7.
Both Ends Against the Middle
Stuey arrived in Southern California in July 1978, scared and broke. To this day, there remains some mystery as to how he financed his journey westward, but there’s no mystery about his reasons for leaving New York. He was terrified that some physical retribution would be meted out for his failure to make good on his debts, and California was as far away from New York as he could go. There was another reason he chose Los Angeles as a place to take it on the lam: he had heard talk of big-time gin action there, at the Cavendish West Bridge Club downtown and at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. These two private establishments attracted movie moguls and wealthy socialites who liked playing for high stakes in a relaxed clubby atmosphere.
Stuey bought a cheap used car so that he could get around, and he found a place to stay in a weekly motel across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack, in Arcadia, twenty miles east of L.A. For the next few months, he bounced back and forth between the Cavendish, the Friars, and the local racetracks in a $300 shit box with a knocking engine. Southern California’s elite social clubs were an odd venue for the wired-up bookie’s son from the Lower East Side—he didn’t exactly fit in with his well-heeled martini-sipping hosts—but one can presume that they viewed him as a novelty. Then, too, there were rumors that Stuey was the much-ballyhooed “Kid” from the east whom they’d heard about, and the notion that there was a card savant in their midst inspired a few high rollers to test their skill against him.
How Stuey financed himself is, again, a matter of speculation. It’s likely that either Romano or Philly wired him the money to play. As always, whatever he managed to win at gin then vanished through the betting windows at Santa Anita. Given Stuey’s background and obvious knowledge of the way things worked in the New York underworld, it’s hard to imagine how and why he thought he could escape requital for his debts. It is probable that Victor or Philly impressed this point upon him.
Eventually, what they were telling him appeared to penetrate, and Stuey was reassured that as long as he agreed to work off his debt, no revenge would be taken. Not that he had much choice. It was either play the game according to their rules or be on the lam from Tieri for the rest of his life. Sixty-five grand was too big a number to forgive or forget. An arrangement was reached whereby he’d play cards and pay out all his winnings minus a strict weekly $450 allowance.
At the Cavendish West, Stuey had been introduced to the concept of the gin tournament, and when he learned that the tournaments with the biggest prizes were held in Las Vegas, he decided, now that he could emerge from hiding, to take another trip to the bright lights of Nevada. His very first gin tournament was at the Maxim Hotel, a nondescript mid-rise (since replaced by the Westin) just east of the Strip on Flamingo Boulevard. The entry fee was $1,500. First prize was $50,000. The tournament began with more than one hundred top gin players from all over the world. Three days later, Stuey was the champion.
He’d found the perfect setup, the one venue where he could compete in a game he ruled without giving away spots or handicaps. On a level playing field, Stuey was a man among boys. The problem was that he was reluctant to use his windfall to pay back his debt, which even the $50,000 first prize wouldn’t completely cover.
Word of his victory got back to his chit holder, Tieri, who immediately dispatched one of his associates in Vegas to have a talk with the boy genius. Before Tieri’s goon could catch up to him, however, Stuey had returned to Los Angeles and dropped out of sight again. Needless to say, such antics did not amuse the mobster.
Stuey next surfaced three months later, at another gin tournament in Las Vegas (this time at the Riviera Casino), and this time Tieri had his ear to the ground a bit sooner. After Stuey blitzed through the field and made it to the finals, he and his remaining adversary stopped for a dinner break. As Stuey made his way into the nearest restroom, two men followed him.*
One of the two men was Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, Las Vegas’s most notorious mob killer, who had once placed a man’s head in a vise and tightened it until the victim’s eyeballs popped out of their sockets (a scene Martin Scorsese immortalized in the movie Casino). Though Spilotro would get his just deserts in the end (he was bludgeoned to death with baseball bats in an Iowa cornfield), it’s safe to say that while he was alive, Spilotro was not someone you wanted to meet in a bathroom alone.
Spilotro demanded that Stuey pay the money he owed Tiero, and was not happy when Stuey explained that he didn’t have any money left, that he had borrowed money to enter the tournament.
