To Live and Die in L.V. By Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series, excerpted as is (unedited by Card Player) from Aces And Kings (Wenner Books), which hits bookstores on May 5. Part two of this story will appear in the next issue of Card Player as a special feature.

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 fucking 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.

Left to right: Jack Binion, Stu Ungar, Bobbly Baldwin, Jack Straus "World Series of Poker" (1982) ©2005 Ulvis Alberts

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."

Left to right: Dealer, Gabe Kaplan, Bobby Baldwin (background),

Stu Ungar, Amarillo Slim, Johnny Moss (1980) ©2005 Ulvis Alberts

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 fucking 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 fucking 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."

Left to right: Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, and Jack Binion "World Series of Poker" (1980) ©2005 Ulvis Alberts

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 fucking 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 fucking 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?"