"The Kid".. part 1

[bennythedip2]

Stu Ungar's pockets bulged with $100 bills. He dressed in Versace and kept a closet full of custom-tailored silk slacks. Tens of millions in cash passed between his manicured fingernails and dropped into the pockets of hustlers, drug dealers, and whores.

During his first time on a golf course, Ungar gambled away $80,000 before getting off the practice green. On the streets of Las Vegas he wrecked five Jaguars and a Mercedes-Benz. He turned down an invitation to the White House ("I wouldn't know which fork to use"), and once proved to be of drinking age by slapping $20,000 down on the bar. "What kind of teenager walks around with all this money in his pocket?" he demanded to know.

The barman promptly poured him a Scotch on the rocks.

Back in the late 1970s, when Ungar began cutting a wide swath through Vegas card rooms, other poker stars around town nicknamed him "The Kid" - largely because he resembled a child as he took huge sums of money away from middle-aged men. Ungar's card counting skills were suitably deadly that he got himself banned from every blackjack pit in Vegas. He once short-circuited a computer that had been programmed to beat him at gin rummy - "The ******* thing went through shock," he said. "It was hysterical" - and was widely acknowledged as the best in the world at that mathematically ball-busting game. But it was in the more publicized arena of high-stakes poker where Ungar made a name for himself: He won 10 of the 30 major tournaments he entered, raking millions of dollars and setting a standard that few players have come close to matching.

In 1997, Stu Ungar became the first person to win three World Series of Poker championships. After claiming a jackpot of $1 million, he vowed to mirror his back-to-back series victories from 1980 and '81 by winning again in 1998.

For one year, the poker world held its breath, waiting for Ungar to fulfill his audacious, Namath-style guarantee - and hoping the Kid could hang in there and do it before his inevitable crash.

On May 11, 1998, 30 minutes before the World Series championship kicked off, Binion's Horseshoe was a crush of big-money players. Guys who hadn't been together since the previous year's Series greeted one another with hearty handshakes and bear hugs. Debts got paid off with thick stacks of $100 bills. Posing alongside Doyle Brunson and Puggy Pearson, Amarillo Slim grinned big and fanned out a straight flush for a local newsman's camera. Actors Matt Damon and Ed Norton, playing in the World Series as a publicity stunt to promote their movie Rounders, were trailed by a dozen gushy teenage girls and half as many elbowing photographers.

Only one hotly anticipated player was missing from the pregame festivities: Stu Ungar, poker's reigning champ. The Binion's people, surely frantic behind closed doors, played it cool for the public. No matter, they insisted. He'd be down to defend his title. In a profession where character is as prized as talent, the very idea of someone failing to defend the World Series crown was unthinkable. However, as game time neared, Ungar remained conspicuously absent.

Most concerned about the potential no-show was the nattily turned-out professional gambler Billy Baxter, who had put up Ungar's $10,000 entry fee in exchange for 50 percent of his potential winnings. The year before, he and Ungar had had an identical arrangement, and it paid off magnificently - to the tune of $500,000 for Baxter. Now he was rocking from the toes to the heels of his shiny black loafers, looking around the room every few seconds. "Where's our man?" he wondered aloud. The question was returned with quizzical glances.

At about 12:50, 10 minutes before the first hand was to be dealt, Baxter reached for a Horseshoe house phone and caught Ungar in his room. "Come on down, Stuey," he said. "They're getting ready to play here."

"I'm resting," Ungar replied.

"Resting? You've had the last three weeks to rest."

No response from Ungar.

"If you don't show up, I'm gonna take the money down."

"Take the damned money down," Ungar shot back. "I'm too tired to play."

Baxter got his entry fee refunded just in time and a lame announcement poured out of the poker room P.A. system: "Stu Ungar will not be participating in the World Series of Poker championship. He is not feeling well."

A mix of groans and laughter resonated from the crowded tables, and above it all the cry of a frustrated woman: "Stueeeey!" The voice belonged to Cyndy Violette. Ranked among the top female players, she's a Meg Ryan look-alike who idolized Ungar for his skills and once had a bit of a crush on him. She remembered sitting behind the Kid during a game, looking over his shoulder, being entranced by the beauty with which he played cards.

She wasn't alone. "There is nobody in poker history who has been able to calculate quicker than Stu Ungar," says Mike Sexton, a respected high-stakes player in the '90s and now a commentator on World Poker Tour. "You have no concept of this guy's mind - above a genius-level IQ."

If he had made it down from his room, Ungar realistically could have pulled off his second back-to-back World Series victory. "He takes poker to a whole other level," Baxter said after recouping his 10 grand. "He's a brilliant guy. He has a knack for zeroing in and putting you on a hand. He understands how to win a pot where no one else would even attempt it. Through a process of elimination, analyzing betting patterns, and understanding how people play the cards that are out there, he can pigeonhole hands. If he figures you have the second- or third-best, Stuey will try to take the pot away by betting big. But then Stuey is also very good at estimating the amount of heat you can stand, how much he needs to bluff in order to make you so uncomfortable that you fold - with anything but the best possible cards. He judges the precise amount required to get that job done without betting any more than is necessary."

