The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Read online

  By Saturday, the players were not even maintaining the pretense of keeping their situation from Beal. As the bankroll became depleted yet again, they met right next to the table while he was playing. In addition, there was some concern about whether Andy might take the money and run. He never said how long he intended to stay, and he had been in town since Tuesday. He was feeling sick, and had another player—a local doctor who occasionally played for high stakes—give him some antibiotics.

  Although the Doc was just helping out another player in need, a physician could live comfortably off the health impact of the poker lifestyle. It was easy to accumulate bad habits in the poker room: inconsistent sleep patterns, lack of exercise, poor posture, hurried eating, and a fondness for free drinks made with milk and ice cream with whipped cream on top. Several years earlier, the Doc attended to a spectator at the final table of a poker tournament at Binion’s Horseshoe who suffered a seizure and stopped breathing. (Another doctor, who was actually playing at the final table, also assisted and revived the man, who survived long enough for the ambulance to arrive.)

  How much longer would Andy stay? He had given them plenty of opportunities to get their money back. They just had not capitalized.

  Even when it looked like the pros would recoup their losses, their hopes were dashed. John Hennigan, potentially as much a wizard at the poker table as with a pool cue, got ahead of Beal by more than $1.5 million.

  When Andy began a comeback, the other players’ attention focused on the beer bottles accumulating on Johnny World’s side of the table. Nobody attached any significance to Hennigan enjoying a beer while he was winning, but now it looked like he was drinking away millions of dollars. After Andy recovered his losses and steamrolled the pro for at least another million, they ended the game. While his colleagues stared from the next table, Hennigan sat alone, his shaved head in his hands, covered by a red bandanna, sunk low to the table.

  Saturday started as a continuation of the same miasma the entire week had been. Ted Forrest was still playing in a game from Friday night when Andy Beal wandered into the room early in the morning. Andy and Ted were supposed to play later that day, but Andy was having trouble sleeping and, having nothing else to do in Las Vegas, wanted to get started.

  Ted agreed to play, but he wasn’t holding the team’s bankroll. The player who had those chips on account wasn’t expected to arrive for several hours. Ted called the other player and told him the starting time had been moved up, so he should come to the Bellagio and get the money from his account. In the meantime, Ted loaned the team the $240,000 he had in his box until the other player arrived.

  The experience gave Ted Forrest a fresh opportunity to experience how scary it could be playing high-stakes poker on a short bankroll. Heads-up poker requires playing a lot of hands and playing aggressively, but with a bankroll of only twelve large bets, he felt like Beal was draining his chips while he waited in vain for a hand. As it was becoming certain that Andy would win the $240,000, Forrest asked Beal to front him some additional chips. Unless Andy wanted to put his heater on hold until the bankroll arrived, he would have to loan Ted some chips to keep the game going.

  Andy hesitated. Did he really know Ted Forrest? Apart from finding him a nice guy and terrific poker player, all Andy knew was that Ted was not part of the original group. Andy just sat down and played, choosing his opponents by names and faces he could remember or recognize. He knew that his opponents were staked by one another, but no one briefed him on the team’s composition or financial arrangements. What if he fronted Ted the money, Andy won it, and Doyle said that Ted still wasn’t part of the group?

  He knew he was just being paranoid. As a banker, rather than a gambler, however, their casual handling of financial transactions was alien to him. He loaned Forrest the money so they could continue playing.

  But Beal made him sign a promissory note on a napkin.

  And he won that money from Ted as well.

  Ted lost $620,000 in two hours and let someone else take over. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was on a short bankroll, throwing around too many chips for his own good.

  Between the phone calls and the visits to the poker room to post more money, it had been a stressful, chaotic week for Jennifer Harman. She tried to take a break from poker and do some Christmas shopping.

  One of the fringe benefits of being a professional poker player is easy access to great shopping, dining, and entertainment. The pros generally took this for granted; after all, you could spend only so much time shopping at Prada and Armani and eating at Wolfgang Puck’s. But for the holiday season, this came in handy.

