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

  John Hennigan learned his gambling in Philadelphia, where he started as a professional pool player and turned to poker when he ran out of opponents. Nicknamed Johnny World because of his willingness to bet on anything, he once took a bet that he couldn’t live within the Des Moines city limits for a month. (There were different stories about how that bet concluded, but Hennigan did not last the month.) Hennigan was part of the new breed of high-stakes pros in their thirties. He was an erratic player, but his A-game had even the top pros in awe.

  Chau Giang, Jennifer Harman, and Todd Brunson had all arrived at Table One by the same route, but by overcoming different obstacles. Giang, forty-six, had left his native Vietnam with almost nothing in the late 1970s and settled in Colorado Springs as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. Unable to make ends meet, he started making money in local low-stakes poker games. He moved to Las Vegas and worked his way up, like Brunson and Harman, level by level, until he was a premier player in the highest games. In fact, he was establishing himself as the biggest winner at Table One. He was so skilled that a few other players believed he might be using voodoo, a belief he was aware of and did nothing to discourage.

  Jennifer Harman, a small, attractive blonde in her mid-thirties with delicate features, was the only woman who regularly played and won at such high stakes. She had no role models or mentors and was naturally slower than her peers to become part of the all-male Vegas poker subculture. Gradually, she won their respect, which was inevitable when she won their money. She also had to deal with being estranged from her father for many years as a result of her career choice.

  Among the top players, few of them had families initially supportive of their decision to become professional gamblers. Even Todd Brunson, whose father was Doyle Brunson, had trouble at home with the decision. While players would snidely remark that his famous father’s money and instruction paved his way to Table One, the opposite, in fact, was true.

  If Andy Beal was intimidated by the quality of his opposition, he did not show it. In fact, he insisted on raising the stakes, from $1,000-$2,000 to $2,000-$4,000, $3,000-$6,000, and finally $4,000-$8,000 by the end of the second day, making it the highest-stakes game since the Bellagio opened in 1998.

  As the game filled up, it became less fun for Andy, and he kept raising the stakes to maintain his interest, as well as to test the professionals. Jennifer Harman had never played this high and noticed everyone was playing tighter than usual, saving bets, and abandoning the aggressiveness that was the hallmark of the highest-stakes professionals.

  Andy Beal is backing down the best players in the world by raising the limits, she thought. This is unbelievable.

  Andy won over $100,000 in a game filled with the world’s top money players. He was flabbergasted. Maybe I’m actually a good poker player, he thought. But he also realized that he had a lot more fun playing three-handed against Todd Brunson and the Irishman, then heads up against Todd, going wild-man.

  He returned to Dallas and the professionals knew little more about him than when he arrived. But they were sure of one thing.

  He would be back.

  2

  HEADS UP

  MARCH 2001

  Andy Beal felt uneasy on the American Airlines flight from Dallas to Las Vegas. The more he thought about his success at poker the month before, the more he realized he had simply gotten lucky. To succeed this time, he would need more than luck. He would need to attack the edge the professionals typically enjoyed. And he would have to be careful.

  Upon his return from the previous trip, he asked an assistant to order the fifteen best-selling poker books on Amazon.com. He had been reading them, but they offered only a little help. He agreed with the books that the concept of pot odds was of paramount importance, but they did not give enough attention to the statistics.

  Pot odds are the payout offered by the pot expressed in comparison to the price to call a bet. For example, if there was $100 in the pot and the player had to put in $20, the pot was offering 5-to-1 odds. These odds were then compared to the likelihood the player making the decision would win the hand, either by having the best cards or drawing to the best hand. When it came to figuring out what hand an opponent had, pot odds became subjective. If a player had two pair and a straight draw (four cards to a straight), the likelihood of winning the hand depended on whether the player needed a straight to win. But Andy found the books deficient in presenting objective information. He knew mathematical tables weren’t for everyone, but the key to the game was understanding the probabilities. Without knowing them, all the strategies advocated by the authors would be less effective.

  The basic strategy advocated in these books was too conservative. Sure, you should raise with a pair of aces, but you could expect them only once in 221 hands. There just wasn’t enough action in the waiting game. Finally, the books devoted almost no attention to shorthanded games. If Andy could arrange it, he would play with just a few opponents or heads up.

  Andy also had conflicting thoughts about the character of his opponents. They had been nothing but friendly and gracious to him, but he did not really know them or their world. Could they have been letting him win? Were his winning sessions just their way of baiting the hook, keeping him interested? Somehow, he doubted that they would give away over $100,000 on just a hint of a greater return. He also had to consider that it was unlikely he was being hustled because he was the one who wanted to keep increasing the stakes. Still, he wanted the stakes high enough that no one would toss him an occasional win.

  He was more concerned about the opposite situation, being cheated. Again, everything about them and the game seemed aboveboard, but they were all intimately familiar with both one another and all the angles, while he was the only outsider in their game.

