The World Series of Poker - Part IV

In 1990, the first non-American player, an Iranian-born resident of Wales named Mansour Matloubi, won poker's world championship. Johnny Chan was born in Guangzhou, a Chinese city not far from Hong Kong, but was raised for the most part in Phoenix and Houston, where his family owned restaurants. He was an American citizen living in Las Vegas and had been playing professionally there for nine years when he first won in 1987.



On the key heads-up hand of the 1990 main event, with the blinds at 15,000-30,000, Matloubi raised to 90,000 from the button with pocket tens. Holding a 1.1 million to 840,000 chip advantage, Hans "Tuna" Lund called with A-9. Playing out of Sparks, Nevada, Lund was six feet seven inches tall in his two-tone trucker's cap, and well over 300 pounds. Matloubi was a chain-smoking, hatlessly dapper 5-foot-9. The flop of 9-4-2 gave Lund what he thought was the best pair and best kicker. Hoping to check-raise, he knocked the felt twice with his fist. When Matloubi obliged him by betting 100,000 on his overpair, Lund raised him to 350,000. The olive-skinned Brit went into the tank for almost five minutes, dragging contemplatively on a thin Capri cigarette. He finally concluded that Lund would have reraised before the flop if he had a pocket pair higher than tens. If he had a set, so be it. Stubbing out his Capri, Matloubi pushed forward the rest of his chips, which constituted a raise of 378,000.

Lund now understood that he probably had the second-best hand, but the pot seemed too big to fold the top pair and top kicker. He shrugged his big shoulders and called. When the hands were turned over, Lund slapped the side of his head. Matloubi stood up and began pacing behind his chair – until an ace spiked on the turn and he angrily kicked it over. Tuna's pot-committed crying call had paid off, leaving Mansour with only two outs among the 44 unseen cards. The crowd, mostly fellow Nevadans pulling for Lund, was still cheering the turn card when the 10♠ peeled off the deck. Lund slumped back into his chair as Matloubi yelled, "Oh my God!"



Describing the swings of fortune after each of the four rounds of betting, ESPN color commentator Chip Reese told the audience, "This is without question the most incredible hand in the World Series of Poker." With a 6-1 chip lead, Matloubi needed only a few more hands to bring the championship of America's national pastime home to Great Britain, along with $895,000. "When I got to the final table, I thought I had made it as far as I could go," he recalled of being up against the likes of Lund, Rod Peate, the aggressive and cantankerous John Bonetti, and '86 champion Berry Johnston. "I entered hoping to get a piece of the pie, and I got it all."



It certainly had helped Matloubi's cause that Stuey Ungar was busy cementing his reputation that week as the Keith Richards of poker. Ambushing pots with his usual pirate's abandon, he had intimidated and outmaneuvered opponents on his way to an early chip lead. Halfway through the second day, he and many others believed that he had his third championship all but sewn up. Calling a raise with pocket tens against another good-sized stack, he watched the flop come with an ace, a 10, and a small card. He was even more pleasantly shocked when his nervous opponent pushed all in. "I called him in a heartbeat," said Stuey. "He had a king and a jack. On the river a queen came. He hit the gutter ball. If I had won that pot, I would have had five hundred thousand in chips early in the tournament! It would have been all over. I mean, over. Done! … There was no way I'd lose if I won that pot. But those are the bad beats you have to take."



Yet it seems that the Kid didn't take this one especially well. Still among the leaders after two days of play, he failed to appear at high noon on day 3. A few minutes into the action, Jack McClelland phoned Billy Baxter, who had put Stuey into the event and was paying for him to sleep across the street at the posh Golden Nugget, to say that his horse hadn't shown.



"How could he not be there?" said Baxter. "He's one of the chip leaders in the goddamn World Series of Poker!"



It turned out that Stuey was lying close to death in Room 341 of the Nugget. His cocaine habit had been costing a steady $1,200 per week, but perhaps he had overindulged the night before to ease the pain of losing that pot to the gutter ball. Or maybe his Tuesday night dose had been cut less than what he was used to. Whatever the reason, after Baxter got Nugget security to unlock the door, the unconscious 36-year-old addict was taken by ambulance to University Medical Center. While his seat remained empty for the final two days, his stack was blinded and anted off round by round, though enough chips remained for him to finish ninth and win $20,050. To his other accomplishments was added the dubious distinction of making the final table from the intensive care unit. While Baxter had managed to recover his investment, he undoubtedly swore never to back Stuey again.



Much farther out of the spotlight that May was a poker variant Ungar never took to – Omaha eight-or-better, a high-low split game requiring the winner of the low half of the pot to show down five different cards below 9. Because of the patience and technical skill it required, its popularity had expanded throughout the 1980s as a less rowdy alternative to the Texas bluffers' darling. The $1,500 event at the '90 World Series was the first time it was played for a bracelet, which was won by Vegas pro Monte Kouz. Other bracelets were awarded that year to Shawqi Shunnarah, an American of Persian descent, for pot-limit Omaha, the most popular form in London and other European cities; Slim Preston in the larger pot-limit Omaha event; Houston's John Bonetti for deuce-to-seven draw, also called Kansas City lowball; another Houstonian, Allen Baker, in the smaller no-limit hold'em event; and Berry Johnston for limit hold'em, a more technical variant, increasingly prevalent in California.



