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

  Just as Jennifer was leaving the poker room, Andy Beal was waking up. He could never adjust his body clock to the Pacific Time Zone, nor could he get used to the desert air. Even with the antibiotics, he wasn’t feeling well. But he was wide awake with nothing to do.

  When Jennifer got home, it was just after 5:00 A.M. She remembered something they needed to tell Howard. Andy had been pressuring his opponents to double the stakes, to $20,000-$40,000. The group decided that they should not give in. It would be easier for them to take advantage of their edge on the relatively short bankroll if they kept the stakes down, at least initially.

  It was too early to call Lederer, so she dialed Ted Forrest’s cell phone. He would probably play poker until Howard took the bankroll away.

  “Remember to tell Howard we’re going to start at ten-and-twenty.”

  “No,” Ted said. “We’re going to play twenty-forty.”

  Ted’s voice seemed distant. Then it dawned on her.

  “Really?” she asked a bit sarcastically. “You’re already playing him, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, good luck.” They said goodbye and hung up. So it would be Ted Forrest, who had been in the room playing for two days straight, rather than Howard Lederer, recommended by Doyle Brunson as their best hold ’em player.

  Nevertheless, she fell asleep without any trouble. She was a gambler and this was a good gamble. Ted Forrest should be better than Andy Beal, and her money was down. She had the right side of the bet and there was nothing more to do.

  Her husband, Marco, didn’t have it so easy. He had been a wreck all week, trying to keep up with the phone calls and the meetings, how far behind they were. He tried to balance being present and supportive with giving her space and not adding his concerns to the woes of the week.

  Not that his concerns would have mattered. When he married Jennifer a year earlier, he knew what he was getting: a strong-willed woman who gambled for a living. She made it clear that she was going to be part of this group until the end, no matter how it turned out. There would be no debate or discussion.

  Marco Traniello could live with that. He just couldn’t eat or sleep with it very well.

  For Andy Beal and Ted Forrest, Sunday morning looked like a replay of Saturday morning. It was hours before the scheduled time of his game, but Andy couldn’t fall back asleep. He walked into the poker room, to find Ted Forrest squeezing out the last bit of action before morning. Andy, at least, had gotten most of a night’s sleep. Ted and Chau Giang looked like they had been in the room since Steve Wynn nailed the roof on.

  Ted again agreed to play Andy, bypassing Brunson’s recommendation and the consensus of the group. Ted and Chau gathered the chips borrowed from the group’s bankroll and changed them for flags. Because Forrest was feeling a little tired, he made Giang sit and watch, or “sweat,” the game. Chau, however, was even more exhausted, so he set up a row of chairs and periodically lay across them, catching short naps.

  When Beal asked about raising the stakes, Ted agreed without argument. The $1.2 million bankroll was big enough for a $20,000-$40,000 game, and Ted was from the sit-down-and-play school. In general, he did not labor over getting the largest possible edge before playing.

  Professional gamblers faced this all the time, choosing between the conflicting goals of maximizing their advantage and marketing themselves so people would gamble with them. After all, if the members of the group somehow demonstrated to Andy Beal that their advantage was so big that he had no chance whatsoever, he would never sit down to play them. Likewise, if they would play only under conditions that favored them in every way, he would eventually become frustrated by their inability to give him a fair chance and give up.

  Poker was a game of skill, but if you played it for a living, you also had to be willing to gamble. Someone who bet only on sure things may be smart, but they would have to work hard to find people who would bet against them. A gambler who would enter a situation where the edge wasn’t clear, or when it looked like he had the worst of it, would always be in action.

  The best gamblers, therefore, weren’t necessarily the ones who were best at getting the edge. The true professionals—those most respected and often the most successful—were those whose carefree attitude might sometimes cost them, but who had the extraordinary instincts and management skills to handle the bad gambles while cashing in on all the favorable situations their “let’s gamble” style brought their way.

