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

  Howard Lederer appreciated the rare opportunity to share strategy with his friend-colleague-competitor. Lederer believed in a more aggressive style for heads-up hold ’em than Forrest, but his advice made sense. Howard would remain aggressive but mix up his play a bit more. He would try to keep down the fluctuations in their bankroll and aim for controlling the action after the flop and winning the bigger pots.

  Not satisfied with merely maintaining the day’s win and holding down the group’s loss, Howard continued to attack. As the afternoon dragged on, Andy Beal’s play became more erratic. He became careless and increasingly disregarded his carefully developed game plan.

  Less than twenty-four hours after having his picture taken with 1,000 flags won with cunning and skill from the world’s best poker players, Andy Beal had given every chip back. Almost worse for Beal, he again stayed beyond the last flight, and trudged back to his room with nothing to look forward to but another restless night.

  Andy lost again before he left town on Monday, not a huge amount but enough to allow the players to claim a small profit. It was a nice Christmas present, considering how they were looking at a loss of approximately $500,000 apiece just thirty-six hours earlier. They stuck together, buoyed one another’s spirits, helped one another through the financial scrapes of the previous week, and hung on long enough for Ted Forrest and Howard Lederer to finally assert the group’s advantage in skill.

  For Beal, the loss stung more than the amount involved, or the swing to a small loss from a $5.5 million profit. He had lost much more than that in business. This felt personal.

  Like the players, he could separate his competitive feelings from his personal feelings. He was coming to like and admire the players. But the contest was more intimate than any kind of business he had ever conducted. The pros sought to expose and exploit every weakness. He did not expect to become a superior poker player in less than a year. But his four-day winning streak gave him the impression that he had made progress, that his theories for bridging the gap were correct. It was painful for it all to fall apart so fast and so decisively.

  That was why Andy Beal decided before he even left Las Vegas on Monday afternoon that he had to give up poker forever.

  PART II

  ACTION

  7

  GONE

  INTERREGNUM, 2002-2003

  That Monday in December 2001, Andy Beal told Chip Reese that he was through with poker, and he meant it. At least he thought he did.

  Reese had returned to town and the two men had lunch before Beal went back to Dallas. People who considered professional card players somewhere between con men and crooks would say he was merely “chilling out the mark.”

  Such an interpretation, however, fundamentally misrepresented the scene. Beal had lost fair and square. If there was some scheme to cheat him, it was either unrealistically brilliant or unrealistically stupid, because he had won $5.5 million of the players’ money before they won it back and eked out a small profit. Although Andy periodically took steps to make sure the game was on the level, he did this merely out of prudence and his thorough examinations and precautions never revealed anything that could have been interpreted as cheating.

  To the contrary, Andy Beal got his money’s worth. He found a group of the best poker players in the world and had them on call to play him whenever he wanted for almost a week. Even though he was a novice and they were motivated to play their best, he nearly had them pinned for the count. To be able to play—and defeat—in succession Jennifer Harman, Todd Brunson, John Hennigan, Ted Forrest, Chau Giang, and Doyle Brunson would be the experience of a lifetime for any person who played poker. If you gathered all the people in the world who could afford to spend a million dollars on a challenge or test, Beal would not be the only one to choose this experience.

  Consequently, professional poker players have learned over the last twenty-five years that “honesty is the greatest hustle in gambling.” (Howard Lederer said that, attributing it to London high-stakes player Ali Sarkeshik, though it could have just as easily originated with Mario Puzo, Tennessee Williams, or Fyodor Dostoevsky.) The reason a person like Chip Reese—solid in education and values from middle-class Dayton and Ivy League Dartmouth—had thrived in Las Vegas for thirty years was that he was simultaneously much more skilled than his adversaries, yet never ran out of men with money and inferior skills who would challenge him. A dishonest man in this position could have made some of the scores Reese had to his credit, but only an honest gambler could so consistently win and keep his outclassed opponents coming back for more.