  She was next door to the Bellagio at the Forum Shops of Caesars Palace, getting her car from the valet, when she got the first call.

  Chau is playing Andy. Surely, Chau would put an end to this and return things to their proper order.

  Even among the world’s best players, Chau Giang was regarded with respect bordering on awe. Like Jennifer Harman, his ascent in poker was a solo venture. Born and raised in Vietnam, he came to Las Vegas in the early 1980s by way of Florida and Colorado, and set up shop at the $20-$40 hold ’em tables. He slowly moved up. When he finally made it to the big game at the Mirage, he took his lumps in his first encounters with Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese. At one point, he blew a million dollars at baccarat.

  But Chau learned from his mistakes. He plugged his leaks and improved his game with more exposure to the best players. By 2001, he may have been the player at Table One most feared by his peers.

  There is probably less prejudice in poker than in most areas of American life. There are more stereotypes about the players than from them. Plenty of ignorant people play poker, so there are bigots of every type among the fifty million or so Americans playing the game. But among the professionals, as the expression went, “cards speak.” An opponent’s skin color, religion, or nationality would not change the cards. (Women have had some trouble getting respect, but even then, not at the highest levels. And when such dismissive attitudes do occur, high-stakes players like Jennifer Harman and Mimi Tran are happy, because it makes it easier for them to take the money.)

  Many émigrés of Vietnam have excelled at poker over the past two decades, but none played for such high stakes or with as much success as Chau Giang. Ultimately, the most important reason the top pros hold Chau in such high regard is because he is so good. And, what is probably the highest compliment a professional poker player can bestow on a peer, Giang has a reputation of playing better when the stakes rise.

  By the time Harman got to the Bellagio poker room, however, Chau was broke.

  Jennifer could read on the long faces of the other players that something bad had happened. Chau was joining several members of the group at the adjoining table. Jennifer took a seat as well to try to figure out what was going on. Four members were playing Chinese Poker, a game in which each player receives thirteen cards and wins by getting points based on how they arrange the cards into three- and five-card hands. To all but the Table One regulars, Chinese Poker was like TEGWAR (The Exciting Game Without Any Rules), the made-up card game from the movie Bang the Drum Slowly. Even those few players who played it for ridiculously high stakes acknowledged that the element of skill in the game was pretty small.

  What made this game even more unusual was that there were no chips on the table. Ted Forrest was keeping track of wins and losses with a pencil and a pad of paper. Everybody was out of chips.

  Andy Beal walked over to their table.

  “Who am I going to play next?” he asked.

  Doyle Brunson looked up and gave him a wry smile. “Congratulations, Andy. We’re broke. Go back to Texas.”

  Everybody chuckled, and Doyle said it as a joke, but it wasn’t too far from the truth. Between when he arrived the previous Tuesday and that Saturday night, Andy Beal had won $5.3 million. Someone muttered something about “there won’t be any more high-stakes games for a while,” but Beal thought they were pulling hi
s leg.

  Finally, Doyle said, “Okay, Andy. If you want to play some more tonight, I’ll play you. We just have to get the money together.” Satisfied, Beal went back to his table, alone, with rack after rack of white $5,000 chips.

  Everybody was in some form of financial distress. “We’re broke” was not an exaggeration. What Brunson technically meant was that everyone’s safe deposit box was cleaned out, or nearly so. Hence, the Chinese Poker game “on the pencil.” The players had varying amounts of nonpoker assets, some of them substantial. Accessing those assets would require breaking a cardinal rule of money management: Once money leaves the room, it doesn’t come back.

  Professional gamblers lived and worked on a high wire, and that rule was their only safety net. The old-fashioned road gamblers were proud of going broke, even being broke. But when they wanted to let you know how well they’d really done, they told you how much their wives were worth. The late Johnny Moss told a story about how he won $250,000 on a monster run at the craps tables in 1939. He told his wife, Virgie, to find the nicest place she could in Dallas and he would send her the cash. That way, no matter what happened to him, she would have a home. She took a friend and they had a wonderful time, touring the grandest estates the city had to offer. When she finally picked out a home, she called and asked him to send the money. “It’s gone,” he told her. “You should have looked faster.”