  Beal was only vaguely aware of poker’s seamy past. No one liked to talk about the details, but before 1980, some players would hold out cards and slip them back into play at opportune moments. Unscrupulous casino personnel would occasionally collude with players, putting marked cards in the game, readable only by highly trained cheats. Most of these practices developed in the era when the mob had a big presence in the operation of casinos. (Even the mob, however, could get cheated in a poker room. Doyle Brunson told a story in Gambling Wizards, a series of interviews with gamblers conducted by Richard Munchkin, about the late Johnny Moss, who won the World Series of Poker championship three times and was hailed, by the end of his life, as the “Grand Old Man of Poker.” Back in the 1950s, Moss had told Brunson, he tried to cheat Flamingo owner Gus Greenbaum by having compatriots peeking at his opponent’s cards through a hole in the wall. He was discovered, barely escaped with his life, and stayed away from Vegas for nearly two decades.)

  At least in Las Vegas, that era ended long ago. The new generation of players around 1980, including Chip Reese and Eric Drache, started running card rooms themselves, stamping out such practices and letting the old-time cheaters die out. In the ethic of the times, they usually let the known cheaters play if they promised not to cheat. Eric Drache swore that the cheaters usually honored their promise. According to Reese, the cheaters, when they weren’t cheating, were the worst players in the game and they were desperate to gamble whether they could cheat or not. The ones who didn’t die off simply lost all their money.

  The influx of corporate investment in Las Vegas, first from Howard Hughes in the 1960s, then from Hilton, Holiday Inn, Sheraton, and Mandalay Resort Group (originally Circus Circus) and high-profile individuals like Kirk Kerkorian, drove out the dirty money and created an incentive to clean up unsavory practices. A company like MGM Mirage (made up of pieces of Kerkorian’s holdings, plus the former Golden Nugget/Mirage public company) made hundreds of millions of dollars per year from its gaming licenses. There was too much money to be made honestly, far more than could be made cheating on poker or even risking the taint of a cheating scandal.

  In fact, several casino operators were high-stakes players. Bellagio president Bobby Baldwi
n was the 1978 World Champion and played in a $4,000-$8,000 game with Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, and a few others during each year’s World Series. Another regular in that game was Lyle Berman, a founder of the World Poker Tour and a principal in several companies that operated casinos. These men would be putting too much at risk to participate in a game where cheating was a possibility. The caliber of players in the biggest games also made cheating less likely in those games than anywhere else. The best players didn’t need to cheat and were the least likely victims because of their observational skills. The highest-stakes players also policed their games. Nothing could kill a poker game faster than the possibility of cheating.

  Nevada gaming regulations, technology, and the desire to remove all doubt about the honesty of the games created an entirely different atmosphere compared with Vegas’s Wild West days. Take the playing cards. Dealers would change the deck every half-hour and the setup (the two different-colored decks at each table) every hour. The decks were kept in a secure location, under constant surveillance. Kem, the company that sold the Bellagio poker room thousands of decks of cards per year, placed an extra seal on each deck, which was broken in view of the players. Dealers were trained in a detailed ritual of spreading, counting, making available for inspection, and handling the deck.

  In addition, dealers changed tables every thirty minutes and were randomly assigned. They never knew before their shift at which tables they would be dealing. Cameras kept the poker room and the area around it under constant surveillance. This included the areas immediately outside the room: the entrances from the casino, the Starting Line bar, and the sports book; the offices; the area where the dealers took their breaks; the cashier’s cage and the privacy room where players opened their safe deposit boxes. A camera was trained on every table twenty-four hours a day.

  The only cheating even remotely possible in a Las Vegas poker room was when two players, without the knowledge of the casino or other players in the game, colluded to signal their cards and manipulate the betting. It was almost unheard of in big games, but theoretically possible.

  Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour flight, Andy Beal struggled, both to fit his six-foot, two-inch frame comfortably in the cramped coach seat, and to figure out how to prevent the possibility that some of the pros might team up against him. The ideal situation, he realized, was to play heads up.

  He had broached the subject during his February trip. On a short break, he saw Jennifer Harman standing in the sports book. Jennifer was on the waiting list for Andy’s game and was just killing time.

  “Jennifer,” he had asked, “how about you and I play heads up for a little while?”

  It was difficult to explain to Andy why she couldn’t do that. If they started another game, it would immediately fill up with players on the waiting list or players from his original game following him to the new game. The prospect of taking Andy’s money packed the poker room’s high-limit tables. Jennifer could not separate Andy from the herd without repercussions.

  “Then how about we break up the game into two tables and play shorthanded?”

  Beal did not quite understand that any game he played would fill up, even if he kept raising the stakes. The Bellagio was a public place of business. You could not keep players from sitting down at a table, and if Andy and his money were there, players definitely would have taken all the empty seats.

  Andy had called Doug Dalton, the manager of the Bellagio poker room, and asked for an accommodation. Dalton explained that anyone could sit at any game in the poker room if they had the minimum buy-in, so he could not exclude anyone who wanted to play.

  “Look,” Andy said, getting frustrated, “I’ll pay the time charge for every other seat at the table. But if I can’t play heads up, I’m going to play somewhere else.”

  Dalton said, “I’m sorry but I can’t do anything about it.”