Puggy Pearson summed up Ungar's X-factor thusly: "He's unafraid of risking his chips to take advantage of weakness. It's harder to do than it sounds; it's wired into your heart or it isn't, and that is one thing that makes him a great player. If you show him weakness" - by playing slow or hesitating while making a bet - "shame on you."

By midnight, Ungar's absence was still a major topic of discussion, and everybody had a Stuey story to share. Mostly they were anecdotes of card-table genius colliding with amazingly stupid self-destruction - like the time he won $3.6 million playing poker and was broke three weeks later. Or when he bought a top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benz, never bothered to change the oil, and was surprised when the thing seized up on him. Then there were the outlandish rumors floating around: Somebody said that Ungar's skin was peeling off. One British journalist insisted that dealers were ferrying eightballs of cocaine up to his room. A friend of a friend swore that the room's walls had been smeared with days-old food.

Baxter's got one of the greatest Ungar stories of all, and he told it with dramatic relish, pointing out that the afternoon's no-show was not exactly unique. "In the '80s Stuey didn't come down for the second day of the Series, even though he was close to being chip leader. I backed him that year too, my money was on the line, and I was pissed. Turns out that he had been carried out of his room at the Golden Nugget on a stretcher [apparently overdosed on drugs]. So I tracked him to Sunrise Hospital. That's where I saw him laying there, unconscious, like a little bird, in what appeared to be a crib of some sort. I started shaking him, telling him to wake up. The doctor came in and asked if I was a relative. I told him, 'Not exactly.' I told the doctor that Stu needed to get up and finish playing in a poker tournament. The doctor said, 'I have bad news for you. He won't be going anywhere for a couple days.' He didn't play, they kept anteing him off, and he had enough of a chip lead that he still got to within five places of the money."


Somebody asked what had made Baxter reinvest in Ungar for the '97 Series. "Nobody would have anything to do with him at that point," he said, not needing to mention the fact that drugs had hobbled Ungar's poker skills and crippled his reputation. "But he wanted to get into the tournament and asked me to stake him. I said, 'Stuey, please, leave me alone. Last time I did that, you wound up in a ******* hospital bed.' He waved his hand and said, 'Stop it with that bullshit, Billy. Just give me the 10,000.' I was playing Lowball at the time, and must have been winning, because a day later I put up the entry fee for Stuey and we split a million-dollar prize. Now he's broke again, but I just couldn't turn the guy down this year - not after he won for me."

By the start of the 1998 World Series, the five-foot-five Ungar had wasted away to less than 100 pounds. His skin was gray, his pupils were pinned, he looked half-dead. The bottom row of his front teeth had gone missing, and his lower lip curled over enflamed gums. He was 45 years old, and he walked with the hunched shoulders and stuttery gait of a frail, elderly man.

As the championship tournament unfolded at the Horseshoe, Ungar sat alone, upstairs, in room 1208. He watched television, did drugs, and obsessively stacked Pringles as if they were $1,000 chips. Over a baggy white T-shirt, he wore a black satin World Series of Poker jacket that hung like a tent. As a young man Ungar had come off like the Mick Jagger of gambling, with his confident swagger, puffy brown hair, and hyped-up mannerisms. Now his right nostril had caved into the center of his nose due to excessive cocaine use. The cartilage had literally worn away and collapsed, despite a recent rhinoplasty (which he destroyed by snorting lines of cocaine soon after the procedure was completed).

Players who visited Ungar in room 1208 would have happily given odds on his dying within days. But they'd have lost. Six weeks after pulling his Howard Hughes act at the Series, Ungar was alive and astonishingly well. An old girlfriend had mercifully taken him in, kept him off drugs, and nursed him back to health.

On a sunny afternoon, during the final days of June 1998, he stood near the entrance of the buffet at Arizona Charlie's, an off-Strip casino that caters to locals. Having recovered from the World Series debacle, Ungar had put on some pounds and filled in his missing teeth. Black hair, flecked with gray, was neatly swept to the left side of his head. Clean-shaven and charismatic, he wore a tropical-weight, black-and-white button-down shirt and gray slacks. The cuffs broke beautifully over soft Italian loafers. His demeanor was like that of a little boy who wants to impress.

Stepping up to the buffet's carving station, Ungar loaded his plate with roast turkey and prime rib. He sat down at a corner table and settled in for a long interview. Over the next several hours, Ungar would open up and reflect, sometimes pausing and thinking for long periods, as if he were much older and unspooling tales from a rich and varied life. He began by leaning forward and recounting his introduction to gambling as a kid growing up in New York. "My father, Isador, was a bookmaker, a Shylock, a big man; I was eight years old and helping him to figure out what the parlays paid at Belmont," Ungar said. His voice was gravelly, and he spoke with the rapid-fire timing of a stand-up comic. "My father managed Fox's Corner, a bar on Seventh Street and Second Avenue on the Lower East Side, and had a million dollars in lockboxes around the neighborhood. I was born in 1953, and I grew up alongside Italian Mafia guys and Hasidim with payis. They were all tough."

