The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Page 3

These characteristics, coincidentally, were ideal for a poker player: physical strength, initial reserve, courage of convictions, focus, and a sense of humor. But in February 2001, Beal was playing poker in Las Vegas for only the second time. He had spent nearly twenty-five years in real estate and banking, and became one of the great entrepreneurial success stories of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, he was virtually unknown, which suited him just fine.

  The professionals made casual conversation. Naturally, they had an ulterior motive; they wanted him to give away some information about himself that would help them take his money. This was a lark to Andy, and he was having a good time, so he told them he was a banker from Dallas who was giving up blackjack for poker.

  His opponents were working professionals trying to eke out a decent living in a capricious business. The $80-$160 game was a way station for most poker players—a place to build a bankroll to challenge a bigger game, rebuild after losing at the bigger games, or recover from a serious reverse on borrowed money. These men were grinders and their civility only barely covered the tension of their daily lives, exacerbated by an obvious novice winning. “Always be nice to the live one” was a universal rule of professional poker players, however, so they were unfailingly polite, civil, and complimentary to the newcomer.

  This delicate balance—simultaneously casual, civil, friendly, competitive, intense—was shattered by the arrival of Mike Laing, who sat in Seat Seven. Laing, a professional poker player the same age as Beal, was his opposite in every way imaginable. While Beal radiated robust good health, Laing’s pallid complexion and the bloating of his once long face and narrow features, the consequence of years of heavy drinking, made him look unhealthy.

  Beal would prefer to listen than talk; one of Laing’s principal weapons was his nonstop chatter at the table: small talk, trash talk, boasting, insults, self-deprecating humor, and drunken raving.

  Andy Beal built a financially sound professional life for himself by managing risk. Mike Laing, in the poker business, was almost always broke, despite some great successes and an uncanny ability, especially in the late stages of big tournaments, to read his opponents. Laing won $212,000 in the $2,500 Limit Hold ’Em event of the World Series of Poker in 1994, in front of one of the largest crowds to gather for a final table of a preliminary event. Most of those watching, it turned out, were Mike’s creditors. Despite his status as a frequent borrower, however, he was diligent about paying back his lenders. Within a week, he paid back everybody he had borrowed from, and had less than $2,000 left.

  Andy was intensely private, building his real estate fortune, banking business, and other interests without accessing public capital markets, making no more than the required minimum public financial disclosures, and without courting the press and drawing attention to himself. Laing regularly brought his dysfunctional world to the poker table. Between hands, he would borrow and repay (and, on the rare occasions when he had it, loan) money around the poker room. His ex-wife would sometimes show up on the rail, heckling him. She actually left him and delivered the news during the night of his World Series win. With a pep talk from Vince Burgio, a fellow professional who, like many of Laing’s contemporaries, saw him as a good person with great talent despite his flaws (and the services of Jack Daniel’s), Laing dominated the final table. Then, of course, there was the heavy drinking, which was part of virtually all the seemingly endless stories about Mike Laing.

  On this particular night, Laing was returning to the Bellagio for the first time after the greatest success of his professional career. On January 26, 2001, Mike won the main event of the inaugural World Poker Challenge at the Reno Hilton. (This was one of the most prestigious poker titles outside Binion’s Horseshoe’s annual World Series of Poker. The Reno event has ridden the stratospheric rise in poker’s popularity and is now televised as part of the Travel Channel’s coverage of the World Poker Tour. First place in 2004 paid over $600,000; it may pay $1 million in 2005.) Laing outlasted a glittering final table including Scotty Nguyen, Daniel Negreanu, and Amarillo Slim to win $331,000, the biggest payday of his life.

  Laing won in his unique fashion. At a significant disadvantage in chips against his last opponent, he repeatedly went all-in with hands like trey-deuce and nine-four, then showed his bluffs when his opponent folded. The next time he went all-in, his opponent called, only to find Laing holding two aces.

  He also made a bizarre proposal at the final table. Because of the steep payout structure and the large blinds and antes at the end of tournaments, players would frequently propose deals to divide the top prizes more evenly, and play out the tournament for a smaller sum, as well as the right to be called champion. When there were four players left, all roughly equivalent in chips, Mike Laing suggested that they each take $20 and play one hand for the remaining $600,000 in prize money.

