture in the air to humidify and cool the ninety-eight-degree desert heat and an ESPN crew filming with eight-camera coverage, the players took their seats.
Stuey wore a frayed green long-sleeved, button-down shirt and a pair of too-large faded blue jeans. He also had on the blue-tinted granny glasses that had become his trademark in the tournament. Ron Stanley wore a dramatic but impractical tailored black tuxedo, topped off with a baseball cap, which did not look like the wisest choice under the conditions. But it was difficult not to consider that Stuey Ungar, with twice as many chips, posed a bigger problem for Stanley than the nuclear heat.
You know what people get caught up in? The crowd. It’s the crowd that really gets to you at the final table. You hear that “Ohhhhh!” You hear everybody that’s talking, what they’re saying. Every sense you have is going a hundred miles an hour; you just pick up on everything. It gets into your head.
Some players get lost at the final table. I mean they don’t have a clue. Even some of the people that have won it.
I was dead broke at the time. But if I would have finished second, eventhough the money would have been good, I would have been in a state of depression you can’t imagine. I would have killed myself if I had lost that tournament. In my mind, I had no concept that I could lose. There was no question about it. I was going to win. You have to understand that there were a lot of people who were saying that Billy was crazy to put up the money to get me in the tournament. So I had something to prove. I think that motivated me more than anything.
Early on in the play, with the blinds at $5,000 and $10,000, Ron Stanley opened the betting for $35,000 from early position. Stuey called on the button, and John Strzemp called from one of the blinds. All three checked the dangerous-looking A-K-6 flop. The turn produced a seven, and this time, after Strzemp checked again, Stanley bet $45,000. Stuey thought for a while, then called, while Strzemp folded.
A three came on the river, and this time Stanley checked. Stuey’s call had clearly scared him.
Without wasting much time, Stuey cut off ten red $10,000 chips and slid them forward. Stanley, perhaps feeling the need to demonstrate at the beginning of the day that he wasn’t going to be pushed around, called with A-J. When Stuey showed him an ace and a queen, he sighed, nodded, and mucked his hand.
Phil Hellmuth, doing the commentary on ESPN along with Gabe Kaplan, was moved at that point to say, “I see this tournament as a battle for second place.”
Kaplan, however, was quick to point out that Hellmuth had made a similar pronouncement in a tournament where, from a chip position similar to Stuey’s, Hellmuth had ultimately finished third. “Let’s not award it to him yet,” Kaplan said. “There’s a lot of playing left yet.”
A round later, Stuey got involved in a hand with John Strzemp. An earlier all-in move by Strzemp had prompted Bob Walker, the victim of the raise, to comment that “it must be nice to have a job. You can play with no fear.” And it seemed to be true. Strzemp, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor Gary Busey, seemed to have some of Busey’s attitude at the table, too—which is to say that he was unpredictable and dangerous.
Now, on a flop of A-K-3, he checked. Stuey, as in the earlier hand, checked behind him. When a small spade came on the turn, putting two spades on the board, Strzemp bet out $45,000, and Stuey flat-called behind him. All this was very similar to the hand that Stuey had just played against Ron Stanley.
The river card was another low spade. Strzemp grimaced slightly, then bet $70,000. Stuey stacked and unstacked his chips, as he often did when weighing a move. Finally, he plucked seven red chips from a stack and flicked them into the pot.
Strzemp turned over a king and a ten of spades. The nut flush.
The crowd and the commentators murmured in surprise. Stuey himself seemed nonplussed.
Moments later the players reached a break, and as Stuey got up from the table, Gabe Kaplan collared him, calling him over to the broadcast table.
“Why did you make that call on the river?” Kaplan asked Stuey.
Stuey shrugged. “I knew he didn’t have an ace, and I didn’t think he got running spades. The guy could have been betting second pair and thinking it was good.” It was a weak rationalization for what had amounted to a misread, and Kaplan felt entitled to tease Stuey about it. “What do you know about poker, anyway?” Kaplan said.
Stuey shrugged again. “The guy’s an owner of a hotel,” he said, implying that Strzemp was the kind of player likely to have anything.
“Ahh, take a walk,” Kaplan ribbed him. “Go back to New York.”
Stuey’s main competition at the table still appeared to be Ron Stanley, who had recovered from the earlier hand against him, and built his stack up to a level at which he trailed by only a couple of hundred thousand.
Thirty-six hands into play, the two big stacks got involved in small blind–big blind confrontation, with Stuey having position on Stanley. Both players checked the flop of A-9-6, but when an eight of spades came on the turn, putting two spades on the board, Stanley bet $25,000.