Like many New York Jewish families, the Ungars - Stu, his parents, and his older sister Judy - spent summer, Hanukkah, and Passover in the Catskills, usually at the Raleigh Hotel. That's where Stu first displayed his excellence at gin rummy, reveling in its low luck level, which tilts the game toward skillful players rather than those who are merely fortunate. "I started by watching my mother playing poker; but she was a big sucker and never went out," he said. "I knew I could do better than her, and I was only 10 years old. I'd play the waiters at gin and win $40, $50, $60. I had the fever at a young age."

By his 13th year, Ungar had lost his father, who died of a fatal heart attack while in the arms of his mistress; 12 months later his mother suffered a debilitating stroke that eventually landed her in a nursing home. Isador's millions never turned up ("The government wound up getting all of it," his son said), Ungar dropped out of 10th grade despite having skipped from sixth to eighth with apparent ease, and the young gambler took it upon himself to support his mother and sister. "I was never a kid," said Ungar. "I got a job dealing poker in a goulash joint on Ninth Street between Second and Third Avenues. I was 14, but I looked like I was seven."

A natural born hustler, Ungar operated with the craftiness of a professional gambler long before he possessed the consciousness to articulate what he was doing. A friend of his recounts that, as a boy barely in his teens, Ungar would stand on the outskirts of high-stakes gin games, watching the action, while a partner played. The partner would eventually tell others at the table that he was tired, then ask if he could have his nephew sit in for him. He'd nod in Ungar's direction. "Of course, the opponents were always happy because they figured they'd be gambling against a child," recounts the friend. "Then Stuey would sit down and beat them all."

Ungar played gin in a manner that foreshadowed his greatest skill as a poker player. "Stuey had the imagination to put other people on certain combinations," says Chip Reese, who learned gin from Ungar in exchange for teaching him the finer points of Seven-Card Stud. "He told me about this old man, this guy he played when he was about 12 years old, back in New York, who taught him a secret to looking at the first seven discards in a game of gin, then looking at your hand and creating a picture" - an actual visual image of what an opponent's cards looked like. "It's one thing that he never showed me."

After outplaying New York's most legendary gin professionals - eccentrics with nicknames like the Bronx Express and Leo the Jap - the teenage Ungar established himself as a nervy kid who needed to be put in his place by the game's elders. The person who seemed poised to do it was a superior gin specialist from Canada named Harry Stein. "They called him Yonkie," Ungar remembered. "He was imported to New York to play me. We played 27 games of Hollywood. I won $10,000 from him and became a marked man who nobody wanted to play without a spot. You have to understand that $10,000 was a lot of money back in the '60s."

What did Ungar do with his winnings? "Of course I took the cash and went to the racetrack. Whoever said that money burns a hole in your pocket was talking about me. I once played ping-pong for $50,000 against some Chinaman in Tahoe. I played this old Italian game called Ziganet. I went to Aqueduct and bet a guy $2,000 on which horse would come in last. I'm an action freak. I'd bet on a cockroach race."

The thousands were virtually meaningless to Ungar. It was as if he had taken one of Amarillo Slim's aphorisms - "To be a successful gambler, you need a healthy disregard for money" - and perverted it to the unhealthiest possible extreme. More specifically, as an old running buddy of Ungar's has said, "Money was the cheapest commodity in Stuey's life." He could always get more of it from backers (eager to buy 50 percent of his action). "Stuey never cared about winning," says Reese. "He only cared about playing. One reason he was so good at gin was because you have to play every single hand."

Ultimately, though, in 1978, Ungar's reckless wagering got him into more than just debt. "I was betting a bookmaker who was hooked up with the top guy in the city, and I ended up owing him $60,000," Ungar remembered.

The top guy in the city? "I was sick," he said. "Give me a phone and I'm going to bet. I don't care if it's ******* Al Capone on the other end."

Not exactly eager to pay off 60 grand, Ungar quietly lit out for Los Angeles.

He explained that Victor Romano, a masterful bridge player and Mafia soldier with the Genovese crime family, had been looking out for him in exchange for 20 percent of his winnings, so he hadn't been too worried about what might happen to him if he skipped town to dodge a debt. "Victor could have straightened it out," said Ungar. "Besides, there's no use killing someone who owes you money. Everybody knew that I had good earning power - I was an oil well for Victor and those guys. I just didn't want to face the pressure. It would've been embarrassing. And I might have got a beating if I stayed in New York."

