Puggy Pearson

I received the news about Puggy Pearson's passing via the newspaper article headline, "Legendary Poker Player Dies." A legend he truly was, growing up poor, dropping out of elementary school, but going on to become the World Poker Champion and getting written up in a full article in Sports Illustrated magazine as a result. I was not really surprised to read about his demise, as Puggy had complained to me about his health every time I ran into him throughout the nineties, as never feeling quite right, but being unable to find out from any doctors exactly what the problem was. However, I mourned his passing as a friend.
Puggy was sometimes portrayed by writers in the old days as living evidence that the main kind of intelligence needed for poker was of the cunning rather than smart type of brain. I knew Puggy quite well, and he was smarter than any of the writers who penned such nonsense. Intelligence and a formal education can be two different things, and Pug had plenty of the former, despite his lack of the latter.

I'm sure there will be plenty of articles that talk about Pug as a poker player, so I won't add anything to that portrait. Rather, I would like to talk about him as a gameplayer - a very fine gameplayer. I have tangled with Pug on the golf course, in the poolroom, and at the backgammon board (as well as in many a pot-limit Omaha game). He was a tough opponent and a smart gambler, just as you might expect.

Puggy in his prime was the perfect golf hustler. He did not have a powerful or picturesque swing, and was certainly not a long hitter. However, the closer he got to the hole (and the bigger the betting got), the better he played. He was an excellent iron player, a superb pitch shot artist, and a very fine putter. He told me that when he was in his prime, he was a favorite to get up and down anytime he got within a hundred yards of the hole. He said, "Bob, my short game used to be better than over half of the touring pros." I have watched him play and talked to many people who knew his game when he was playing his best, and I believe this comment of his was a simple statement of fact.

Puggy knew a lot of tricks on the golf course, including some good ones within the rules. I played as his partner once, in a thousand-dollar Nassau against Tommy Fisher and Yosh Nakano. (Neither I nor Yosh were skilled at golf; Tommy and Pug were pretty even.) I hit a bad approach shot on a hole and wound up in a sand trap. The hole was only a dozen feet or so away, but my ball was at the bottom of a steep embankment. I shook my head on bewilderment.

"Use your putter," said Pug.

I looked at him like he was from Mars. I said "Are you serious? That slope is three feet of practically straight up." It actually crossed my mind that maybe he was not on my side after all.

"Use your putter. There's no lip on the trap. How else are you going to get the ball out of there?"

For lack of an alternative plan, I took his advice. I gave the ball a good rap with my putter. It crawled up the side of the trap and came to rest about four feet from the hole. I could hardly believe my eyes. "I don't give you no bad golf advice," twined Puggy.

No, sir; he didn't.

I played pool against Puggy only one time. It was in 1986, when we had run into each other at a pool hall in Las Vegas. Pug had been a good player as a young man, but it had literally been decades since he had played with any regularity. I had been away from the game a long time, but had gone back to playing a few months beforehand, and was hitting the ball as good as I had in my younger days. I would have been happy to play him some straight-pool, but the only game Pug was even willing to discuss was one-pocket. So we agreed to play a few friendly games of one-pocket at $50 a pop. Pug's shooting was as rusty as I thought it might be, but one-pocket is not a shooter's game; it is a thinkers game. Time and time again, I got outsmarted. I did win a few games, but he came out a couple hundred ahead of me when all was said and done.

Later on in life, Puggy took a liking to backgammon. He was a halfway reasonable player, but no one would say it was his mother tongue, as was poker or golf. Somehow or other we got into an environment where there was a backgammon board and some time to kill. Negotiations broke out. Pug knew I was a "good player," so asked for a spot. He wanted double aces. I demurred, pointing out that the best player in the world could not give him that big a spot. We finally settled on my spotting him the cube. This meant that he could double the stakes any time he wished, but I could not. This was a big spot­­- but not quite as much as he really needed. Puggy had overlooked a couple of things. First, by owning the cube, he was going to get some games played out where he got gammoned, rather then getting doubled out of the game (gammons pay double). Second, I was not the same quality of "good player" that he had been facing previously. I had owned a backgammon club, and made my living playing the game all day nearly every day for a decade. I do not claim to be quite as good at backgammon against the very best players of the game that are also fine poker players, such as Erik Seidel or Jason Lester, but I was better than just a "good player."

We started playing for $100 a game, and with me rolling some nice dice, I got a couple of grand ahead. Then he asked to double the stakes, to $200 a game. The dice continued to be friendly to me. When he was down close to 10K, he wanted to play for $300, and I once again agreed. That's when the luck of the game took a big swing in his favor. When we finally quit, he had escaped the trap by losing only little less than two grand. We never tangled at backgammon after that episode.

As I said at the start of this article, I wanted to describe only how Puggy was in my company. He was always bright, entertaining, and friendly, a pleasure to be around. We had a lot of fun swapping stories about the various games we had played in and opponents we had faced. With his passing, the world is a worse place, for poker has lost one of its most interesting people.

Bob Ciaffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Poker. All can be ordered from Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons: email [email protected]. His website is http://www.pokercoach.us/, where you can get his rulebook, "Roberts Rules Of Poker" for free. Bob also has a website called http://www.fairlawsonpoker.org/.