Will the Stuey Ungar Book Prove Sexton Right Again? A long time in the making

In January 2001 my business partner Frank and I were having dinner with Mike Sexton in the coffee shop of Bellagio. By 2001, Sexton had made a name for himself as a tournament player and the organizer of the Tournament of Champions (TOC), but this was still more than two years before the first World Poker Tour (WPT) broadcast and he wasn't a household name. His greatest ambition was to bring corporate sponsorship to poker, but as a promoter, his passion was greater than his actual results. The TOC was a classy tournament, but for all of Sexton's salesmanship as to why poker should be mainstream, no one was buying. Had he offered to sell me stock that night in PartyPoker.com for pennies a share, I would have laughed at the absurdity of people actually playing poker for money online. Remember, this was January 2001 – before NBC was televising poker, before ESPN was treating poker like a major sport, and before poker had tipped.

My reason for meeting with Sexton was the same reason I meet with dozens of writers a year. I had just co-founded an agency and thought he would be a good person to write a book. He said he would think about writing his own book, but then his eyes got real big when he started talking about Stuey Ungar. "I'm talking about a surefire number-one best seller," he said, "and an Academy Award-winning film." Of course, I had heard the name Ungar bandied about by hard-core poker players, and Frank had remembered the articles that ran in Icon and New Yorkmagazines in the late '90s, but neither of us knew too much about him. We listened as Sexton went on: "The first time he played golf, he lost $80,000 before he made it to the first tee! He won 10 of the 30 no-limit tournaments he entered! And while he was the best poker player who ever lived, he was a hundred times better at gin rummy!"Sexton had us hooked, and when he said that, we had to call Nolan Dalla right away, the writer who had been working with Stuey on his memoir right before Stuey died; we didn't even wait for the dinner check to arrive. It's hard to believe now but only four years ago, Dalla was living in Washington, DC, and was writing about poker for Card Playerand sports handicapping for various websites. Over dinner in DC a few weeks later, not only did we start talking about how to publish the Stuey book, but we decided to change the memoir to a biography, and placed Dalla's bio of Stuey with Atria/Simon & Schuster. This happened in 2002.So, why has it taken all of these years for One of a Kind, the definitive bio of Stuey Ungar, to finally hit the shelves? Well, that's a question that Dalla has probably had to answer more often than, "Can you comp me a room during the World Series?" But suffice it to say that adapting a memoir to a biography, writing full time, moving to Vegas, serving as the media director for the World Series of Poker, and working for PokerStars didn't leave a lot of hours in the day. Not only that, but he knew the story was so complex and so anticipated by the poker community that he wasn't going to write a book that was anything short of exceptional.We decided that we needed a co-author, and finding Peter Alson was like moving all in on the flop with no pair and hitting runner-runner trips to win the World Series of Poker. Alson's resume was startling: He not only grew up in New York, but did so around the same time as Stuey; he had covered the Super Bowl of Poker in 1988 for the Village Voice when Stuey won it; he had written extensively about gambling, including his critically acclaimed memoir Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie; and he was a semiprofessional poker player.Even before we had found Alson, Mike Sexton was starting to look like the visionary he always was: PartyPoker had exceeded one million registered users; the World Poker Tour was a smashing success; and corporations were sponsoring poker players. Every time you turned around, there was Mike Sexton on TV, usually with a champagne flute in his hand. And if you looked real close, the look on his face screamed, "I told you so." He sure did. The next thing we had to do for the book was enlist the support of Madeline and Stefanie Ungar. A memoir is a memoir – the author can talk about whatever he wants and remember whatever he chooses to remember. But a biography needs to tell a larger story, and needs insight from those closest to him. And Madeline, Stuey's ex-wife, and Stefanie, Stuey's daughter, could not have been more cooperative. Their input – along with that of Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Billy Baxter and dozens of other poker players who were gracious with their time – was the final piece to making this a complete book.

So, here we are in June 2005, 25 years after the first of Stuey's three WSOP victories, and I am proud to be a part of what might be the greatest gambling story ever told, One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey "The Kid" Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player. The book illuminates the dark genius of poker's most charismatic and mysterious star, who could ruthlessly peer into and read other men's souls, but seemed baffled and powerless when confronted with his own. It has the raw genius of a savant at the poker table, the seediness of the New Yorkmob and the Vegas drug scene, million-dollar highs, tragedy, despair, triumph, and a comeback for the ages. Al Alvarez, author of the classic The Biggest Game in Town, called One of a Kind "a well-written and well-researched study of the most naturally gifted and emotionally stunted card genius in the history of poker."

A number-one best seller? That's certainly a lofty goal. But when it comes to anything related to poker, do you want to be the one to bet against Mike Sexton?

Greg Dinkin is the co-founder of Venture Literary, www.ventureliterary.com, and the author of three books, including The Poker MBA. He gives keynote speeches and seminars, and can be contacted at www.thepokermba.com.