  More often, the pros just borrowed the money. They were, after all, the best in the world and loaning them money was usually a good risk. Borrowing money was complicated, however, because the pressure was not merely to play well, but to win. Some poker players thrived in this situation. Generally, however, it was a circumstance they preferred to avoid. In addition, many of their closest friends were in the same boat. Some of their best sources, therefore, were also broke and anyone they approached could be getting hit up by the other players.

  For Howard Lederer, it was a waking nightmare. He had plenty of experience being broke, and a long list of people willing to stake him or loan him money. But he had worked hard for two years to reconcile his gambling lifestyle with a responsible adult’s financial discipline. He directed his energies not just to winning, but toward building a secure future. He had also gotten married just six months earlier. Somehow, despite his best efforts and all the changes he had made, he had “gotten broke.”

  Howard got word that if they could keep Andy in town, the plan would be for him to play Beal at eight the next morning with what might be the last $1.4 million they could gather. (Even after that, the players would not have exhausted their borrowing power or seriously hurt their nonpoker assets, but borrowing more money to play Andy Beal might have been out of the question.) Howard had to force himself to go to bed early, unheard of for a poker player. But he first had to make arrangements to borrow the money needed to post his share by the morning. Just like the rest of the team, he got the call from Doyle. “You better get your money down here or you’re not in.”

  At least Howard was spared the bizarre scene that unfolded next.

  While Andy was waiting for Doyle to get the chips to play him and the others played Chinese Poker for IOUs, he sent for the Bellagio photographer. The casino resorts on the Strip all had photographers, usually stationed around the gourmet restaurants, to take commemorative photos of the guests to mark what the casinos hoped were special occasions.

  For Andy, this was a very special occasion and he wanted to commemorate it. He was sitting at a poker table with fifteen racks of chips. Each chip was worth $5,000. Each rack was worth a half-million dollars. During the half-hour he waited for the photographer, he removed the chips from their racks and stacked them in rows of twenty. He made one long horizontal row, stretching from his seat at the center of the table almost to one end. But that was fewer than four racks. So he made a second long row, then a third and a fourth. Even after that, he had two racks of chips propped up against the rail.

  When the photographer finally arrived, Andy walked over to the adjacent table. He asked Doyle if he would sit for a picture Andy wanted taken. Jennifer Harman and Ted Forrest joined Doyle as they arranged themselves around the fortress of chips.

  If the situation was uncomfortable for the players, it was about to get worse. As the photographer told them to hold still and smile, his flash failed to work. They had to freeze in that position as he repeatedly snapped pictures, trying to get the flash to work. Finally, after what seemed like a dozen tries, the flash popped and Beal had his picture.

  Andy Beal sat in the middle, behind $7.5 million in chips. Brunson sat to his left, almost leaning away from Andy. The expression on his face is clearly half a smile, half a grimace. Harman and Forrest stood between Brunson and Beal. Jennifer, over Doyle’s right shoulder, had a blank expression. Other than Andy, who looked tired and happy, only Ted was smiling. Ted looked like he had been in the room for days—a circumstance not far removed from the truth—but it could just as easily have been a picture of his great accomplishment instead of Andy’s, from the expressions on their faces.

  There was no sense in which Beal was trying to show up the pros. To Brunson, the man was simply proud of his accomplishment. “Why take anything away from him? If you can’t do something like pose for a picture after that, you’re in the wrong business.” To Harman, it was simply an accommodation to a nice guy. He won all their money, but that didn’t make him an enemy.