On May 14, Benny Binion was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame. Though he had played fairly seldom, the citation called him a "tempered player who was skilled at all forms of poker." The real and legitimate reason was that he had ushered a game played by a few of his Dallas cronies into the modern age of televised tournaments, making no-limit Texas hold'em the most popular variant of the national card game.



In promoting his World Series, round numbers had always been crucial. Since 1972, when Benny subsidized 50 percent of each buy-in to attract more publicity, the price of admission to the main event has been the iconic $10,000 – 10 large, big heap wampum, long money. Ten dimes, others call it, using deflationary gamblers' lingo to show off how little they value it, or to reduce the emotional impact of losing it. For perspective, it's the sum the supposed cattleman John Backus cheats the cheaters out of with a double cold deck during the 1883 steamboat voyage in Twain's "The Professor's Yarn." It's what MGM paid Herbert Yardley to help write a spy movie in 1933, and what Lt. "Nick" Nixon needed to bankroll his 1946 congressional campaign. It was the bounty Quint demanded of Chief Brody and Amity's business owners to kill the marauding white shark in 1975. "I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, Chief," growls Quint after scraping his fingernails down a chalkboard to get their attention. "I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you wanna stay alive, then ante up."



In the 1990s, that same three-eighths-inch stack of C-notes was called "high society" by Mike McDermott, who is packing a wad just that thick as he heads to the World Series in the last scene of Rounders. Anteing up against Chan and the other great whites is what separates Mike from the unheroic "grinders" who eke out a living at poker. Ten grand also had been the median family income when hold'em arrived in Las Vegas in the mid-'60s, and despite inflation, the sum will still buy a year's tuition at an excellent state university, a used VW Beetle in pretty good shape, or a family vacation to Florida. It's also the amount won by high-stakes pro Howard Lederer, a vegetarian, from fellow pro David Grey, who had bet him that he wouldn't eat a cheeseburger.



In 1991, the WSOP introduced a longer round number when first prize in the main event rose to $1 million. The cash and bracelet went to Brad Daugherty, a former construction worker living in Reno, who had outlasted the likes of Perry Green, Donnacha O'Dea, and Ali Farsai of Beverly Hills. Second-place money of $402,000 went to Vegas professional Don Holt, who had won a bracelet in stud two years earlier.



First prize remained $1 million for the rest of the decade, as prize money for the other finalists continued to rise. (Junk bond analyst Alan Goehring won $768,625 for finishing second in '99.) The sums awarded in the championship and even in some of the preliminary events were now dwarfing the purses of Wimbledon, the Masters, and the Kentucky Derby, not to mention baseball's World Series. The dream of Mike McDermott was increasingly shared by the average American guy. More and more women were also being inspired, especially after Barbara Enright outlasted 269 players to finish fifth in '95. (She would have finished higher if pro Brent Carter hadn't bizarrely called her all-in preflop raise with a 6-3 and outdrawn her pocket eights.) The winner that year, Dan Harrington, a chess and backgammon master, went on to establish a record in large buy-in no-limit hold'em tournaments bested only by Ungar and a handful of others. In 2004, he began writing the definitive series of primers on how to play them.



Two years after Matloubi had won in 1990, a second Iranian player, real estate investor Hamid Dastmalchi, took home the bracelet. He had learned to play at age 12 in his native country before moving to San Diego. Having won a bracelet in a smaller no-limit event in '85 and a pot-limit hold'em bracelet in '93, Dastmalchi went on to take fourth in the '95 main event. Since then, pros such as Amir Vahedi, Farzad Bonyadi, Korosh Nejad, Ben Roberts (born Mehdi Javdani), and Antonio Esfandiari have impressively extended the Iranian poker tradition.



After his victory in '90 and a dominant run in the live games, Matloubi began to be spoken of as "the new Stuey Ungar." Ears burning, Stuey challenged Mansour to a series of heads-up, winner-take-all matches for $100,000 each during the Four Queens Poker Classic in February of '91. Brimming with confidence, Mansour happily put up $50,000 and sat down to play. After a seesaw battle between two aggressive champions, Stuey had about $60,000 when he opened a pot for $1,600. (The blinds were $200-$400.) Mansour called with 5-4 offsuit. On a rainbow flop of 7-3-3, Mansour checked to Stuey, who bet $6,000. Mansour called again. Both players checked the king on the turn. When a queen appeared on the river, Mansour had missed his draw. Even so, he smelled weakness in Stuey and moved all in for more than twice the size of the pot. Stuey stared him down for 10 or 12 seconds. "You have 5-4 or 6-5," he coolly announced. "I'm gonna call you with this," though all he could show Mansour was 10 high.