  The gallery laughed, but Laing would have done it. Another player once said that “Mike Laing lives like he is allergic to money,” and few would dispute the characterization.

  Laing came into the Bellagio’s poker room that night in February 2001 with over $300,000 in cash. Unlike the period following his World Series win, he did not have a long list of creditors. In fact, his small safe deposit box at the Bellagio would not hold all the cash, so he walked around the poker room looking for something to do with fistfuls of hundred-dollar bills, banded together in stacks of $5,000. (Putting the money in a bank was apparently never a consideration.) He had also been drinking.

  In the corner of the high-limit area at Table One, he saw Jennifer Harman waiting for a game to start. Harman, a regular in the highest-stakes cash games, knew Mike, but everybody knew Mike. “Jennifer,” he asked, “I don’t have room in my box. Can you hold $25,000 for me?” Without waiting for her reply, he shoved five stacks at her and walked to the next table, still $15,000 in his hands.

  He saw two pros, Marlon and Irish, playing Pot Limit Omaha. It was an expensive game, and not Mike’s specialty. (Omaha, like hold ’em, requires players to make the best possible hand from their hole cards and five community cards. The main differences are that players receive four cards instead of two, and the five-card hand must be made from exactly two hole cards and three community cards. Pot limit means that players could bet an amount equal to whatever was in the pot at any time, leading to an exponentially rising betting structure.) Receiving congratulations and trading barbs as he worked the room, he sat down and played a hand, winning it. Then he got up and walked away.

  The Irishman, a former world champion in Pot Limit Omaha, naturally started verbally jabbing at Laing for winning one hand and leaving. Big mistake.

  “How much you got in front of you?” Mike asked him.

  “About five thousand,” Irish responded.

  “I’ll flip you a coin for it.”

  When Irish declined, it became Laing’s turn to unload, which he did with gusto as he walked to the nearby $80-$160 hold ’em table and sat down at Seat Seven, two seats to the left of Andy Beal. Still holding $15,000 in cash plus the handful of chips won during his one hand of Omaha, he ignored congratulations on his Reno victory and instead told his colleagues how he put the Irishman in his place. He asked around the table for someone to sell him a rack of $20 chips, exchanging $2,000 for a rack.

  Catching Andy Beal’s eye in the Five Seat, Mike Laing said, “You want to flip for a rack?”

  Certain the pros were on to his style of play, Andy had started playing more conservatively. It was getting boring, folding hand after hand. He appreciated that the clownlike pro wanted to shake things up. Gamble.

  “Sure.”

  Mike fished through his pocket, pulled out a penny, and passed it across to Andy. “You flip, you call.”

  The dealer and the other players watched as Andy flipped the penny in the air and called heads. It bounced on the green felt and turned up heads.

  Mike Laing pushed Andy the rack of chips. Then he separated $2,000 from his cash and pushed it over to A
ndy to rebuy that rack of chips.

  But before the dealer could start the hand, Mike said, “I want to do it again.”

  Andy Beal quickly agreed. “Okay, heads.” He tossed the penny in the air and the result was the same. Two more times, they repeated the process.

  One of the other players grumbled, “Damn it, we’re here to play poker. If you want to flip a coin, do it on your own time.” Action stopped at other nearby tables as players turned to watch Mike Laing lose $8,000 in coin flips.

  Finally, a floorman came by to restore order. “Come on, Mike. Let’s get back to the game, okay?”

  Mike stood up and handed him his stack of yellow $20 chips, $400. “Just one more, for eight thousand. Double or nothing?” The floorman quietly walked away.

  Andy agreed to one more flip, but there was a question about whether Mike had enough cash left to cover a loss. Just then, Jennifer Harman came by to give Mike his $25,000 back. She was leaving and told him she didn’t want to hold on to his money.

  Andy flipped the penny in the air and, like the previous four flips, called heads. This time, however, he tossed the penny much higher. It hit the padded rail, bounced on the floor, and rolled beneath the table near Andy. The penny joined the eclectic collection of items that find their way under poker tables: chip racks, empty water bottles, straws, swizzle sticks, the Daily Racing Form, Card Player magazine, sports parley cards, and candy and gum wrappers.

