Victor and Philly wanted to take Stuey and Madeline out to celebrate.
It was amazing: there was Stuey, surrounded by television people and reporters, and everyone was going up to him, wanting to touch him, ask him questions. Victor was puffed up with pride, watching. He was beaming. After all those years in New York’s backroom card games, here was his boy on the big stage in Vegas—the world champion!
First things first, however. Stuey wanted to get paid, and that was turning out to be a problem. Eric Drache and Jack Binion walked him back to the cashier’s cage, but they needed Stuey to supply them with a Social Security number, and he didn’t have one. He had never worked at a conventional job, so he had never needed one. Even when he won gin tournaments, this hadn’t been a problem, because those were private events—the organizers rented a ballroom in a casino and ran the tournaments themselves. In the 1970s, the Gaming Commission was fairly lax, particularly with independent contractors. But the Horseshoe, since it was the sponsor and host of the WSOP, had to follow all the gaming laws. There was no way around it.
“You’re saying you can’t pay me?”
“Stuey, I don’t understand,” Jack Binion said. “You’ve never needed a Social Security card before this?”
“Nope.” The new champ was getting a rude introduction into the ways of the real world—where normal people filled out forms and paid income taxes.
Eric Drache picked up the phone and spoke to someone in the executive office at Binion’s. He learned that Stuey could get a card issued at the Federal Building, a few blocks away. While Drache tried to get instructions on how to apply, Stuey kept interrupting.
“How long will it take? How long will it take? Ask ’em how long will it take.” Stuey’s impatience was almost comical. He seemed like a child tugging at his father’s shirt.
Drache called for a limo, and Stuey was whisked off to the Federal Building. It was four o’clock, and the office closed at five. He had less than an hour to fill out the necessary forms and get processed.
Stuey rushed out of the limo and ran upstairs, bursting through the swinging doors into the second-floor office. Reaching the window, breathless, he asked a bored civil servant, “How do I get a Social Security card?”
“Fill out a form. It’s over there,” she said, pointing to a metal counter against the far wall.
Stuey filled out the form and brought it back.
“I need the card quick.”
“It will take just a—”
“Here, honey, that’s for you,” Stuey said, slipping her a $100 bill across the countertop. “I need to get the card today.”
The clerk was stunned. “Why do you need it in such a hurry?”
“You’ll read about it on the front page of the papers tomorrow,” Stuey said, his head cocked back, waiting for her to accept the hundred.
“I appreciate your generosity, but we issue the numbers right here, so it’s not really necessary—”
“It’s okay, honey, you keep that. It’s for you.”
Fifteen minutes later, Stuey had his temporary Social Security card in hand. He ran out the door and jumped back into the limo.
Drache was still in the cage with the money piled on a table when Stuey was brought back in by the guards. He slammed a small white card down on the metal desk.
“There! Now pay me my money!”
Drache counted out $365,000, consisting of thirty-six bundles of $10,000 each; then he added fifty $100 bills. The loot covered the desk, looking like nothing so much as the spoils of a bank robbery.
After deducting a sizable tip for the dealers and for Drache, Stuey took two bundles totaling $20,000 and put them in his pockets. The rest he instructed a clerk to put in a safe-deposit box for him. When the box was secured, he signed a slip and was issued a key.
That night, he and Madeline went out with Victor and Philly to an Italian restaurant off the Strip called Villa d’Este. The four of them were in high spirits, and for once Stuey didn’t rush through the meal as if he had a train to catch. They drank a lot of wine, and Victor not only had a large plate of pasta like the rest of them but followed it with a veal dish and dessert and coffee (Victor liked to have his coffee served in a glass with a spoon in it so the glass wouldn’t break). When the bill came, Stuey picked it up despite Victor’s protests.
“I guess we can let the world champ take us out, huh, Philly?” Victor said at last.