“How much is first prize?”
“Fifty thousand.”
Spilotro’s associate grabbed Stuey by the collar and shoved him up against the paper towel dispenser.
“Then you better fucking win.”
The two men exited the restroom, leaving behind a very rattled Stuey staring at his ghost-white face in the mirror over the row of sinks.*
Stuey’s opponent knew nothing of what had taken place in the men’s room during the break. With Spilotro and his goon looking on, the final game of the tournament was played. It was a tense, unpleasant experience for Stuey, but somehow he managed to win.
Afterward, while he was shaking hands and getting his picture taken by photographers from the local papers, the two hoods stood off to the side, waiting with their arms folded.
Never one to accept a cashier’s check or a bank draft, Stuey went to the cage to collect his winnings in cash. Spilotro and his sidekick stood right beside him as the cashier counted out the money.
“Aren’t you going to let me have anything?” Stuey pleaded.
“This doesn’t even cover the sixty-five you owe. You’re lucky to be breathing.” And with that, the two men pocketed the cash and left.
Despite this setback, Stuey’s successive wins at the Maxim and the Riviera convinced him that he had a permanent home in Las Vegas. New York and Los Angeles simply couldn’t compete in terms of gambling opportunities. For the next several months, he took up residence in different hotel rooms, a short elevator ride away from the action.
Philly flew out for a visit, determined to persuade Stuey to approach gin as a business. “If you take this seriously,” he said, “you will be a millionaire.”
A month later, Stuey entered another gin tournament, this time at the Aladdin. He made it down to the final two players, a point at which it was not uncommon for players to make a deal to hedge the difference between first- and second-place prize money—in this case $50,000 and $25,000. Stuey, however, was not interested in hedging. He wanted to win outright and take down the money.
There was this guy. His name was Gus. They said he had won six major gin tournaments. He leaned over and looked at me straight and said, “What kind of deal do you want to make?”
“What do I want to do?”
“Yeah. What do you want to do?”
“How’s this: let’s play the match winner take all. Let’s put both first- and second-place money into the pot and let’s play for the whole fucking thing!”
When I said that, it completely shattered him.
They would announce the scores—“Stu Ungar 112–0, Stu Ungar 114–37, Stu Ungar 105–81.” Yeah, sure, right. I’m going to chop the prize money with a guy who ain’t got a chance in hell of beating me. It was like a joke to me.
From early 1978 through the end of 1979, Stuey entered five gin tournaments and won three of them. At the two events he didn’t win, he placed in the top four, and in one of those two, at the Union Plaza, his defeat did not come at the hands of another player; he simply failed to show up for the second day of the tournament. “I guess something better came along,” Glenn Abney remarked.
When Stuey did show up at the Riviera to defend his title in the fall of 1979, as he was standing at the registration desk, waiting to pay his $1,500 entry fee, tournament officials pulled him aside.
They told me that they didn’t want me to play. The excuse they used was that people were not entering the tournament because when I played they didn’t have a chance. I could see that the other players didn’t like having me there.
It certainly didn’t help Stuey’s cause that he was an obnoxious winner and a poor sport. He had proved to be too good and too irksome for the rest of the field to handle, so they took their ball and went home. The ban would be the last card off the deck in Stuey’s career at gin. It was clear that if he planned on making a living as a professional gambler, he was going to have to find a new game. Poker seemed the most obvious choice.
In those days the poker rooms of Las Vegas were snake pits of hustlers and cheats. Players colluded, shot angles, kited chips from the pot, held out cards, and were constantly on the lookout for a mark.
The biggest games were played at the Silverbird, the Dunes, and the Golden Nugget—all of them hotbeds of cheating, among both the players and the management. By far the most corrupt room, however, was the Stardust. One newly hired dealer there noticed that the backs of some of the cards he was dealing were marked. Mindful not to upset the game on his very first day on the job, he approached a floor supervisor during a break.