Stuey again went into his stack-chopping routine, breaking the stacks down, shuffling chips between his long bony fingers, pondering, and finally raising $60,000. It was a semibluff. Stuey was holding Q-10. The eight on the turn had given him a gut-shot straight draw, nothing more. Most players would have folded in his spot and moved on to the next hand, but he had raised instead, putting Stanley to the test.
Gabe Kaplan discussed the hand with Phil Hellmuth as it was unfolding. “Having played a lot with Stuey,” he said, “I would say either he’s got the straight already, or he’s drawing to it.”
Stanley seemed to decide it was the latter and called the $60,000.
The final card, a king, made neither a straight nor a flush.
Stanley checked.
Now, Stuey bet $220,000.
“Stuey’s got either ten-seven, five-seven, ten-jack, or ten-queen,” Kaplan said. “One of those four hands.” Two of them were the nuts and second nuts, and two of them were air.
“If Ron Stanley were to call and lose this pot,” Hellmuth pointed out, “Stu would have an absolutely huge chip lead.”
Hellmuth’s remark divined the real power of Stuey’s bet. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Stuey understood that the size of Stanley’s stack would force him to the conclusion that calling and being wrong would be a disaster for him; whereas folding and being wrong would be only a serious mishap. You could see the gears spinning in Stanley’s mind. Something about Stuey’s bet smelled fishy, but in the end it was too risky a call. Stanley showed his 9-7—a pair of nines, in other words—and mucked. At this point, Stuey, turning the screw, flipped over his cards, revealing his bluff.
Both Stanley and the crowd were stunned as Stuey raked in the healthy pot, stacking his chips greedily.
A while later, Stanley opened up a hand for $35,000 with pocket kings, and was only too happy to call when John Strzemp moved in behind him. Strzemp turned over pocket tens, and when Mel Judah announced that he had folded a ten, Strzemp realized he was drawing to a one-outer.
The flop and the turn brought no help, but just as Strzemp’s day seemed to be leading him back to valet parking, a miraculous ten on the river had Stanley looking like a man in need of a good antacid.
Stanley’s horrendous luck in the hand with Strzemp, combined with his earlier mistake in laying down his nines against Stuey, caused him to come unglued. Not long after, he made a $60,000 bet on the button with J-8, and Strzemp (again!) called him from the big blind. On a flop of K-7-2, Strzemp, as he so frequently had in the tournament, led out with a bet, $80,000 this time; and Stanley moved in, over the top, for the rest of his chips, on what was a stone-cold bluff. His timing and his read could not have been worse. Strzemp had pocket aces. Adios, Ron Stanley.
Mel Judah was the next one out, overplaying a middle pair against Stuey, whom he mistakenly put on a draw. Suddenly John Strzemp was all that lay between Stuey and his third world championship.
Strzemp had about $900,000 to Stuey’s $2.1 million, a substantial deficit; but of all the players Stuey had faced on the day, Strzemp seemed to be the only one he had failed to figure out.
As was the long-standing tradition, when the tournament got down to the final two players, there was a break in the action so the money could be brought out from the Horseshoe’s vault. Several heavily armed security guards accompanied an executive who was carrying a cardboard Chiffon toilet paper box that now held $1 million in cash, in banded $10,000 bricks. It was typical no-frills Binion style to bring out the money that way—like Mike Tyson coming into the ring for the heavyweight championship wearing a towel with a hole cut in it instead of a fancy silk robe.
The money was stacked up at one end of the table, with the coveted gold bracelet laid on top like a glittering bow. Then, with the bounty in place, the combatants, who had stood up to stretch, took their seats once again, as did the spectators.
There was no slow build in the confrontation between Stuey and John Strzemp, no feeling out, no parrying and thrusting. As soon as the cards were back in play, they got into it.
The very first hand, Stuey raised Strzemp’s big blind $40,000, and Strzemp, now wearing a pair of corded reading glasses, quickly called.
The flop came A-3-5.
The desert wind had picked up as the afternoon had worn on, and the dealer laid a clear piece of Plexiglas atop the cards to keep them from blowing away. Strzemp examined the board for a moment, then bet out—as he had so many times when first to act. One hundred twenty thousand.
Stuey started his chip-riffling routine, peering at Strzemp over the tops of his blue lenses. Uncharacteristically, as he shuffled the chips, the slippery disks slid out of his fingers and spilled across the felt. Was it nerves? He picked them up and began shuffling them again, continuing to stare down the casino executive.
Finally, he made his decision.
“I raise,” he said. He moved five stacks of red chips toward the pot like a general deploying troops on a war map.