  Reese and his colleagues were like a casino in that regard. A casino running a crooked game would be sure of making money, but would ultimately be found out or at least suspected of cheating, which would chase away gamblers. The honest, heavily regulated modern casinos with their tiny edge make billions and sometimes have to turn people away.

  Reese was a gambler’s gambler, superbly skillful at the games, but also at the game of staying in action and showing his opponents a good time. Was being friendly and treating his amateur opponents with respect manipulative or cynical or hypocritical? Sure, Chip Reese was a salesman. But he was selling an honest gamble against a skilled opponent, and he did it well.

  Beal told him that he was giving up poker. It was taking up too much of his time. He and his wife were expecting another child, and he had a lot going on at his bank.

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me. I don’t think I want to play anymore and I don’t want to be tempted.”

  Reese understood. A professional gambler knew that the urge to play could be irresistible. Chip had an expression for it: a gambler in heat. He worked on controlling it in himself and profiting from it in others, but was careful not to exploit it. Gambler’s remorse could be powerful and it was rarely worth it to win one time and sour your opponent from coming back. You could shear a sheep countless times, but slaughter it only once.

  He and Doyle Brunson would respect Andy’s wishes. The men finished lunch and Reese drove Andy Beal to the airport so he could catch his flight back to Dallas.

  If being nice was hustling, then Chip Reese was definitely a hustler. But he was being true to his nature and, after all, honesty was the best hustle of all.

  Poker is such a stupid game, Andy thought. It has no redeeming value and takes up so much time. I’m not going to spend my life like that.

  That feeling lasted several months, through the birth of Andy’s son in February 2002. They were simply better than me, he told himself. I put a lot of effort into the game but I still couldn’t beat them. I can do better things with my life.

  Beal’s sole contact with professional poker for most of 2002 was in February. It was the only time Brunson and Reese broke their promise not to contact Andy. The banker had learned while he was in Las Vegas the previous December that his new director of risk management, Craig Singer, was a poker buff. He, in turn, mentioned it in passing to Brunson. A copy of Doyle Brunson’s Super System, autographed and shipped by the lead author, materialized on Craig’s desk.

  During spring 2002, the World Series of Poker started a process that fundamentally altered the perceptions of millions of people about poker. It started slowly, almost imperceptibly. The top pros, even those who didn’t bother with tournaments, all played in the main event, which drew a record 631 players. Even Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese surprised everyone by entering.

  The World Series was a creation of the Binion family and the pros played—usually the main event and events that functioned as reunions for the high-stakes poker fraternity, like Deuce-to-Seven and Chinese Poker, during the brief time it was an event—out of respect for the memory of Benny Binion and because of their friendship with his son, Jack. Benny Binion, of course, built Binion’s Horseshoe, started the World Series of Poker, and was regarded as a friend and patron by generations of poker players.

  But Jack Binion lost a family fight for control in 1998. Following Jack Binion’s dev
elopment of a gaming business separate from his family and various lawsuits, he sold his family stock to sister Becky Binion Behnen. Jack’s ouster, followed by the dismissal of the World Series staff, led Doyle and Chip to skip the event.

  For only the second time in the history of the World Series, in 2002 an amateur made off with the championship. Robert Varkonyi, an MIT-educated computer programmer working on Wall Street, won the bracelet. As word spread that an amateur had bested the pros for $2 million, more people were sure to give poker a try. The new phenomenon of Internet poker was already making the game more accessible to players who lived far from a casino or who had felt intimidated as novices by the atmosphere of a poker room.

  Among the high-stakes players, the Series was most notable for Jennifer Harman. She had decided to play a few more events. She finished fourteenth out of 610 competitors in the first event of the Series, $2,000 buy-in Limit Texas Hold ’Em, and made it to the final table of a Seven Card Stud event ten days later.