  Beal was furious. He was aware of the outrageous demands that casinos fulfilled for big players. Maybe they just didn’t take him seriously yet.

  He made up his mind. He would raise the issue again with Doyle Brunson, and not take no for an answer. He had wired several million dollars to the Bellagio earlier in the day. If that didn’t show how serious he was, perhaps he would have to find another poker room and other players.

  If a blackjack or craps high-roller had asked for a private table, the casino would have accommodated him. If he brought a seven-figure bankroll to gamble, they would probably get Wayne Newton to pull his chair out when he sat down. But poker was different.

  Casinos made very little money directly from their poker operations. Nevada gaming regulations limited the Bellagio to raking 10 percent of the amount wagered per hand. Based on the structure established by the poker room, the house usually raked much less, on a scale based on the size of the pot, with a maximum of $3-$5, depending on the game. This was the arrangement for games at limits of $15-$30 and below. For higher-stakes games, the Bellagio took much less, in the form of a time charge every half-hour of $6-$10, depending on the stakes. Unlike the other games in the casino, where the Bellagio was betting against the player, the casino bore no risk of loss, so running a poker room provided a reliable, steady profit, assuming the room was busy and management kept costs under control. But casinos wanted to risk losing to the players in exchange for the chance at greater profits. The odds were in their favor, and any casino could make more from rows of slot machines than it could from poker tables.

  Before the current poker boom, the stereotypical view of poker by casino management was that it was an unwelcome distraction or, at best, attracted tightfisted locals who dressed sloppy, complained a lot, and wanted everything for free. Until 2003, the Las Vegas resorts were closing their rooms and the new properties never bothered offering poker. Five men share the credit for keeping poker alive in Las Vegas until the current frenzy reversed the course and found casinos scrambling to open and even expand their poker rooms: Jack Binion, Steve Wynn, Eric Drache, Bobby Baldwin, and Doug Dalton.

  The 1970s were, in a sense, the “bad old days,” with the threat of cheating, but poker also flourished. Bill Boyd, considered the greatest Five Card Draw player in history, had run the Golden Nugget’s poker room for over thirty years, keeping a commitment in Las Vegas to honest poker. The Horseshoe did not have a poker room but hosted the World Series of Poker and spread poker during the Series. The Dunes, Stardust, Flamingo, Sahara, MGM Grand, Aladdin, Silver Bird, and Caesars Palace all had substantial poker rooms at various times during the 1970s. Johnny Moss, Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, Bobby Baldwin, and Eric Drache all managed or hosted rooms.

  Steve Wynn, the charismatic CEO of the Golden Nugget and a poker player (he could be seen in a crude video of an early World Series of Poker playing in the main event, wearing what looks like a Confederate soldier’s uniform), began monopolizing poker talent. Wynn looked for management talent in different places than his competitors, but he saved poker in Las Vegas during the process.

  Wynn hired Eric Drache to run the Golden Nugget card room. Drache, in turns both cultured and street-savvy, discovered poker in Las Vegas on a weekend trip in 1970 and never left. (Serendipity had always played a large role in guiding Drache’s professional life. He dropped out of Rutgers when he found out after a day at Freehold Raceway that he had missed a chemistry exam.) Drache ran the World Series of Poker from 1973 to 1989 for the Binion family and kept the tournament afloat in the early years. (The incident that led him to offer his services to the Binions illustrated the level of professionalism in the pre-Drache years: He showed up for the Seven Card Stud championship only to be told it was postponed for a day “because Johnny Moss was up all night playing.”)

  Drache not only turned the Series from a gathering of gambling buddies to the international event it remains, but he pioneered satellites, minitournaments in which players put up a fraction of a regular tournament buy-in with the winner getting a spot in the main tournament. Satellites were the reason the main event grew from
102 participants in 1982 to 631 in 2002. The skyrocketing attendance at the main event—2,576 entries in 2004—had been the result of online poker sites running World Series of Poker satellites.

  Eric Drache had a deal with his friend Bobby Baldwin. Whichever one of them got a job running a poker room first would bring in the other. Steve Wynn, therefore, hired Baldwin as the poker host. Baldwin, an intense young Oklahoman nicknamed “The Owl,” was a top high-stakes poker player. Baldwin had so impressed Wynn that Wynn promoted him out of the poker room and into management at the Golden Nugget. Baldwin later became president of the Mirage, chief financial officer of Mirage Resorts (the public company acquired by MGM Grand in 1999), chief executive officer of Mirage Resorts after the acquisition, and president of the Bellagio.

  Drache ran the Golden Nugget poker room until it closed in 1989, then opened the Mirage poker room nine months later. He was the poker manager at the Mirage until 1993. He later worked with longtime poker enthusiast Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler, on purchasing a casino in Los Angeles. While waiting for the casino to open—a process that took several years, because it needed to be rebuilt—Eric organized a Seven Card Stud game at Flynt’s home that eventually ran for 400 nights before moving to the Hustler Casino. Stakes rose from $400-$800 to $2,000- $4,000, making it one of the highest continuing games of all-time, rivaling Bellagio’s Table One.