Later that night, back at their hotel room at Caesars, Victor complained to Philly that he had indigestion from the meal. He took some antacid, but the pain persisted. Philly wanted to call a doctor, but Victor told him to wait.
Six hours later, Victor Romano died of a massive heart attack.
Stuey couldn’t believe it. One minute he’d been on top of the world; the next he’d lost the man who had been like a second father to him.
“It meant so much to Stuey, having Victor come out here to see him in that moment of glory,” Madeline said. “And then for it to turn out the way it did was just cruel.”
Victor would have loved being able to go back to New York and tell the old crowd that I won. That would have been one of the highlights of his life. But he never had a chance to do that. After I heard what happened to him, suddenly the win didn’t mean nothing to me no more. I’d have rather lost that tournament than to have what happened happen.
Stuey took it hard, grieving more for Victor than he had for the death of his own parents. Romano had been one of the few stabilizing elements in his life. When the loss was added to the change in the way people now perceived him, Stuey found himself struggling to maintain his balance. Gambling, as always, helped him stay centered—or at least kept him occupied. It was a good way to avoid thinking too much.
When Stuey flew up to Reno for Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker at the Sahara Reno on January 22, 1981, he was no longer a mysterious newcomer; he was the reigning world champion of poker. He was unaccustomed to the spotlight, and suddenly he felt as if he had a bull’s-eye on his forehead. As he took his seat at the start of the $10,000 buy-in main event, other players kidded him or bemoaned their bad luck in having been seated at his table. If he was feeling the pressure, though, he didn’t show it.
By the end of the first day of the $10,000 buy-in main event, Stuey was second in chips. Early on the second day, Stuey, holding the A-K of spades, ran into Tony Salinas, who had A-Q offsuit. The flop came A-K-Q with two hearts. Stuey moved all-in, and Salinas, with the top and bottom two pairs, called him. Stuey was a huge favorite to win. Only one of the two queens in the deck or running hearts could save Salinas. Incredibly, a queen came on the river, and Stuey was eliminated. Had he won, he would have been a huge favorite to go on and win the tournament. Instead, he stormed out of the Sahara and hailed a taxi back to the airport, leaving his clothes behind in his hotel room.
Even for a regular joe, life in Las Vegas can be a bit overwhelming. For the reigning poker champion, it was surreal. Wherever Stuey went he was regarded with curiosity and stares: “Is that really the poker champ? He looks like a high school kid.” One wisecracking tourist reportedly asked him why he wasn’t in class in the middle of a weekday afternoon. “Shut the fuck up,” was Stuey’s diplomatic reply.
In April, Stuey prepared to defend his WSOP title. He rarely played in any of the smaller events that led up to the championship, feeling that they weren’t worth his time. But in 1981, on a whim, he decided to enter the Deuce-to-Seven Lowball event. Two days later, he took the $95,000 top prize, beating the champion of 1978, Bobby Baldwin, heads-up to win his second gold bracelet.
A week later, on May 19, 1981, the main event got under way. Bettors weren’t enthralled with the defending champ’s chances. Jackie Gaughan listed Stuey at 25–1, longer odds than Brunson, Baldwin, and eight others carried. When Stuey saw Gaughan’s number, he was insulted. He let everyone know that it would only motivate him to prove that his victory the previous year hadn’t been a fluke. When Gaughan walked onto the tournament floor, Stuey took the slight as an opportunity to make even more money by betting $5,000 on himself to win. Gaughan booked the bet and assured Stuey that he would pay $125,000 if Stuey won.
At the WSOP, the money bet by gamblers on one another was at times almost as exciting for them as the event itself. Telecasts of the WSOP from that era often refer to the excitement of the crowd, but that excitement was often fueled less by sentiment than by big bets they had riding on particular players. Hundreds of thousands of dollars routinely changed hands among those watching. Today, betting on the event is not permitted in Las Vegas—at least not out in the open as it was in the 1980s.