  As the other players scrambled under the table to see the coin, Mike Laing knew if he could not see the coin, he should call off the action. He would call off the bet and demand a new coin flip.

  But he was drunk, and he could not put his thought into words fast enough. Andy Beal looked under the table, called, “Tails, you win,” and scooped up the penny before anyone had a chance to see it.

  Mike Laing kept his mouth shut. Andy handed back the $8,000 in cash Mike lost to him over the previous three minutes. The dealer began the next hand, and players from other tables returned to their games. Neither man remembered anything about the $80-$160 game that followed, but they gave everyone in the room a story they were sure to repeat for years.

  The next day, the two men met again in the poker room. A new $80-$160 hold ’em game was about to start and both arrived in time to play in it. Mike Laing approached Andy Beal and introduced himself and Andy did the same as they shook hands; they hadn’t learned each other’s names the previous evening.

  ”I was kind of drunk last night, Andy, but I’m dead sober today. A lot of people would have taken advantage of the situation when that coin rolled under the table. I want you to know that I think you are an honorable person and a true gentleman—”

  Andy muttered his thanks.

  “—and if you ever get yourself broke in this town, you can count on me for $10,000, no problem.”

  It was a sincere offer. Even though Mike Laing was almost always broke and scrounging for a stake or watching from the rail, he would still lend an outrageous sum of money to a stranger if he had a good feeling about the guy.

  Mike eventually lost all that money from the Reno tournament, but he never had to loan it to Andy Beal. Mike’s instinct for a good credit risk was as good as his card-reading skills.

  Andy soon became bored with the size of the stakes in the $80-$160 game, and moved to a $400-$800 hold ’em table. Even at these stakes, where players regularly won or lost $20,000 in a session, Andy was getting restless. Waiting for a good hand was becoming a chore. In blackjack, you made financial decisions every hand. In poker, it seemed to be fold-fold-fold while you waited for cards.

  It was late, and Andy should have gone to bed, but he never slept well in Vegas so he stayed up and played. As players left to go home, the game became more interesting. Down to three players, Andy started playing more hands, recognizing that he no longer had to wait for premium cards. In addition, if he represented a big hand early, his opponents (who were also not waiting for premium cards) could fold, increasing the value of aggressive play.

  Against two world-class pros, Andy played in a style he described as “wild-man”: playing nearly every hand, always raising. The Irishman, Mike Laing’s foil from the evening before, had joined the game because he saw the newcomer, and was getting the worst of it. Andy was running over him, and when the pro made a stand with a decent hand, those turned out to be the occasions when Beal had big cards or outdrew him. After a few hours of three-handed, Irish lost all the money he had in front of him and left.

  Andy was also winning money from his other opponent, Todd Brunson. Brunson, thirty, was one of the youngest of the high-stakes professionals. His father, Doyle Brunson, was one of the world’s best and most famous poker players. Never completely escaping the shadow of his famous father, Todd nonetheless worked his way up the poker hierarchy on his own, rung by rung, winning some big tournaments and establishing himself as a first-class money player, especially in Texas Hold ’Em.

  Todd had left a bigger game at Table One as it was breaking up to get a seat in this smaller game with the newcomer. Even when the game came down to heads up—one-on-one—he could not make a dent in Beal’s growing stacks of chips.

  As the poker room started emptying out, they played on, talking a little.

  “I want to play higher,” Andy told Todd.

  “Okay,” Todd said, “I’ll play you higher.”

  “No, not this time. I’d like to come back and play a lot higher, like $10,000-$20,000.”

  Todd didn’t think he was serious. This $400-$800 game was not particularly large by Todd’s standards, but this guy wanted to play for twenty-five times as much.

  “If you come by tomorrow afternoon, they’ll get a bigger game going in the corner. And I can talk to some people about getting you a big game next time.”

  They played heads up for a few hours before Andy decided it was time to try to fall asleep. He won money from Todd, and cleaned out the Irishman, so it was a successful night. He wanted to get some rest before coming back the next afternoon and trying the game in the corner.

  When Andy got up, they shook hands and introduced themselves. “I’ll see you around,” Andy said as he left.