From L.A., Ungar made a trip to Las Vegas for a gin-rummy tournament at the Union Plaza Hotel. He put up the $1,500 entry fee and cashed for $50,000, with which he paid off a chunk of what he owed back in New York. An additional payment came out of $100,000 that he won from Danny Robison, who was then regarded as Vegas's top gin player. Two months later, Ungar was free of the mob debt and a million dollars in the black. He settled into the Vegas Jockey Club with his New York girlfriend, a former cocktail waitress named Madelaine Wheeler, and her son, Richard, whom Ungar would later adopt. "In New York, I didn't have the confidence that I developed out here," he said. "This town is heaven for a degenerate, for a sick guy like me."

Just to keep things cool and protect his investment, Victor Romano dispatched his nephew Phil "Brush" Tartaglia to Vegas. Uncle Phillie, as he became known, looked after Ungar and fended off guys to whom his young charge owed money. "Stuey always wanted to gamble with me, but it became impossible," says a Costa Rica-based bookmaker who used to operate out of Vegas. "Whenever he lost I had to take it up with Phillie, and he would never pay me. It got to the point where I told Stuey that we should be friends but stop doing business together."


edited by btd
below.Doyle Brunson ..Stu Unger ..Jack Binion ..
Stu Unger wins the 1980 WSOP

[bennythedip2]

High-end players in Vegas were thrilled by the arrival of Ungar, who was virtually unknown outside New York and more than willing to gamble with anyone at gin rummy. He angled for sky's-the-limit stakes and, in order to attract action, always offered to be in the dealer's position. This meant that opposing players received an extra card and threw out the first discard to begin the game - a huge advantage for them. To hustlers like Amarillo Slim, that setup was irresistible. Slim came into town with a satchel full of cash, ready to break this little freak from the Lower East Side. "I said, 'Don't let him leave. I'm on my way,'" recounts Slim. "Well, I brought enough $100 bills to burn down the whole ******* Horseshoe."

Slim left $40,000 poorer.

According to Ungar, it's his ability to remember past hands, past games, past actions that helped make him so successful at cards. That ability led him to turn poker into a series of complex numerical problems. What made his performance so stunning, though, was that, unlike the mathematically inclined players who came after him - highly educated guys like Chris "Jesus" Ferguson who were aided by computer science and sophisticated theories - he had no access to computers or college professors. Ungar instinctively incorporated a crude version of high-level math without ever formalizing - or even fully understanding - what he was doing.

And he muscled-up his mental game with a steroidal dose of machismo. "When it comes to mano a mano stuff in cards, I take it personally; my ego is at stake," said Ungar. "If somebody challenged me, no matter how nice the guy might be, I'd find a flaw in him. Maybe there'd be something about his eyebrow that I hated. I take it very personal that somebody wants to beat me. I got to hate somebody to play him."

What about Amarillo Slim and his $40,000? What had Ungar found distasteful about Slim? "I hated him for being so ******* tall and lanky," Ungar said. "And he's a cocky guy. He thought he was conning me, and I wanted to wipe that smirk and everything else off his face in the worst way."

As word of Ungar's acumen spread, the gin action in Las Vegas dried up for him. Hotelier Steve Wynn once said, only half jokingly, that Ungar would need to dig up someone who'd been living in a cave in order to uncover an opponent who hadn't yet heard about his talents. Ungar had no choice now but to find a game he could beat without completely turning off the competition. Poker, with its reasonable degree of luck and abundance of weak players who view themselves as losing to the table rather than to an individual, was perfect.

In the early spring of 1980, the 27-year-old Ungar, who had never before played no-limit Texas Hold 'Em, asked Fred "Sarge" Ferris, a high-rolling poker stud, to back him in the upcoming World Series. Sarge, who died of a heart attack in 1989, naturally hesitated. "He figured that I'd be burning up $10,000," said Ungar. "But then Jack Binion said, 'Let him play. I'll put up 25 percent.'" Sarge relented. The young prodigy went on to storm through the tournament and take the title. "Doyle Brunson had laid 100-to-1 odds against my winning that Series, and I beat him heads-up to take the title," Ungar said. "So that was doubly satisfying."

In 1981 Ungar won the World Series for a second time, and became a disruptive force at the no-limit tables. "Back then there were a lot of Texans who were used to dominating the games - and Stuey would put these guys on tilt," says fellow New Yorker Jay Heimowitz. "He would raise an awful lot of pots and play a lot of crap. Then, all of a sudden, he'd totally change his style by tightening up. They couldn't handle the continual adjustments - but I loved it."

While Ungar described himself as a "buzzsaw" and insisted, "They got a skeleton out of the closet when they put me in a no-limit game," the reality is that he was a big sprayer of money in cash contests. "Especially when it was his own money," says Danny Robison, who played a lot of Stud with Ungar. "The consensus is that he did better with other people's money than with his own. Maybe that's because he cared more about his ego than he did about his bankroll."