Amarillo Slim proposed at one point that he would be willing to take action on anyone who wanted to bet on “the Jews versus the Texans.” Since most of the top players were Jewish (Stuey, Jay Heimowitz, and Mickey Appleman, to name three) or Texan (Slim, Brunson, Moss, and Jack Straus, to name four), it was a proposition that generated considerable interest. There was some debate about how to quantify both sides, and what to do in the case of a Jewish Texan, and so Slim was forced to modify his wager into the more readily visible “hats versus bareheads.” Since the Texans usually wore hats and the Jews didn’t, he was able to work a little bit of the spirit of his original proposition into the bet.
“Half the room had hats, so it really got some people to put up some bucks,” Slim said. “Well, them boys with the hats usually ate everyone up like ginger cake. But things were changin’. The players with the hats had gotten older and then Doyle wrote that damn book of his. It got to where they could play good against us Texans.”
The great secret of the WSOP of 1981 was that Stuey almost didn’t get to play in it. A few days before the event, during a side game, Stuey, who had a well-deserved reputation for being tough on dealers, got disgusted after losing a huge pot and spit in the face of Harry Franks, a middle-aged part-time dealer at the Horseshoe. Dealing the high-stakes Vegas games was no easy job. With thousands of dollars at stake, tempers triggered easily. A slight mistake by a dealer could be tremendously expensive, and that fact, along with the need some players had to blame somebody for a loss or bad luck, meant that dealers were often in the line of fire. They had to be able to endure insults and grumbling without reacting (thus the dictum “Just dummy up and deal”).
“Stuey never knew any of the dealers’ names,” one former dealer at the Dunes recalled. “He always called us the same thing, especially when he was losing. We were all known as ‘motherfucker.’ ”
Stuey’s insults weren’t personal, although that didn’t make them any less objectionable. Nor did his often generous tips excuse his behavior. But some of his defenders insist it was just his conditioning, what he was accustomed to seeing back in New York, and later in Vegas, where even the best poker players, legendary figures like Puggy Pearson and Johnny Moss, were notorious for their brutal treatment of dealers. Stuey’s outbursts had gotten him into trouble before. On at least one occasion, he was invited to go outside and fight. Once at the Dunes, a female dealer named Darlene challenged Stuey to duke it out in the parking lot after her shift was over.
“Are you crazy?” he asked. “You think I’m going to fight a girl?”
“I get off in five minutes,” Darlene shot back. “I’m gonna take you down.”
Stuey didn’t say another word. Her bravado had effectively shut him up, at least until the next bad beat rolled off the deck.
But spitting in a dealer’s face was another matter. Stuey later explained that he had been simply shouting at Franks, when, in the excitement of the moment, some saliva managed to make its way across the table to Frank’s face. Upon hearing of the incident, Benny Binion banned Stuey from the Horseshoe until further notice.
The idea that the world champion might not be able to defend his title was unfathomable. But it would have happened if Jack Binion hadn’t intervened at the last minute and persuaded his father to take a less extreme stance. Although the Binions wanted to send a strong message to Stuey, they understood that the public’s interest in seeing the champion defend his crown needed to be served as well.
In 1981, a fourth day was added to the main event to accommodate the ever-increasing size of the field. Seventy-five entrants put up the $10,000 buy-in, for a total prize pool of $750,000, and first-place money of $375,000. Curt Gowdy and a crew from NBC Sports were on hand to film the event for a later telecast.
The first day of the tournament, in particular, was something of a fashion show, all the players wanting to bask in the moment and give the crowd and photographers and television crew something to gawk at. A. Alvarez, who chronicled the event in his superb book The Biggest Game in Town, described the scene.
One young cowboy was wearing a bright blue stetson and black shirt embroidered with black silk curlicues. Ken Smith, who is also a chess master and was Bobby Fischer’s second in the Reyk-javik marathon with Boris Spassky, wore what he always wears at competitions—a frock coat and a decrepit top hat, which he claims was found in the Ford Theater the night Lincoln was assassinated. Smith has a ragged beard, a squeaky voice, and a girth like that of Swinburne’s giant slumbering boar: “the blind bulk of the immeasurable beast.” Each time he wins a pot, he lumbers to his feet, doffs his topper to the audience, and pipes, “What a player!”