  Todd thought, This guy must be full of shit.

  Andy Beal had his bank wire more money to the Bellagio, and he played at Table One over the next two days. The regular game at Table One was usually a $1,000-$2,000 (or more) mixed game, where the players starting the game choose various forms of poker to play in ten-hand rotations.

  This was the site of the biggest game in the room and, usually, the biggest game in the world. Winning a high-profile poker tournament brought a big payday and a measure of fame, but the best players were those who would risk $100,000 or more every time they sat down at that table. They also excelled at all forms of poker, so the mix would usually include, along with Texas Hold ’Em, some forms of Omaha (with a high-low version where the worst hand wins half the pot), Seven Card Stud, Seven Card Stud Hi/Lo, some low poker (like Razz, which is played like Seven Card Stud but the worst hand wins, or forms of single- or triple-draw poker like Ace-to-Five and Deuce-to-Seven), and something exotic, like Chinese Poker (which is rarely played except in high-stakes games, where four players receive thirteen cards and receive points by making three hands of three-to-five cards and comparing them with their opponents’ hands).

  It was so rare that a completely new player would play for such high stakes, however, that the pros would play whatever game he wanted. When Andy arrived, he and three other pros started playing $1,000-$2,000 hold ’em.

  By the next day, the table filled up and there was a list of players waiting to play. One high-stakes pro drove through the night from California to get in the game. He heard about Andy Beal late at night, too late to catch the last flight out of L.A. He didn’t want to wait until the next morning and risk arriving too late to get an open seat.

  By the second day, Andy Beal was facing a lineup of the best big-money poker players in the world: Doyle Brunson, C
hip Reese, John Hennigan, Jennifer Harman, Chau Giang, and Todd Brunson.

  Doyle Brunson was poker’s equivalent of Babe Ruth, a larger-than-life character who shaped the game’s history. He had done it all: back-to-back world championships (the main event of Binion’s Horseshoe’s World Series of Poker is universally regarded as poker’s world championship), eight World Series bracelets (winning any event comes with, in addition to the cash, a gaudy bracelet, and Series records are measured in bracelets), destroyer of Texas road games, author of the best strategy manual, and a fixture in the biggest cash games in Vegas and around the world going on forty years.

  Unlike baseball’s Bambino, Brunson in his late sixties was still a threat to hit the ball out of the park. He had largely given up playing in tournaments, but still played in the biggest cash games, the higher the better, and still won. A fierce competitor and a phenomenal athlete as a young man—he had been scouted by the Minneapolis Lakers in the early 1950s before suffering a crippling leg injury in an industrial accident—he remained one of the world’s highest-stakes golfers until his bad leg finally forced him to retire for good. For good, that is, until some of the young Turks in the golf-poker group started offering propositions: They’d give him a stroke per hole, he could have someone tee up every shot, he could tee off from the forward tees. He finally shut the kids up by agreeing to a nine-hole match play contest, winning the first five holes, and never playing again.

  Chip Reese was the only professional within two decades of Brunson in age, achievement, and experience. Reese took Vegas by storm in the 1970s and was now considered the best all-around big-money poker player in the world, and high on the list of gin rummy and backgammon players as well.

  Doyle and Chip had played in the biggest poker games ever contested. During the 1970s, they played in the wild games built around casino owner Major Riddle and drug dealer Jimmy Chagra. Chagra would toss $20,000 blind bets into the pot. Riddle, advanced in age, once played for twenty-four hours straight and quit only because he had to attend a board of directors meeting at the Dunes. Trying to recoup his massive losses in the game, he made the other players promise they wouldn’t quit while he was gone. They won enormous sums of money in those games. They played the legendary “Frenchman,” Francis Gross, even traveling to Paris for one final game when he was too sick to travel. (The Frenchman went out in style, winning over a million dollars from his visitors before peacefully expiring.) Chip also played against Archie Karas, the daring gambler who turned a $5,000 loan into more than $10 million during an amazing run at pool and craps. They both played with George the Greek, the colorful, volatile tycoon who once set his cards on fire in anger at the Mirage. (Mike Laing, in a similar fit, once ate one of his cards.)