When people discuss Ungar's drawbacks as a player, the conversation invariably shifts to the very quality that made him successful: the reckless aggression of an amphetamine-crazed pit bull. On a rush, when he was getting cards and making hands, that style of play worked in his favor, allowing him to steamroll the table; when Ungar ran cold, however, this same strategy was a recipe for financial ruin. "The thing you never hear about Stuey is that he made a great laydown," says Barry Greenstein, currently considered the winningest player in poker. "Any time he had top pair, he just moved in. But if he ran into a real hand, he would lose." Reese, who seems to understand Ungar as well as anyone, adds, "Of all the people I've played with over the past 30 years, Stuey could be the best and the worst. But that is no formula for success. What you get when you're the best does not nearly balance the losses you accrue when you're the worst."

Whatever the case - even those who are critical of Ungar's overly aggressive cash-game style describe him as being fearsome, not to mention fearless, in heads-up and tournament play - he appeared to be living every one of his dreams during the early 1980s, taking both his high and low ambitions to their extremes. He married Madelaine in '82, then bought a large Tudor-style home and filled it with fine furnishings. The couple's daughter, Stephanie, was born that same year, and one day his new wife went out and purchased his-and-hers Jaguars - on a whim. However, no amount of domestic perfection could get Ungar to settle down. He routinely blew through massive amounts of cash and spent nights bedding a rotating cast of poker groupies who hung around the high-stakes card rooms with dollar signs in their eyes and bottomless appetites for drugs, sex, and fame.

Though Ungar seemed to be living the life of a rock star, was he happy? "That's a good question," he said. "I think back on those years and I don't know. If I liked it so much, why did I escape reality all the time?"

edited by btd

[bennythedip2]

One auspicious afternoon in 1975, back when he was still living in New York and reigning as the city's most fearsome gin player, Stu Ungar found himself at the home of a friend named Bernie. Set down in the middle of Bernie's kitchen table was a small, amber colored, glass vial. It contained a gram or so of white powder. Amazingly, 22-year-old Ungar needed to ask what it was. "Cocaine," replied Bernie. "It lifts your spirits and makes you feel good."

Attached to the vial's cap was a small spoon. Bernie scooped a bit of cocaine onto the spoon and held it out for his friend. Ungar leaned forward and snorted a hit of coke into each nostril. Almost immediately he turned giddy. It was a 180-degree reversal from how he had been feeling since early that morning. "This was the day I put my mother in a nursing home," Ungar remembered during the course of a lengthy interview at Arizona Charlie's, an off-strip casino in Las Vegas. "She was crying like a baby and she broke me up, but I couldn't handle it no more - to be playing cards, trying to scratch out a living, and my mother calls me to bring her a bedpan." Unable to shake that first snort of coke from his memory, Ungar added, "I started very moderately, like a gram a week."

Before moving to Las Vegas, Ungar said, drugs played a very small role in his life. Prior to the age of 22, he hadn't even smoked a joint. He didn't drink. He didn't party. His vices at that point were gambling and chasing girls. "If there were 58 massage parlors in New York, [Stuey] knew all 58," card player Teddy Price told a reporter. "And he was a big tipper. He'd walk in the door and the girls would yell, 'Stuey's here!'"

By the time he won his second World Series championship, in 1981, his drug consumption had spiked precipitously. But Ungar insisted that it was rooted in practicality. "I did the coke to keep up," he said. "You use it as an excuse to stay awake and play poker. But then you take it home with you." Ultimately, of course, the cocaine went beyond recreation and practicality. "When you have access to it and the money don't mean nothing and people keep calling you with it …" His voice trailed off, implying that there's nothing you can do to fight the temptation. "It's a sickness. I don't even like to think about it. I guarantee you, it's taken 10, 15 years off my life. I don't look like it, but I feel beat up." Actually, whether he wanted to admit it or not, he looked plenty beaten up. It was as if the pain that he felt inside had leaked out, erasing what once seemed like indelible youthfulness from his poker face.

The coke-fueled '80s stands as the decade when Ungar's sports betting spun completely out of control - right along with his drug intake. "The figures were exorbitant," Ungar acknowledged. "A regular person wouldn't even be able to relate to it. Winning a couple hundred thousand playing poker was nothing compared to what I would lose in sports."

Vegas's golf courses served as another sinkhole for Ungar's card room millions. "Stuey's a big sucker at a lot of things," Puggy Pearson said in the late '90s. "Because he's so good at certain things, he thinks he should be good at everything. This is his downfall." Puggy recalled that, as a golf handicap, Ungar was allowed to tee up all of his shots. "That's a huge advantage, and he had all kinds of tees - big long ones, itty-bitty short ones. Hell, I seen him tee the ball up in a lake one time at the old Sahara golf course. But he still lost every damned thing he had. He'd lose his shoestrings if he needed a couple dollars. That boy can't be still. He's got to have action."

During one memorable two-week period, Ungar went on a massive winning streak at the card tables and then laid it all down on a long Thanksgiving weekend of football games - Thursday through Monday. "I had a million in cash going into that weekend," Ungar said, "and at the end of Monday Night Football, I owed $800,000." He lost $1.8 million in a weekend? Ungar nodded. "I was betting $100,000, $150,000 a game. That was nothing to me. I had no sense of the value of money."