“You’re not going to believe this, but the deck on table four is shaded.”
Without skipping a beat, the floor man shot back, “Don’t worry about it. Just keep dealing. You’ll get your share.”
At poker tables nowadays, there is a clearly visible money-slot in the table so that the players can watch the dealer as he drops the rake (the standard house take is a maximum of 10 percent of each pot up to $5). But in the early days in Vegas, dealers pretty much took whatever they wanted, and any player who complained was instructed to read a small sign posted in every card room alerting players that the house could take up to 50 percent of each pot. Although few dealers actually took the 50 percent, some of them probably came close. As a result, the smaller games, in particular, were practically unbeatable. One dealer at the Stardust allegedly set the record for “snatching,” as the practice was called. He snatched $800 in a single hour at a $3–$6 game—the equivalent of taking just about every chip off the table, based on the players’ average buy-in.
High-limit players were exempt from these kinds of house shenanigans. Card room managers were well aware that pros wouldn’t tolerate snatching. There was enough shady activity among the players without an additional cut for the house (beyond what it already got for looking the other way).
News that cheating was tolerated, if not tacitly encouraged, by the casino would have been devastating if the public knew the truth. The Nevada Gaming Board (NGB), which oversees all casino gambling in the state of Nevada, would have been none too pleased, either, if it had found out—although there have been suggestions that the NGB in its early days was nothing but a rubber stamp, approving whatever the casinos wanted.
Many poker pros figured that if a sucker got hustled, it was simply part of the edge he was giving away by sitting down with them. Some people were just too dense to see that they were being duped. The Las Vegas poker scene in the 1970s was an embodiment of Darwinism dressed in the silk shirts and gold chains of the disco age. The most successful pros in the biggest games lived off the Hollywood people, drug dealers, and criminals who wandered into the room from elsewhere in the casino looking for a little extra-special thrill.
One of the most notorious high-limit poker players of that era was the cocaine kingpin Jamiel “Jimmy” Chagra of Texas, who went through millions of dollars of illegal drug money at the tables. While awaiting trial for murder in Texas, Chagra came to Las Vegas for one last hurrah. On the trip, Chagra is reported to have played golf for half a million dollars a round. He once tipped a cocktail waitress $10,000 for bringing him a bottle of water. Although he beat the murder rap, he was still sentenced to thirty years at Leavenworth on related charges.
Other high rollers included Larry Flynt, founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, who had enough money to play in any poker game, no matter how high the stakes, and favored seven-card stud, a game at which he has since become formidable; Gabe Kaplan, star of what was then the hottest show on television, Welcome Back, Kotter; Ron Stanley, one of the stars of the hit movie Deliverance (1972); the Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss; and Telly Savalas of Kojak. It’s safe to say that what attracted men like this to poker was partly its democratic nature, the fact that they were not afforded special privileges or rules—they were treated just like everyone else. What could get their competitive juices going more than having their celebrity status rendered superfluous?
There were high-stakes games at several casinos in Las Vegas, but no room had higher action than the Dunes, a mob-run casino at the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Boulevard, where the Bellagio now stands. The poker room at the Dunes was owned by Syd Wyman and run by the poker legend Johnny Moss, a three-time champion at the World Series of Poker, who was known as the “grand old man of poker.” Casinos normally contracted out their poker room operation, which was primarily a loss leader—its profitability came from bringing high rollers into the casino, in the hope that they’d dump their poker winnings in the pits later on. The Dunes spread $300 to $600 or $400 to $800 almost every night, limits at which a single hand of stud could cost a player $3,000 to $5,000.