The others were less fashion-conscious, although, like the oysters in Through the Looking-Glass, “Their coats were brushed, their faces washed. / Their shoes were clean and neat.” Brunson and Straus wore pale blue suede jackets over navy blue shirts and trousers. Chip Reese had abandoned his velour track suits and reverted to his Ivy League origins: gray flannel trousers and a gray shirt with blue pinstripes. Bobby Baldwin was dressed in gray trousers and a gray Lacoste tennis shirt, at once sporting and sober, to suit his image. Even Mickey Appleman was wearing a neat beige corduroy jacket over his black T-shirt, and Stu Ungar wore a clean bowling shirt.
Early in the tournament, it looked as though the oddsmakers who had made Stuey such an underdog were right. He couldn’t seem to get any traction, and several times he came precipitously close to elimination, but somehow he survived—and in tournaments survival is everything. By the time the competition reached the final day, the eight other survivors included the chip leader, Bobby Baldwin, who had nearly $200,000 in chips; Jay Heimowitz, the formidable New Yorker; Perry Green, a roly-poly Alaskan fur trader; Ken Smith, the top-hatted chess master; and Bill Smith, a Texan, who confounded poker maxims about drunks by drinking straight whiskey throughout the tournament and continuing to win.
Stuey was hanging on with just over $50,000. He was fidgety, as he always was when sitting at a poker table, making faces, his eyes darting around with impatience. Dressed for the final day in a blue V-neck chemise, with a gold necklace draped across his concave, hairless chest and the gold championship bracelet weighing down his wrist, Stuey dextrously shuffled his small pile of chips with his chopstick-thin fingers.
By the time a couple of his fellow short stacks were eliminated, Stuey had been ground all the way down to $23,500. Meanwhile it appeared that Bobby Baldwin would run away from the field. He might well have done so but for one key hand. It began with Green raising preflop with a pair of pocket queens. Baldwin, holding a pair of nines, called. The nine-high flop gave him top set and looked for all the world like the end of Green and the beginning of Baldwin’s coronation ceremony.
To Baldwin’s further delight, Green bet $42,000 into him. Not wanting to get cute, Baldwin raised $85,000 more, setting Green—if he decided to call—in for all his money. The bearded, dumpling-shaped fur trader stared Baldwin down for a full two minutes, counting and recounting his chips. Finally, he pushed them forward. If Baldwin’s set of nines held up, he would have more than half the chips on the table.
The turn brought a harmless jack. But the river spiked Baldwin in the heart with a killer third queen. Baldwin smiled weakly as Perry Green took off his hat in disbelief and rubbed his bald head. As the reality of the miracle catch sank in, Green smiled uncontrollably and did a little shimmy. Who could blame him for feeling giddy? The long shot river card not only had kept him alive but had vaulted him into the chip lead.
When Stuey, a few hands later, moved all-in for his last $23,050, with pocket fives, the still-giddy Green called with only a nine and a ten of clubs. Stuey’s tournament life was on the line in what amounted to a coin-flip situation.*
Green would have liked nothing better than to eliminate a dangerous rival. But Stuey survived. The fives held up.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Baldwin had been on the verge of taking control of the tournament, but the bad beat against Green, despite the brave smile, tilted him briefly. He tried pushing a couple of ill-advised bluffs, including one against Stuey, that took his stack down even further. With pocket kings, he now moved all-in with the rest of his chips, and was called by Gene Fisher, a Texan, who—with his red, diagonally buttoned cavalry shirt, battered Stetson, silver hair, and full silver mustache—looked, as Alvarez described him, “like a reincarnation of Kit Carson.” Fisher’s pair of queens was drawing slim to the kings, but Lady Luck seemed to be against Bobby Baldwin on this day, and an unlucky lady on the river sent him packing in seventh place.