He hesitated a moment. "Sometimes I think that I wanted to lose, so that I could get mad and go back to the poker table."

Drugs and sports betting combined to leave Ungar financially and spiritually destitute. The dual demons created a vicious cycle that wreaked havoc with the one thing he could have done brilliantly: play poker. "He was always under pressure because he went through so much cash," remembers Billy Baxter, a professional gambler and frequent backer for the often destitute Ungar. "Stuey's money management was a joke, and he kept himself against the blade all the time. He never got into a comfortable financial position. He had to win every day just to support his lousy habits. Then he'd run bad a couple days in poker and be busted again." Indeed, when Ungar was losing and strung out, says high-stakes poker player Barry Greenstein, he became so scared and so desperate "that you were able to push him around like a little girl."

In the mid-1980s, Madelaine left Stuey and took his beloved Stephanie with her. Several years later, a poker-playing friend carted a dining-room set out of Ungar's home to settle a gambling debt. In 1992, he sold his beautiful Tudor home for approximately $270,000. "I needed money," Ungar remembered. "I borrowed $150,000 against the house. It was one of those hard-loan shit things, you know, and I had to pay the guy back." Ungar considered the circumstances for a moment. "I had a nice house."

Things didn't get better. Throughout the '90s, Ungar slept where he could and occasionally surfaced when he needed to win or borrow money. There were fl ashes of the old brilliance, but he spent most of his time away from poker, caught up in a world dominated by drug dealers, hookers, con men, and petty thieves. He scraped by with occasional low-profile le action, through financial support from benevolent friends, and by calling in the many loans he had made to other players back when he was flying high. But for the most part, nobody wanted to get involved with an unrepentant, unreliable drug addict. Even Phil "Brush" Tartaglia, Ungar's minder from New York, began to distance himself.

By all appearances and opinions, Stu Ungar was completely finished as a competitor in the heady world of no-limit. He seemed like the Brian Wilson of poker - a brilliant guy done in by drugs and his own strange, unmanageable form of genius. Then, during the early months of 1997, Ungar hit some kind of emotional nadir, and it compelled him to resurface, initially through occasional appearances at $20 buy-in tournaments around town. "People were saying how I'm a has-been and washed-up and all that," Ungar explained. "Finally, it got to me real bad. My pride was hurt. So I tried to eat right, got some sleep, put myself into shape to play."

Some of it, however, was involuntary. Following a couple of busts, one for possession of drug paraphernalia, another for trespassing, Ungar was legally compelled to remain clean. Whatever the impetus, though, his changes slowly became evident during the 1997 World Series. If his presence initially seemed like a sick joke, by day two nobody was laughing. On the third afternoon of play, local newspaper reporters, contemplating their leads for Thursday's paper, had already rechristened Stu "The Kid" Ungar as "The Comeback Kid." "If they wanted to do a clinic on no-limit Hold 'Em, they would have filmed me from day one to the final hand," Ungar said in 1998. "You can't play more perfect than I played. It was just a thing of beauty, what I did in '97. I was reborn."

At the start of the fourth and final day of the Series, Ungar had almost $1.1 million stacked in front of him, dwarfing his nearest competitor by more than $300,000. He was confident dent and cool, diminutive and fl ashy, with blue-lensed granny glasses and a densely patterned shirt. He played with such confidence that it was as if he could see through the backs of his opponents' cards. "It might have been the greatest performance ever in a World Series of Poker," says Mike Sexton, now a commentator on World Poker Tour, then a respected high-stakes player. "He just dominated the tables."

ESPN cameras stalked Ungar as if he were a movie star, and he reveled in the attention. When it finally came down to Ungar and John Strzemp, then president of Treasure Island Hotel and Casino, for the championship, it was clear that Ungar was the superior player by a wide margin. "But," says Sexton, "John was smart enough to recognize that he couldn't play with Stu Ungar. You can't sit there and play with the guy and let him take your money slowly but surely as you go along. John realized that the only chance he had of beating Stuey was to get all his chips in the pot as quickly as possible and gamble with them."

The miraculous resurrection culminated with Ungar pulling a tournament-winning straight on the final card of the last hand. Smiling broadly for the cameras, telling reporters how vindicating the victory had been, holding up a photo of his daughter that he had kept close to him throughout the contest, Ungar seemed to be his old self. "He was in his element again," says Sexton. "He was put back in that throne of destiny, where he would have a new chance to start fresh. I really thought he would do it."

Ungar, posing before a fortress of banded $100 bills, a freshly minted World Series of Poker bracelet in front of him, became the first player to win three championships. He promised to keep himself in shape for the next year's Series. "I was sleeping for 15 years," he announced. "I've decided to wake up."