The regulars in these games, who waited patiently for the fish to come feed them, were men such as Sarge Ferris, Puggy Pearson, Bryan “Sailor” Roberts, Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim Preston, and Bobby Hoff. Most of them had been playing their entire lives and were then in their forties or fifties. Some were in their sixties and seventies. They viewed anyone under the age of forty as fresh meat. Beyond the generation gap, there was also a geographical gap. The old guard was made up mostly of southerners and Texans, who had transplanted themselves in Vegas because the games were better—and legal to boot. These old Texans played in the biggest games and always got all the money. In fact, during the first eight years of the World Series of Poker, from 1970 to 1977, a native Texan won the main event six times. The two exceptions were 1972, when it was won by Amarillo Slim, who had been born in Arkansas; and 1973, when Puggy Pearson, who was born in Kentucky, outlasted the Texans Johnny Moss and Jack “Treetop” Straus. It was a tightly knit circle that didn’t embrace strangers warmly.
Danny Robison and Chip Reese were the first players to challenge the old guard. Natives of Dayton, Ohio, they stopped off in Vegas in 1974 for a weekend while on their way to California. Reese, a graduate of Dartmouth, was on his way to Stanford Law School. The first night, he turned the $200 in his pocket into $800, playing $10–$20 seven-card stud. By the end of the weekend he was up a couple of thousand and law school was on hold. Now, just a few years later, he was a millionaire, bumping heads with the best players in the world. Of course, most of those who were brave enough or dumb enough to try to beat the poker icons were fleeced and left busted—and there was always an empty chair in the big game waiting for the next guy who wanted to try his luck.
Reese and Robison had spent thousands of hours playing at the lower limits, honing their skills, before they stepped up to the big time, and it took many tough wins against the old guard before they were able to earn respect.
“At first we treated them like stepchildren,” Amarillo Slim recalled. “I remember Doyle Brunson one night at the Horseshoe. He had Danny Robison on one table and would spin around in his chair and play Chip Reese on the other. He was playin’ both of ’em heads-up at the same time! When I first saw them boys I thought they was soft as butter, but I come to find out they weren’t. No, sir!”
While Robison and Reese were making names for themselves in poker, Stuey was finding it harder and harder to rustle up a gin game. His finances, however, took a dramatic turn for the better, as he went on a monster roll betting on sports in the latter half of 1979 that not only allowed him to pay off his debt to Tieri, but also swelled his bankroll to over $1 million. In his own classic fashion, he kept the money all in cash, in a safe-deposit box at the Dunes.
The fact was that Stuey didn’t even know how a real bank worked. When a friend told him about interest-bearing accounts and banking hours (this was before the advent of ATMs), he remarked, “You’ve got to be kidding! What if I need fifty grand at midnight? What—I have to wait till they open up the next morning? What kind of person would put up with that, where they can’t get their money when they need it?”
The money from betting on sports gave Stuey the kind of bankroll he needed to play in high-limit poker games. At the same time, he found a mentor: Chip Reese agreed to teach Stuey what he knew about seven-card stud if Stuey would teach him the finer points of gin. Reese had been intrigued by Stuey ever since Stuey had crushed Reese’s pal Danny Robison for $100,000 playing gin during his first trip to Vegas five years earlier. Reese and Stuey, who were roughly the same age, developed an alliance and a friendship built on mutual respect. Stuey had played seven-card stud, of course—just as Reese had played gin—but each of them was eager to add to his knowledge, and who better to learn from than a master of the game?
In the beginning, Reese wanted Stuey to go to the Sahara and play $30–$60 stud to gain some experience. But Stuey wasn’t interested in honing his skills at the lower limits. Grinding out $50 an hour seemed to him too much like work. Instead, he immediately sat down in the toughest $300–$600 stud games he could find, an approach that for even the most skilled gambler would usually mean financial suicide.
Under Reese’s tutelage, Stuey picked up nuances of the game at lightning speed. He also learned from watching other players. Danny Robison, who reportedly won more money playing seven-card stud than any other player alive, had a deep impact on Stuey. Robison was always the biggest talker in the game. While other players were quietly contemplating big-money decisions, Robison would gab away nonstop, acting for all the world as if he were in a penny-ante coffee-klatch game. His ceaseless chatter unnerved many opponents and sometimes got them to call an extra bet or two in the vain hope that if they managed to put a bad beat on him he would shut up. This rarely worked.