Jay Heimowitz had through much of the tournament worn a V-neck T-shirt that on his well-muscled torso made him look a little like an actor auditioning for the part of Stanley Kowalski. For the final day, however, he wore a pink-and-red-striped shirt that seemed more Tennessee Williams than Marlon Brando. His preflop raise with the magical pocket queens was called by Stuey with jacks. The flop came king, jack, ten, giving him an open-ended straight draw to go with his queens, but giving Stuey a set of jacks. When Heimowitz moved in, Stuey called immediately. For once, the queens did not work their magic, and a fourth jack on the river brought a rueful smile to Heimowitz’s lips.
From the brink, Stuey was now over the $100,000 mark for the first time in the tournament. A few hands later, starting to push people around, he vaulted into the chip lead. The hand began with the sodden Bill Smith—who looked, in his wide-lapel tan suit and big-collared brown shirt, like a refugee from the set of a John Holmes movie—betting $8,000 preflop with a 6-7 offsuit, and Stuey calling with K-5 of spades.
The flop came ace of spades, nine of clubs, five of clubs. Stuey checked, and Smith bet $10,000. Stuey quickly called. A six of spades came on the turn, giving Stuey a four-flush to go with his pair of fives. He led out for $40,000. Without hesitation, Smith reraised him all-in for $15,500 more.
Stuey obviously was not happy, but he was pot-committed and made the call.
“Whaddya got, Bill?”
“A straight,” the soused Smith said, flipping over his cards. In fact, he had misread his hand. He had only a pair of sixes with a gut-shot straight draw. Nevertheless, he was in the lead.
Incredulous, Stuey got to his feet. He swung around, looking at Philly Brush, who was standing behind him along the rail. “He made a mistake,” he exclaimed. “He misread it. Can you believe that?”
The dealer knuckled the table and dealt the final card. It took Smith fifteen seconds to figure out that the ten of spades that landed had given Stuey a flush and eliminated him. When he did comprehend it, he got up unsteadily and shook hands around the table. Stuey was now the tournament leader with $340,000. Green was in second place with $220,000, and Ken Smith and Gene Fisher had $95,000 each.
A short time later, the two chip leaders got involved in a hand. Green raised preflop with A-K. Stuey flat-called with A-Q. The flop revealed two more aces along with a three. Both players checked, each trying to set a trap for the other. The turn was another three. If it had been any other card but a queen, it is quite likely that Stuey would have lost most of his chips. As it was, the two players raised and reraised each other all-in, and then chopped the pot, each with the same hand, a full house, aces over threes.
Just after the dinner break, Perry Green eliminated Ken Smith and regained the chip lead, with $480,000 (to Stuey’s $200,000 and Gene Fisher’s $70,000). Another big pot then began to build between Stuey and Green. This time Stuey had pocket kings and Green had A-Q. When the flop came with an ace in it, Green bet $60,000, and Stuey called. It was a questionable call at best, but when the turn card produced a king, one of Stuey’s two outs, the tables were suddenly turned. Stuey adjusted himself in his chair, shook his head impatiently, and pushed his remaining chips into the pot, $90,000. It was now Green’s turn to shake his head. He squinted at the cards and then at Stuey, and slowly, painstakingly, he counted out $90,000 from his mountain of chips, shoving them in. When Stuey revealed his hand, Green nodded grimly, absorbing the sting of what was—no other way to put it—horrible luck. The harmless four of clubs that came on the river drew a cheer from the crowd. Ungar had retaken the lead with $400,000 in chips.
A quarter of an hour later, Gene Fisher got knocked out, unluckily, when Perry Green rivered a flush to beat his three kings. The world championship of 1981 had come down to Stuey and Perry Green, with Green holding a slight advantage, $420,000 to $330,000. Doyle Brunson, who was standing behind one of the cameramen, fished his bankroll out of his pocket and paid off Gabe Kaplan, who was standing next to him. “So much for the Texans,” Kaplan said. “We got ourselves an all-Jewish final.”