  As skilled as Ted Forrest was at poker, this aspect—combining socializing, marketing, having fun, the urge to gamble, and instinct—set him apart even from other top professionals. His willingness to gamble on anything, even when he appeared to be a huge underdog, had earned him the nickname “Professor Backwards” from his closest gambling buddies.

  Just for the sake of action, Ted would propose and take ridiculous bets. He has a bet outstanding with Jennifer Harman that he can beat her at Ping-Pong using her cell phone as a paddle. The wager is for $500 but Harman has the option to increase the stakes to $20,000.

  Ted had a bet with a friend over whether another friend would win the World Series of Poker before a major leaguer hit 100 home runs in a season. He has wagered thousands of dollars on his ability to guess how much people weigh.

  He has made bets with several friends over how fast they could run a mile. If he hears someone he knows is trying to lose weight, he may make them a weight-loss bet. This led to the famous “cross-weights” bet with Mike Svobodny against Huck Seed and Howard Lederer. Svobodny was one of the world’s best backgammon players. Seed, like Forrest and Lederer, was a world-class poker player who won the World Championship in 1996 along with three other World Series bracelets, as well as a tremendous athlete. All four men were action junkies.

  The cross-weights bet had its genesis in the usual New Year’s resolutions. Lederer wanted to lose a lot of weight. Seed, over six and a half feet tall and wiry, was going to begin weight training to bulk up. As an incentive, Forrest and Svobodny bet Lederer and Seed $50,000 each that they could not cross weights during the year. To win the bet, Huck Seed had to outweigh Howard Lederer at some time during the year. Howard started at over 300 pounds. Huck weighed 180.

  Lederer and Seed had to pay off. After several months, Howard was struggling to lose weight and still had a long way to go. Seed, training regularly with weights, actually lost four pounds.

  Forrest’s devil-may-care approach masked an iron will. One night, he lost $60,000 in a poker game. This was not an extraordinary sum based on the stakes, but it especially bothered Ted for some reason. As the game broke up early in the morning, he vowed not to leave the poker room until he won back the money.

  Unfortunately, the biggest game still going was $30-$60 stud. He could beat that game like a drum around the clock for months and not win $60,000. But he had made himself a promise, so he sat down. He then proceeded to get hit by the deck, the gambler’s expression for getting great cards, and won $2,500 in less than an hour.

  He experienced another piece of good fortune when Erik Seidel walked into the room and noticed him sitting at the $30-$60 game. Would Ted like to play some heads-up hold ’em, say $300-$600?

  Ted not only took Erik up on the offer but also called their friend Howard Lederer. Ted knew that Lederer shared the opinion that Ted was not a great hold ’em player, while the general—and correct—opinion was that Seidel was an excellent hold ’em player. Seidel won three World Series hold ’em events and finished second to Johnny Chan in the world championship in 1988.

  Would Howard like to book 100 percent of Erik’s action?

  Howard took the bet, agreeing to duplicate whatever Seidel’s results were in the game.

  By the time other players joined the game and they declared the bet closed several hours later, Forrest beat Seidel for over $15,000 (and an equal amount from Lederer). After another eight hours of playing in the $300-$600 ring game, Ted won enough to wipe out his $60,000 loss and claim a small profit fo
r the session. He still does not know why he made this pledge, but he understood what he learned about himself. “If you make a promise like that and keep it, and do that several times, you gain a lot of confidence in yourself.”

  Ted Forrest could also extend himself physically beyond reasonable limits. He has several times played poker for 100 hours or more. Part of the lore of the Mirage poker room was the four-day $600-$1,200 game Ted played with Hamid Dastmalchi, the 1992 World Champion and a man similarly possessed of a cast-iron constitution. At the end of it, Dastmalchi was taken out of the Mirage in an ambulance. Forrest joked that it was all the bad beats he showed Hamid, but it may have had more to do with the estimated fifty packs of cigarettes Dastmalchi smoked during the game. “And he lit only one match,” Ted noted when telling the story.