  On May 11 and 12, in the $5,000 buy-in Limit Texas Hold ’Em Championship, Jennifer triumphed over a talented field of 113 to win $212,440. For only the eighth time in World Series history, a woman won an open event. Twice, that woman was Jennifer Harman. Mimi Tran, Barry Greenstein’s protégée—he taught her poker in exchange for her teaching him Vietnamese—finished third. Tran, a high-stakes player in L.A., was now also among the top all-time female money winners at the World Series. Ironically, the women-only event ran the same day.

  John Hennigan also won a bracelet. Chip Reese even contended in the championship for a while, reaching as high as second position in chips at the end of Day Two, but was eliminated on Day Three. Otherwise, however, the World Series was a distraction for the high-stakes pros, though a welcome one because it drew together the fraternity of big-money players. The wins by Jennifer and Johnny World were significant, but most of the cash players simply didn’t bother.

  Less than a week after the conclusion of the Series, on May 27, 2002, the Bellagio hosted a $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em tournament as the inaugural event of the new World Poker Tour. Back in February, documentary filmmaker Steve Lipscomb and Lyle Berman agreed to organize a series of filmed poker tournaments. (It would not be until January 2003, when half the first season of tournaments had been completed and filmed, that the WPT lined up the Travel Channel to air the episodes.)

  Lipscomb brought excellent credentials and cutting-edge ideas to the project. He had filmed poker tournaments, including the World Series of Poker. He believed the key to TV poker was in a specially designed hole-card camera that would allow the television audience to see the players’ hidden cards.

  Nevertheless, the key to getting the World Poker Tour off the ground was the participation by Lyle Berman. He brought money (a $3.5 million investment by a subsidiary of his gaming company, Lakes Gaming), a history of success in business, and, most important for this project, credibility in the poker world.

  Lyle had attended Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania but was kicked out after being arrested for gambling. (Charges were dismissed.) Lyle later joined the army, then graduated from the University of Minnesota and went to work in his family’s retail leather business. He expanded the business into a chain of twenty-seven stores, and sold it to W. R. Grace in 1979. He continued to run the operation, expanded it to over 200 locations, led a leveraged buyout in 1986, and resold it in 1987.

  After recovering from a health scare that led him to sell the leather business (now part of Wilson’s, The Leather Experts, a staple in malls nationwide), he invested in a series of start-ups, one of which became Rainforest Café. He was the CEO of Rainforest from 1994 to 2000.

  In 1990, some other venture investors told Lyle about a project to build and operate an Indian casino north of Minneapolis. Berman invested $3 million and took the venture public in 1992 as Grand Casinos. Eventually, the company operated three Indian casinos in Minnesota and two in Louisiana. It also owned three Mississippi casinos, and was part owner of the ill-fated Stratosphere in Las Vegas.

  The Stratosphere again demonstrated that the bonds among poker players were strong enough to survive stresses beyond competition at the tables. The Stratosphere started as Vegas World, a casino built by Pittsburgh native and self-nicknamed “Polish Prince,” Bob Stupak. Vegas World, a wacky place with a spaceman painted on a hotel tower and featuring Cher as a headliner during one of her many career slumps, was located in the no-man’s-land between the Strip and Downtown. Stupak, a tireless promoter who once ran for mayor of Las Vegas, was also a high-stakes poker player. He won the Deuce-to-Seven Championship in 1989. He tried expanding his eclectic property into a first-class resort, but overextended himself. Grand Casinos provided financial help, but the project still fell into bankruptcy, and Grand took a beating. Nevertheless, Berman and Stupak remained friendly competitors at the poker table.

  In 1998, Grand merged with the casino division of Hilton to form Park Place Entertainment, one of the world’s largest gaming companies. After clashing with the board of directors at Park Place, Lyle began running Lakes Gaming, developing contracts to build and operate more casinos on Indian lands.

  Berman’s poker credentials were first-class. He started playing in Vegas in 1983 and became good friends with Chip Reese and Doyle Brunson. He was a regular part of the highest-stakes games during the World Series and whenever the biggest players congregated.