One player recalled Robison playing a hand of stud while he was telling a joke. As Robison built up to the punch line, his opponent caught a miracle card at the end that resulted in a loss of several thousand dollars for Robison. Without flinching, Robison delivered the joke’s payoff. And as the huge pot was pushed in the direction of his opponent, he smiled to acknowledge the laughter and guffaws.
Stuey was so impressed that he tried to model himself after Robison. Of course, Stuey himself had always been a talker at the table, but his style was much less ingratiating. He was a taunter and a braggart—a needler. That may have been an effective way of getting under people’s skin, but more than anything else, it helped him to cope with one of his biggest problems at the poker table—boredom.
As Billy Baxter, one of Las Vegas’s savviest gamblers, once said, “Poker is a waiting game.” Baxter, who wound up backing Stuey in many tournaments but whose biggest contribution to gambling was undoubtedly the landmark legal case he won against the Internal Revenue Service in 1985 that established gambling as a legitimate profession subject to the same tax statutes as other professions,* was so patient in his approach to the game that he’d “sometimes wait fifteen hours for the right moment to come up.”
Stuey might have been able to control his impatience at the table, but his burning need to be at the heart of the action made it inevitable that he would ultimately find his way to the biggest game in town—the no-limit Texas Hold’em game at the Dunes. He had done well in the high-limit seven-card stud games, so it was really only a matter of time. But on the surface, at least, this jump—for a player of his inexperience—appeared to be suicidal. Any newcomer who took a seat in the no-limit game at the Dunes was basically asking for a severe beating.
“People showed up trying to play me in a game I had played all my life—no-limit hold’em!” said Amarillo Slim. “They were accustomed to playing limit poker and games like stud where you can bet a guy three hundred and he can call you, and then you get to the river and you can bet six hundred and he can call the six. Nobody’s goin’ to get whupped too bad. But with no-limit, they’d bet that same six hundred, then I’d raise ’em back ten thousand—and now you’d see ’em polish the seat of their britches. They’d get to wigglin’ and squirmin’ like jitterbugs. That’s the difference between limit and no-limit.”
Most of the gang at the Dunes knew Stuey Ungar or knew about him. They had figured the day would come when he would show up, and they were right. On a hot spring day in 1978, Stuey traipsed into the deep-freeze of the Dunes and was promptly carded by the security officer standing guard outside the poker room. Only after being waved in by Johnny Moss was Stuey allowed to enter.
As he approached the no-limit table, the players pretended not to notice him. They didn’t want to scare him away by licking their chops.
“Wh-wh-what are you playing?” Stuey asked, stuttering slightly in his excitement.
“No-limit hold’em,” answered a big fellow in western clothes, tipping back his hat to examine his cards more closely.
“Siddown, we have a seat for ya,” said another.
“I never played no-limit before,” Stuey replied honestly, aware that he was being coaxed into the game and that a remark like this would start a feeding frenzy.
He pulled $20,000 wrapped in a rubber band out of his pocket and plopped down in the empty seat.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he had to go to his cashbox to get more money. He’d lost the entire twenty grand. When he returned, he played more cautiously, though not timidly. The game went on through the night, into the next day, and then into the next night. Thirty-six hours after he sat down, Stuey took a break to get some sleep. He had won back the original $20,000 plus another $27,000.
“He had such a great mind,” Amarillo Slim said. “I would be doing things that he would pick up on immediately. I mean, I’d have to explain my moves to most people, but little Stu intuitively knew why I did what I did. I’ve never seen anyone pick up on it so fast.”
One thing that immediately struck all the legendary no-limit players in that game was how aggressively Stuey played. “To Stu,” Slim said, “money wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. It was like water. It meant nothin’ to that kid. Of course, that’s what eventually made him a great player. He wasn’t afraid to shove those chips into the pot. He could bet it all whether he had a hand or not.”