  Back in July 1996, Ted jumped into a juicy-looking ultra-high-stakes game of Pot Limit Omaha and lost $250,000, the most he had ever lost in a session and his entire bankroll. He walked home from the Mirage in the middle of the night through the worst area of town he could find, hoping someone would attack him. There were no takers.

  The next day, at tennis with Mike Svobodny and Huck Seed (Mike had bet Huck that Huck couldn’t play tennis eight hours a day for a month), Forrest asked Svobodny if he would pay him $5,000 to run a marathon that week. The next morning, Svobodny woke him up to say the bet was on. He would actually bet Ted $6,000 that he couldn’t run a marathon that day at the UNLV track, 106 laps.

  “Make it $7,000 and it’s a deal.”

  Svobodny agreed before Ted woke up enough to realize what he’d gotten himself into. It was the Fourth of July in Las Vegas, and the temperature was expected to climb above 110 degrees. The UNLV track was red, rubber urethane, which would radiate the heat.

  Huck Seed showed up to run with Ted. (Huck once won a huge golf bet by shooting under 96 for four rounds in one day without a cart, using only three clubs, on one of the hottest days of the year. He not only improved his score each round, but he shot 96 in the opening round and therefore had to play five rounds that day.) He had a separate bet with Svobodny to run the marathon.

  The two men were such incredible athletes that they were fine for the first fifty or so laps. They even talked about how much they might get Svobodny to bet them that they couldn’t do it five days in a row. Forrest recalled: “The next six miles were a lot tougher. And the last six? It wasn’t even human.”

  Huck finished first and the UNLV track coach, amazed that someone was out on the track, asked what Forrest was doing. “He could die out there,” the coach said.

  By the end, Ted was suffering from heat exhaustion. He said the sole of one of his feet actually separated from his foot and came off in his sock. He may have run two extra laps because he could no longer think clearly enough to count or make himself stop. “It was two weeks before I felt human again. Today, I wouldn’t take that bet for $100,000.”

  So even if Forrest had been in the poker room for days on end and was not, by reputation, the best hold ’em player in the group, he brought enormous resources to the table that he could call upon in an important confrontation. This was the kind of challenge, mental and physical, that Ted craved, an opportunity to break through the walls of fatigue, doubt, and failure.

  Even though he let Andy raise the stakes, and was just one day removed from the feeling that he was taking a beating for being undercapitalized, Ted Forrest had a plan. The usual strategy for heads-up poker, especially among the pros, was to play as aggressively as possible. If an opponent showed just a bit of weakness, the aggressive pro could run them over, as Howard Lederer did the first time he played Beal heads up. But Beal wasn’t backing down on this trip. That meant they were playing showdown poker for a couple hundred thousand dollars per hand. Where did their edge in skill and experience go? When they played aggression vs. aggression, it was just a coin flip over who had the better cards. Beal’s deeper bankroll (especially now that he had most of their bankroll) gave him the best of that confrontation, even if they somehow used their skill to a small advantage.

  So Forrest stood the traditional strategy on its head. He would play more passively, though only by degree. The idea would be to let Andy win more pots, but use his superior skill and experience to get away from weaker hands and win most of the big pots.

  The strategy immediately began paying off. The group’s bankroll was not fluctuating by large amounts every single hand. The size of the average pot dropped. Fewer pots were contested to the end. Forrest was folding more hands, but mixing up his play with the hands he pushed, and took a majority of the big pots.

  Andy Beal was also starting to wear down. He had done little but play poker, eat, and sleep since Tuesday and it was now Sunday. He was sick and he wasn’t sleeping well. Looking back on his play, he thought he was becoming careless in handling his cards, holding them and placing them differently based on their quality. It was not a big error, but one a pro like Forrest could catch and exploit.

  Beal also realized that the time he took to make a decision provided his world-class opponents with too much information. Therefore, especially as the games became a grind, he would decide quickly how to play strong cards and weak cards. Even if he played the cards contrary to their strength, he would decide quickly. With a borderline hand, however, especially after the flop, it took him a few more seconds to decide on the play. It was not a flaw obvious to most players, and Beal did not discover it until later, but it was ammunition to a player of Ted Forrest’s caliber.