  Was he a live one, an outsider the pros built a game around? The point was arguable. He did not play nearly as much as the pros, and made no secret that he didn’t really like limit poker and mixed games. (He would prefer playing No-Limit or Pot Limit Omaha or Hold ’Em, though he played all the games at high limits.) Lyle could certainly afford to be the live one, and enjoyed the time spent with his friends, who were also very talented players.

  On the other hand, he was a tough competitor with a long list of tournament successes for an occasional player: three World Series bracelets in different forms of poker (Limit Omaha, No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em, and Deuce-to-Seven), a final table appearance in the main event, and a victory in the main event of Binion’s Hall of Fame Tournament in 1991, when that was the second biggest tournament of the year. In September 2002, he was inducted into Binion’s Poker Hall of Fame, one of only twelve men to receive that honor in their lifetime.

  Berman started putting his credibility to work by first approaching the Bellagio to be a charter sponsor of this new World Poker Tour. Berman wanted the Bellagio to host two tournaments during the first season. The new venture, World Poker Tour LLC, would charge each venue $50,000 per tournament to have its property featured. This would be a substantial sum for promotional consideration, in view of the fact that poker had never found a good TV audience, no one knew whether players would support a poker tour, and the WPT did not have a TV contract.

  Doug Dalton, the director of poker operations for the Bellagio and parent company MGM Mirage, however, wanted the company to take the leap. This was exactly the kind of promotion he wanted to do for the poker room, which would in turn both attract poker players to the Bellagio (some of whom would be good customers for the casino) and show off the property wherever and whenever the tournaments aired. Bellagio president Bobby Baldwin, who knew Berman from years of high-stakes poker games, agreed to let Dalton give it a try. To seal the deal, Berman and Lipscomb agreed to charge all the charter members of the tour only half the site fee for the first season.

  For Dalton, the timing couldn’t be better. He had just hired Jack McClelland, longtime tournament director of the World Series of Poker, as his director of tournament operations. Between the two of them, they were able to help Berman cement the first season of the tour. Dalton lined up the Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles, and the Aviation Club in Paris. McClelland convinced Jack Binion, owner of the Horseshoe Casino Hotel in Tunica, Mississippi, to host a WPT event. McClelland’s contacts at the Commerce Casino in L.A., and online poker site UltimateBet.com also came thr
ough and they hosted events during the first season. The tour eventually lined up twelve tournaments for that season, in large part through the efforts of Dalton and McClelland.

  Asking tournament players to plunk down $10,000 twice within a week may have been expecting too much, but scheduling the first event of the tour at this time benefited the non-Las Vegas players, who were still in town from the World Series. Without the luxury of preliminary events or satellites, 146 players still showed up to pay and play. Because it was Berman and the Bellagio, the high-stakes pros supported the event. Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese played, giving the tournament immediate legitimacy.

  This time, Doyle Brunson took a run at this new generation of tournament players. After the first day, he was in fourth place out of 100 players still left. He was eliminated, however, on the second day of the competition. (Chip did not last the first day this time.) Lyle Berman outlasted his friends. He was in tenth position at the end of Day Two, but was eliminated on Day Three. The final table featured an eclectic mix of cash game pros and tournament specialists, including John Juanda, Freddy Deeb, Scotty Nguyen, and John Hennigan. First place and $556,000 went to Gus Hansen, a tall, angular Dane who started as a professional backgammon player and alternately awed and infuriated his competitors with his bizarre hand selection and reads on his opponents. It would be ten months before the edited version of the final table appeared on the Travel Channel, but the players were excited about the debut.

  After a disappointing World Series in which he put forth little effort and had no positive results, Howard Lederer decided to change his approach to tournament poker. Other than the tradition of the no-limit championship, he had gradually cut himself off from the tournament world to focus on cash games. Though he did not regret, and in fact relished, the time spent playing the biggest games in the world with legends like Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese, he wondered if he was missing out on something by losing touch with tournament poker. More important, was he about to miss out on something?