But just a couple of months after netting $500,000 (the million-dollar first prize, minus a 50-percent cut for Billy Baxter, who put up the $10,000 entry fee), Ungar was broke. He apparently blew the money on all his old vices: sports betting, drugs, and hookers. A poker-playing friend who popped by the apartment where Ungar was staying in late '97 remembers a refrigerator with nothing in it but Tang. Propped against one wall was a beautifully framed collage, filled with laudatory press clippings from Ungar's glory days. "I'm reading the collage, and there's something in there that says, 'Talent will get you to the top, but you need character and discipline to stay there,'" recounts the friend, one of Stu's old coke buddies. "I said, 'Stuey, we ain't got that ******* shit. We have character and talent, but we don't have discipline.' He heard me, but he didn't say nothing."

edited by btd

[bennythedip2]

Whatever Ungar's problems, it seemed to be a given that he'd put in a good effort to defend his World Series crown. He checked into Binion's Horseshoe on April 17, intending to rest up and get acclimated for the championship event three and a half weeks later. Billy Baxter, who once again funded Ungar's $10,000 entry fee, suggested he get himself warmed up with a couple preliminary tournaments. But Ungar waved him away and said, "I don't need that shit."

On the morning of May 11, the day the Series was slated to begin, Ungar's cocaine addiction was in full fl are, leaving him emotionally depressed, strung out, and physically wrecked. His right nostril was practically flush against his face. The tips of his fingers had been burned black from handling the hot end of a glass crack pipe. Bob Stupak, casino entrepreneur and occasional backer of Ungar's, had offered to provide a hairdresser and makeup artist to ensure that the drug addled star would look presentable, but Ungar never green-lighted them to come upstairs.

Just minutes before the tournament's starting time, Ungar remembered, "I got showered and dressed. I put my clothes on. And then I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked terrible. I looked like I came from Auschwitz. That's when I knew I couldn't sit there and play for four days, for 10 hours a day, and put in a good performance. I wasn't geared up. I was physically out of it. The year took a toll on me." As the opening hand was being dealt, Ungar remained sequestered in his 12th floor room at the Horseshoe. Baxter managed to get back his $10,000 and the game went on without its defending champion.

Ungar stopped speaking for a moment, maybe to replay the World Series nightmare in his mind. "Listen, not coming down to play in that tournament was criminal. I honestly think I could have won back-to-back if I was in decent shape. But I thought it would have been more embarrassing to have shown up looking the way I did than for me to stay in my room and not play. In the end, though, I disappointed everyone and, what's worse, I made everybody who's jealous of me happy."

But maybe the horrible experience had given him perspective. If he walked away from the Horseshoe with a realization that some things are more important than the primitive act of winning money - like not letting down the very people who care about you - then it all could be worth it in the long run, couldn't it? Ungar considered the theory for a split second. "If there is more to life than gambling," he said, "I don't know that I'm able to enjoy it. And what I'm afraid of is that gambling ain't stimulating me lately. That's a bad sign."

Several days after opening up at Arizona Charlie's, Ungar was having dinner with his ex-wife, Madelaine, and daughter Stephanie at the Sahara Casino and Hotel, a mid-level place on the Strip with a low-stakes poker room. Stephanie, 16 at the time, was a lovely, intelligent girl who had endured a lot of disappointment and heartache from her father. At that moment, though, she was thrilled to be with him. "We've spent a whole week together," she gushed. Most importantly, he appeared to be completely straight. "People introduce themselves to my dad and say that it's a pleasure to meet him. We walk around holding hands, and everybody is so happy to see my dad with me."

When they strolled into the Sahara's poker room, Ungar's dentist was there, messing around in a low-stakes, 30-person freeze-out with a $22 buy-in and a first prize of a few hundred dollars. Just for kicks, maybe showing off his star patient, the dentist requested that Ungar pull up a chair and enter the event. Considering that Ungar's more obvious poker milieu would have been the Horseshoe or the Mirage, where, at the time, games ranked among the highest in town, this was a bit of a comedown. But, as a favor to the man who had built a bridge for the front of his mouth, Ungar dispatched his ex-wife to the blackjack pit and accepted the invitation.

He wound up signing 40 autographs, and a crowd of some 200 railbirds formed around a tournament that would ordinarily have generated no interest whatsoever.

Goosed by the crowd and glad to be back in action, Ungar played aggressively and hard, as if psychologically making up for the World Series he had missed. "It came down to me and this old man," Ungar recalled. "I had $12,000 in tournament chips in front of me. He had $400. Then he outdrew me for seven pots in a row and won the thing."

Ungar was initially upset about losing. Then the man told him, "You made my life, Mr. Ungar. I can tell my children, my grandchildren, and everybody else that I beat you."

After shaking the man's hand, Ungar said to him, "If I can make your life, I'm tickled that I lost."

This encounter provided a rare glimpse at Ungar's sentimental side, but, sadly, it didn't augur long-term change. A couple of weeks later, he convinced a doctor to prescribe narcotic painkillers and found himself backsliding into drug dependency. Following a disagreement with his girlfriend, he bashed her in the face with a telephone. She kicked him out of her house and called the police. He went to stay with a friend, someone said, but nobody seemed able to find nd him.