It was an $800,000 raise—all of Strzemp’s money, in other words. Strzemp wasted no time in contemplation. “I call,” he said. He flipped over his cards defiantly. An ace and an eight.
Stuey cocked his head, as if surprised, and turned up his own hand. An ace and a four. Once again, he’d misread the amateur. He was trailing and needed help.
The turn card was dealt. Another three, pairing the one onboard, meaning that if the final card was a six, seven, or eight, Strzemp would win the $1.8 million pot and take a three-to-two chip lead. If, on the other hand, the final card was a four or a deuce, Stuey would win the tournament.
Any other card would produce a tie and a split hand, keeping things going.
The blond female dealer thumped the table softly and turned the final card.
A deuce!
Stuey clapped his hands triumphantly. John Strzemp blinked at the board as if not, for a moment, wanting to accept what his own eyes were telling him.
The crowd began hollering and cheering. It was over. Stuey had done it. He was champion again, for the third time.
Fans and players alike jumped over the rail and mobbed the little man. The television cameramen pushed forward trying to reach him. When Gabe Kaplan pulled him aside, finally, for a wrap-up interview, Stuey was emotional. He showed Kaplan a picture of Stefanie. “I did it for her,” he said. “I called her up last night and she said to me, ‘Daddy, I’m going to disown you if you don’t win the tournament,’ and I said, ‘Stefanie, I love you too much for you to disown me. I’m going to win.’ ”
“Stuey, let me ask you a personal question,” Kaplan began, speaking loudly to be heard above the buzz, “and I think I know you well enough to ask you this question—”
“You do, Gabe, you do,” Stuey said.
“In nineteen-eighty and ’eighty-one, you won the world championship, but you weren’t smart with the money after that, your life didn’t go a hundred percent in the right course. Now you’re older, you’re wiser, you’re forty-three years old. You think you’re gonna do things differently?”
“Well, I hope so, Gabe. You know, I’ve neglected my kid. I’ve done a lot of stupid things to myself, but I want to tell you something for a fact: there’s nobody who ever beat me playing cards. The only one who ever beat me was myself, my bad habits. But when I get to playing the way I was, when I’m on stroke the way I was in this tournament, I really believe that no one can play with me.”
Just before the cameras broke away, Kaplan delivered his final comic dig to the man who had just won a cool million in cash: “Stu, you think I can get that three hundred you borrowed from me about six years ago?”
In fact, Stu still had the empty pockets he had arrived with five days earlier. The $1 million in cash had already been carried back to the vault. When such a large sum is won, Binion’s normally gives the winner a receipt for the money; after that, a cashier’s check is issued. Stuey was eager to split up the money with Baxter and take his share out the door in cash.
Jack Binion gave each of them a W-2 form to fill out, but just as he had done years earlier, Stuey ran into a snag when he was told that he needed valid identification, to be photocopied along with the completed forms, before he could receive his share of the prize money. He no longer had valid ID. Moreover, the problem couldn’t be resolved so quickly this time.
“I’ve got to have some walking-around money,” Stuey said.
“How much do you need?” Baxter asked, ready to give him what he needed from his share of the winnings.
“Fifty thousand.”
“Fifty thousand! For one night?” Baxter was incredulous. “How about five thousand?”
“No, I need fifty.”
On this momentous occasion, it seemed impossible to refuse Stuey. Baxter counted out five packets and handed them to Stuey, who somehow managed to stuff the money into the pockets of his jeans. The remainder of the cash was locked inside the vault to be collected a few days later when Stuey returned with identification.
That night, Binion’s held a catered banquet in Stuey’s honor out on Fremont Street, in an area that was roped off. The guests included local celebrities, other players, friends, and members of the press. Stuey showed up wearing the same clothes he had worn in the tournament. He grabbed a chicken drumstick from the buffet and sat down at a small café table with Jack Binion, devouring the chicken leg like a man who hadn’t eaten in days. Smacking his lips, gesturing wildly with the drumstick, and talking with his mouth full, Stuey hadn’t changed one bit.
Yet for all the satisfaction he took in winning, something was missing. There were hundreds of people around him, players with wives and girlfriends, and there was Stuey, alone, flashing his Warchaizer-made smile at Binion.
After thirty minutes, Stuey shuffled back into the casino, moving through the door without looking up, so as to avoid eye contact with anyone. He went upstairs to his room. Later that night, he went out, but no one knows where.
*Johnny Moss also “won” three, but the first one, in 1970, was by vote. The following year, 1971, the tournament adopted the competitive freeze-out format that has been used ever since.
*Stuey explained later that he wore the unusual glasses to conceal the damage to his nose, an aim which they seemed to accomplish.