On the other side of the room, Johnny Moss, surveying the impregnable wall of chips in front of Green, was, according to Alvarez, “not impressed. ‘I reckon Stuey’s got it made,’ he said. ‘He may not look like no Buffalo Bill, but he’s one tough poker player. That boy’s got alligator blood in his veins.’ ”
As the two finalists squared off, Perry Green turned to Doyle Brunson, who was still up close to the rail, and revealed the secret of his success: “It’s all because I read your book,” Green said.
Doyle flashed a big smile and nodded.
The cards were dealt, and Green bet $16,000. Stuey, sitting with his elbow on the table and his chin held in the L formed by his index and middle finger, raised $40,000, and Green called. The flop came jack of diamonds, nine and eight of clubs. Stuey had the ace and jack of clubs. Top pair with the nut flush draw—a monster hand. He bet $60,000, and Green considered the bet momentarily before shoving all his chips in.
Stuey did not deliberate. “I call,” he said. Green’s $450,000 had him more than covered.
Green once again turned toward Brunson. “I’ve got your hand,” he said.
Before Green could turn up his cards, Stuey sprang from his seat. “Ten-deuce of clubs?”
Incredibly, Brunson, while sitting on the sidelines, had influenced the outcome. Perry Green had made his remark to the poker icon about reading his book, and on the very next hand was dealt the master’s trademark 10-2, the same hand Brunson had played to close out his two WSOP victories. How could the Alaskan furrier not play it? And when the flop gave him an up-and-down straight draw with a flush draw, what was he supposed to think? It was kismet.
But Stuey’s hand cut off his flush at the knees. Green’s only outs were the six cards that made him a straight without giving Stuey the higher flush.
The dealer turned up the final two cards. A jack on the turn, and a six on the river. No help for the 10-2.
Stuey was now well in front of his opponent, with $600,000 of the $750,000 chips in play. The end came after another hour of back-and-forth play. Green, with a 9-10 offsuit, made it $16,000. Stuey, holding an ace and queen of hearts, raised him $25,000. Looking a bit pained, Green called. The flop came 7-8-4, and two hearts.
The crowd leaned in closer, as if sensing the end. Stuey separated five stacks of red chips from his pile. “One hundred thousand dollars.” Green only had $78,000 left. “I call,” he said. When Green saw Stuey’s hand, he sighed and said, “I got a draw.” And as the dealer dealt the final two cards, he chanted “Nine, ten, six, jack,” naming all the cards that could help him.
The dealer burned and turned fourth street, which was another four, then burned and turned the river. For a split second, it appeared that Green’s prayer had been answered. It was definitely a face card. Could it be a jack, giving him the straight? Everyone’s eyes were blurred, after hours under the hot television lights, but when the last card came into focus, it was not a jack, it was a queen, giving Stuey two pairs—queens and fours—and the championship. The spectators roared their approval.
Curt Gowdy interviewed Stuey directly afterward, amid the hubbub, sticking a microphone under the champ’s chin.
“Two years in a row,” said Gowdy. “What are the odds on that?”
“Awful big,” Stuey muttered. “It’s very tough to win it. You’ve gotta get awful lucky in key situations.”
He had won not only the first-place prize money, $375,000, but an additional $125,000 from his 25–1 bet on himself with Jackie Gaughan.
The money was great, but Stuey’s real satisfaction was in proving the critics and oddsmakers wrong. Those who thought that his victory the previous year had just been a fluke, that he was a one-hit wonder, were forced to eat their words. At twenty-seven he was not only the youngest champion ever but a champion who had won it all twice.
*The precise odds favor Green’s 9-10 suited by 52.43 to 47.56 over Ungar’s fives.