  As it got closer to the time when Howard Lederer would be coming to the poker room, Ted and Howard talked on the phone. How was Ted doing? How was he feeling?

  “I’m winning,” Ted replied.

  “Then I probably won’t come in until a little later.”

  When Howard came by later in the morning, he saw three very ragged-looking men at Table Seven: Ted Forrest, Chau Giang, and Andy Beal. Only one of them looked like he wasn’t there as part of some prison sentence, the once preppy-looking man with a growing pile of flags in front of him, Ted Forrest.

  Finally, around 1:00 P.M., Ted decided he felt fatigued and told Howard that he wanted him to take over. Other players had been calling in throughout the morning. As he took Howard aside to talk during a short break, he made a mental note of the chip count.

  Nine racks, one stack.

  Nine hundred twenty flags.

  Four million six hundred thousand dollars.

  Subtracting the morning’s starting bankroll, Forrest had won back $3.4 million of the group’s money. They were still stuck $2 million, but disaster had been averted. If things stayed as they were, the players would be looking at a loss in the area of $200,000 each, compared with over $500,000 apiece as of early Sunday morning. Almost more important, if Lederer could hold on to these chips, everyone now would have several hundred thousand dollars in their box. They could play their regular games and rebuild their individual bankrolls.

  Forrest explained to Lederer his new strategy for playing Beal. This was a unique opportunity for Howard. Professional poker players did not often have the chance to discuss strategy. Occasionally, in a tournament, pros might discuss the play of a hand afterward or during a break, but that was more just chatting than a serious exchange of information. Primarily, their most frequent opponents were one another, so it obviously made no sense discussing strategy with a target of that strategy. Even talking about fairly innocuous matters could provide an opponent insight.

  That was what made poker such a lonely profession. The players were bound together by their love of action and by their common skills—and among the very best, their extraordinary skills were understood by only one another—but they were adversaries and restrained from discussing the very thing that brought them together hundreds, or even thousands, of hours a year.

  To keep from becoming even more maladjusted, the professionals became close friends with their adversaries, mastering the trick of separating the professional from the personal. O
utsiders occasionally used the friendships and common bonds of the elite players as “evidence” that they must be ganging up on outsiders. How could they really be taking each other’s money if they were so chummy away from the table?

  But how could it be otherwise? It was extremely difficult for poker players at this level to maintain relationships with people outside the gambling business. If a player had to give in to animosity against all opponents, every night would be like going into battle, alone, against everyone in sight. And if the player had to treat every other player as the enemy, who could they share a ride to the airport with, or a round of golf?

  Contrary to what some people would like to believe, these friends really did compete hard against one another at the poker table. One time, in a mixed game, the Table One regulars were playing Deuce-to-Seven. Jennifer Harman and Doyle Brunson were competing in a hand, heads up by the end. According to Jennifer, she turned over her hand and the dealer said “seven low,” an excellent hand. Brunson mucked his hand, throwing the cards face down into the discard pile. Then he noticed that there were two deuces in Jennifer’s hand. She didn’t have an excellent low hand, but a pair of deuces; Doyle had thrown away the winning hand.

  Brunson was furious, and he does not get angry often. He called a floorman, but he ruled as expected: once a player throws a hand into the discard pile, the hand is dead. Harman got the pot, and the force of Brunson’s anger. The incident was so upsetting that she had to leave the room. Even in the days after, it was uncomfortable for them to play together.

  “Jennifer,” he groused, “you’d steal the quarters off a dead man’s eyes.”

  After a week, Doyle finally got over it. But that he could get that angry—at a woman who regarded him like a father, whom he loved like a daughter, whom his son dated for over five years—provided an idea of how seriously they took the games against each other. And the closeness of the relationships away from the table, and their ability to resume them after such disagreements, demonstrated a rare ability to separate business from personal relations.