Playing poker regularly with Billy Baxter, Slim, Treetop Straus, Chip Reese, and Johnny Moss was a tough way to break into the fast lane of no-limit hold’em. In that murderers’ row of poker, perhaps no one was more formidable than Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, who was the Babe Ruth of that lineup, both in the size of his accomplishments—he had won the final event at the World Series in both 1976 and 1977—and in his physical girth.
Whenever the big game was going at the Dunes, Brunson would travel from his ranch in West Texas to play in it. Though he preferred the slow pace of life away from the bright lights and neon of Vegas, a gambling man goes where the action is. Like a lot of the top poker pros, Brunson had been an athlete when he was younger, having earned a full basketball scholarship to Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene. He was scouted by what was then the Minneapolis Lakers, but just before the NBA draft, while working at a summer job, he shattered his knee as he unloaded a pile of Sheetrock. Pro basketball’s loss was the poker world’s gain.
Brunson went on to earn a master’s degree in education, and he worked briefly as a salesman for business machines. At one of the first offices he called on, he got involved in a backroom poker game and won a month’s salary in a single afternoon, at which point he reassessed his career path. Like many of his contemporaries, Brunson honed his poker game as a road gambler on the underground circuit in the South, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars while dodging the law and getting robbed at least a dozen times.
Beyond his accomplishments as a player, Brunson made perhaps his biggest contribution to poker with his book on poker theory and strategy, Super/System, first published in 1978 and originally titled How I Won a Million Dollars Playing Poker. This book was instrumental in educating a generation of no-limit players, and it prompted Brunson the player to wish that Brunson the author had kept some of his secrets to himself. “If I had to do it over again,” he once said, “I wouldn’t write that damn book.”*
The first time Stuey encountered Brunson was at the Dunes. Stuey certainly knew who Brunson was—Brunson had won back-to-back world championships and was nearly legendary in the poker world—and perhaps the sense of familiarity that celebrity confers emboldened Stuey to approach him in the way he did. Brunson was an imposing figure in his large white Stetson hat and black horn-rims with custom-made tinted lenses designed just for poker. But that didn’t stop Stuey from asking the big man straight out if Brunson might be able to get him tickets to that night’s UNLV basketball game.
“Doyle looked at me like I was crazy,” Stuey said. “The thing was, I had ten grand bet on the game, and I just wanted to be able to watch it. I’d heard Doyle had access to good seats.”
When the awkwardness of the moment passed—a complete stranger had just asked him for the best seats to a sold-out game—Doyle was finally told that this was the Stuey everyone was talking about. That night, Stuey sat at courtside with Doyle and watched the Runnin’ Rebels win, covering the point spread and earning Stuey a quick and easy ten grand. It was the beginning of a long friendship between the two men.
In only a year’s time, Stuey had gone from being broke to living large as a professional gambler. The next thing to do was to get his personal life straightened out.
*This conversation was overheard by Glenn Abney, better known in card circles as “Mr. Gin,” who happened to be in one of the restroom stalls during the encounter.
*When Glenn Abney left the restroom stall, he exchanged a knowing look with Stuey but said nothing.
*The key argument in Baxter’s suit against the U.S. government for the return of $180,000 that had been withheld from his tournament winnings was that poker should be considered a game of skill. As such, poker winnings should be regarded as earned income, subject to the same deductions as other earned income.
The U.S. government maintained that poker was a game of luck, in the same category as lotteries and sweeptakes, and therefore subject to the same tax requirements.
In the first filing in federal court in Reno, Nevada, the judge ruled in Baxter’s favor, telling government lawyers that “if you think poker is luck, I invite your side to play Mr. Baxter in a poker game.”
The U.S. government appealed the decision, and the case was retried in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles. The judge there also ruled in Baxter’s favor. Eventually, the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the U.S. government dropped the appeal before arguing in front of the highest court.
The $180,000 that the IRS had to return to Baxter in 1985 barely covered his legal fees. “But of course that was never the point,” Baxter said. “It was a matter of principle.”
*In fact, he has done it over again. Super/System II, a revamped and updated version of the original, was released in February 2004.