Mike Sexton hinted that Puggy Pearson might have a lead. Puggy had met Ungar two days before at Sam's Town Hotel and Casino, and had lent him $500. "He didn't look too damned good," Puggy said. "Stuey was sitting there on the bench, next to a guy who claimed to be his plumber. Stu gave me his word, on his daughter's life, that he would pay me back $500 in two days, which is today. I lay 100-to-1 that I don't hear from him until he needs me again. But that's okay." Puggy sighed. Then he added, "Stuey's all right."

A day later, Ungar was back at Binion's Horseshoe, registered on someone else's credit card. Speaking over the phone and sounding lucid, he said, "I'm gonna start playing. I'm waiting to see a friend of mine who's got money for me. Then I go to the Mirage."

Despite vows to resume his once brilliant career, Ungar maintained a ghostly poker-room presence during the summer and into the fall of 1998. Billy Baxter lent him 25 grand and he used it to play $30/$60 Hold 'Em. But his heart was no longer in it. Inferior players beat him in headsup matches, and cocaine retook its place at the center of Ungar's life. He continually phoned the Mirage poker room, trying to scare up money from old friends, but nobody would take his calls.

Then, in November 1998, things seemed ready to turn around yet again. Ungar signed a contract with hotelier Bob Stupak, agreeing that Stupak would pay off Ungar's debts and finance tournament-play in exchange for a piece of Ungar's future winnings. Stupak even assigned a bodyguard named Dave to look after Ungar and make sure he stayed away from drugs. However, on November 20th, Ungar convinced Dave that he had to take his daughter to a birthday dinner.

Dave cut him loose on that Friday afternoon, and Ungar checked into the Oasis Motel, a notorious short time sex joint on the northern end of Las Vegas Boulevard. He paid cash for a single night and claimed the Mirage as his permanent residence on the check-in form. Earlier in the day Stupak had given him a $10,000 advance, as "walking-around money."

The next morning, after Ungar failed to check out of his room on time, an Oasis employee knocked on the door, entered the room, and found him lying face down in bed, shaking. Apparently in no condition to leave, Ungar asked to see the hotel manager, then slipped the manager a $100 bill for a second night. "Can you close the window?" Ungar asked. "I'm cold." The manager looked up and noticed that the window was tightly shut.

Twenty-four hours later, on November 22nd, Stu "The Kid" Ungar was found lying in the same faced own position on the mattress - but this time he was dead. Eight hundred eighty-two dollars, all that Ungar had to his name, was in his pants pockets. Police found the room to be clean of drugs and paraphernalia.

According to a Clark County spokesman, the official cause of Ungar's death was coronary arterial sclerosis brought on by his lifestyle. Essentially, the arteries around his heart hardened and would not allow blood to circulate. Ungar's passing was ruled accidental, even though cocaine, Percodan, and methadone were found in his blood.

Maybe the dope in Ungar's system reflected a final binge before he checked into the motel with the intention of kicking his habit for good. Maybe he sensed that the end was near and wanted to die alone, in peace. Or maybe something more nefarious transpired.

A longtime friend of Ungar's claims to know what happened. "Stuey bought a bunch of crack and picked up two hookers who like to troll near the Oasis," says the friend. "Once they found out how much money Stuey had on him" - presumably a good chunk of Stupak's $10,000 - "he was as good as dead. They pushed him to smoke enough so that he went into convulsions - which Stuey was prone to do. The convulsions came, they took most of the money, and left Stuey for dead."

Ungar's funeral was presided over by a rabbi and financed by Bob Stupak. The ceremony was a who's who of no-limit players, and Stupak reportedly hit them up for donations to help cover the burial costs.

Days later, at the big-money tables around town, cards were dealt, millions were won and lost, and the games rolled on unabated by the passing of poker's ultimate supernova. ♠

the end
...edited by btd

below Jack Binion and Stu Unger..World Champion of Poker 1997

[bally73]

Benny very good read mate
one thing though you have far too much time on your hands
Lee
hope the dog wins tonight i got a tenner on her

[bennythedip2]

fingers crossed, glk us !!

[Tony2005]

Ive read extracts from that before but still had to read it all again. The bloke was a genius on the tables but like most people who have a gift ( george best springs to mind) they have vices that they cant kick and in the end most of these gifted people go to an early grave and Stuey Ungers story is just example of what these vices end up doing to these people....

[bally73]

Tony i quite agree with you on that i would be one of the top professional poker players in the universe































If i didn't have to go to work every day
but your right he was one of the greatest tournament players ever
as chip reece was probably the best cash player ever
Lee

[Tony2005]

[B]Lee, i could have been a great accountant as i have a head for figures but unfortunatly i have one big vice which im not good at controling............































































































































POKER.........Which im rubbish at..... :-)

[bally73]

loooooooool Tony ..........................



















































fancy a game