  Ted Forrest agreed with Jennifer and Doyle. “I think he just wanted to have the picture to remember his friends and the trip to Vegas. That’s a hell of an accomplishment if you can pull it off, to come to Vegas and play in a game bigger than has ever been played, and face seven or eight of the top twenty players in the world and win. That’s one hell of an accomplishment.”

  And it was one hell of a picture.

  Between loans and commitments to post the money by the next morning, Doyle Brunson was able to bring nearly $1.5 million in chips to take one last shot that night at Andy Beal. After the picture, however, Beal had run through his supply of adrenaline. He was exhausted, but after making Brunson and the group scramble around to get the money, he felt he had to play for a little while. It was the sporting thing to do.

  After about twenty desultory minutes, Beal caught a lucky run of cards and, in a flash, was ahead $200,000. But the needle on his gas gauge was squarely on E. He made his apologies to Doyle and called for security to pick up his chips. The cashier’s cage in the poker room could not store Beal’s $7.5 million in chips. Two security guards, using Lucite boxes with metal handles, carried the chips through the casino to the main cage.

  He felt a little awkward about not giving Doyle Brunson more play. But otherwise, he felt great. It was after 11:00 P.M., so it was too late to fly home. He would give them another chance in the morning. He fell asleep almost instantly.

  6

  THE LAST LESSON OF PROFESSOR BACKWARDS

  LATER THAT NIGHT

  It was nearly midnight when Doyle Brunson left the poker room. Before he left, he told the members of the group present—Jennifer Harman, Chau Giang, Ted Forrest—that he thought Howard Lederer was the right choice for the game the next morning.

  The players were under no obligation to follow Brunson’s advice. In fact, as premier players themselves, they had strong personal reasons for disagreeing. Nevertheless, they expected (and were expected) to follow it without argument. Organizationally, their enterprise was, if anything, socialist in nature. Bound by their common abilities, their trust, and their respect, they had no leaders or decision-making apparatus. They shared in what they put in, and in what they took out.

  Brunson was never elected captain, nor did the players vote on any of the decisions. It was all done informally, but that was the poker way. He was the oldest by a generation, the most experienced, and was respected among the pros above all others. Chip Reese enjoyed a similarly elevated position among his peers, but he was closer in age and background to the other players. He was also out of town this
week, though his money was posted.

  Doyle’s recommendation was just that: his opinion. And no one saw any reason to question it. Like Chau Giang, Jennifer Harman, and Todd Brunson, Howard Lederer had moved through the poker ranks on the strength of his hold ’em game. Because Howard started so young and made his bones in the rough-and-tumble underground clubs in New York, Brunson’s assessment was backed up by Lederer’s deep experience, especially in difficult financial situations.

  Not that anyone would explicitly concede the point; every member of the group would step forward to play Beal with their financial stability on the line rather than have it ride on someone else’s shoulders. None would admit that their talent was inferior to Howard’s. But it was a reasonable recommendation, and from an impeccable source.

  Doyle Brunson left the details to the group, as well as who would safeguard the remaining $1.2 million of the bankroll until the match on Sunday morning. Once Brunson was gone, Jennifer Harman looked at all those chips and thought, now we can play poker! They abandoned the Chinese Poker game and started a $1,500-$3,000 mixed game. As the players got the chips broken down into smaller denominations, they established some special rules.

  The chips could not leave the table at the end of the night. The losers would have to settle up separately with the winners. This was the team’s bankroll and it needed to be turned over in its entirety to Howard Lederer the next morning. Likewise, anyone playing in the game who wasn’t part of the group was told of the situation: Their winnings had to stay on the table as part of the joint bankroll.

  Jennifer Harman was one of the winners that night. Her profit meant that she would not need to post her share the next morning. Finally, something good came of the week.

  By 4:30 A.M., Sunday, she decided it was time for this long, strange day to end. Chau and Ted kept playing on with a few others. Gamblers defined their sleep needs differently from the rest of the world and those two in particular seemed to take a childlike joy in playing for days on end, as if they were kids who tricked the baby-sitter into missing their bedtime.