When he saw the two hands, even Phil Hellmuth was startled. "Wow, what an unbelievable call! Stuey can't even beat a jack-high bluff." Mansour later said he felt "like a bulldozer just ran over me. I still love Stuey, but what the heck is going on!" As Barry Greenstein and others have noted, Stuey "was a hard player to bluff, since he was an expert at figuring out when his opponent was on a draw that didn't get there." The extremely narrow range of hands Stuey had put Mansour on, 5-4 or 6-5, were just about the only two he could beat in a showdown, so it took total confidence in his read to call a bet of that size. "When a guy makes a call like that against you," Matloubi admitted to Hellmuth, "you just give up. It's like he's taken all of the wind out of your sails. I decided that I couldn't play any more heads-up no-limit hold'em, at least not that day, if not forever." Stuey's defeat of Mansour and the way he'd accomplished it cemented his reputation as the game's reigning no-limit genius.



By 1997, however, the former back-to-back champion hadn't won any tournament in more than six years. He couldn't even scrape together a bankroll to play in the black-chip game at Bellagio, which had replaced the Mirage as home of the white-chip (highest limit) action. Decades of snorting cocaine had caused his nostrils to partially collapse, which he tried to hide behind a big round pair of blue sunglasses. On May 15, he was so obviously strung out that 20 minutes before the main event, he had neither $10,000 nor a backer to put it up. Desperate, he called Billy Baxter and pleaded with him to forget the ICU final table in 1990. "I knew Stuey was having problems and wasn't in great shape," Baxter said later. "But he was always hard to say no to. It just seemed from his tone that he wanted to play in that tournament more than anything, and in the end I didn't have the heart to tell him he couldn't. What the hell – I done worse things with my money."



Though it was a struggle for Stuey to focus and even stay awake – many recall that he looked like a corpse – his aggression and talent against a field consisting mainly of players trying to survive was enough for him to finish day 1 in seventh place with 41,175 and day 2 in second with 232,000. The luck of the draw on day 3 put him at a table with Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, and Chris Ferguson. Hellmuth took the opportunity to try to dominate these former and future champions, but it was Ungar who responded most effectively by playing back almost every time Hellmuth came in for a raise. "Stu's very good at looking at a player and knowing what he has," Hellmuth admitted. "I know, because I personally bluffed off two hundred thousand to the guy during the tournament. In fact, my bluffing him so many times kept him going strong and knocked me out."



When the final table was set late Wednesday night, Stuey had a sizable chip lead. Not surprisingly, Baxter and Mike Sexton made a bed check of his room at the Horseshoe. Baxter was only half joking when he told Stuey that if he didn't show up on Thursday, "I'm going to kill your ass." But he was serious when he added, "It's all over. The rest of them – they're playing for second place."



"You have to appreciate the beauty of what Billy did for Stuey that night," Sexton said. "I mean, Stuey was so fragile at the time; that comment was just the perfect boost to get him ready and keep him straight." And his friends' little pep talk did keep him straight, at least for the next 18 hours or so, long enough for Stuey to blitz through the other finalists and become the only player ever to win three WSOP championships. (Moss was elected to his first; in the next two, he vanquished fields of eight and 16.) Of the 30 major no-limit hold'em events Stuey entered in his life, he won an astonishing 10 of them, a record that will never be even approached. "At least three of those tournaments he entered," adds Brunson, "he was stoned out of his mind and went out immediately. So that makes 10 out of 27." Players in the next-highest echelon, Brunson included, win roughly one start in 40.



In keeping with a no-frills Horseshoe tradition, the $1 million in cash arrived at the table in a cardboard Chiffon toilet paper box. Baxter's faith in Stuey had finally paid off in spades, but Stuey's half-share was gone within a couple of months, most of it spent on long-shot sports bets and bags of cocaine. Because his ruined nostrils kept him from snorting the powdered form, he was now smoking crack and swallowing Percodan tablets. When it came time the following May to defend his title, he was too strung out to walk upright into the tournament room, let alone play, even though Baxter had once again fronted his buy-in.



Six months later, on Nov. 22, 1998, Stuart Errol Ungar, 45, who had won in the neighborhood of $25 million playing poker and gin, was found dead in Room 16 of the Oasis Motel, a $58-per-night dive in the no man's land between Downtown Las Vegas and the iridescent gleam of the Strip.



The Kid's near-suicidal approach to playing hold'em, betting sports, and getting high had positive results only in the card game, but his weaknesses and strengths are all of a piece. Addiction and mental illness remain disgracefully misunderstood in our culture, but it's clear that the headlong talent of people like Ungar has to do with unusual – some would call it freakish – neural chemistry. In the back of their forehead, more specifically in the anterior cigulate of their frontal cortex, they have more vulnerable dopamine systems, "psyches" (as we used to call them) more easily hijacked by rewards like sex, dope, money, or laurels. Mastering any game or art form can trigger overpowering pleasure, and this dopamine rush gets deeply embedded in the memory of the most talented players. Normal brains work this way, too, but they tend to operate within milder and narrower "mood swings," with lower intensity jolts of pleasure and insight. "The same neural circuitry involved in the highs and lows of abusing drugs," says Harvard neuroscientist Hans Breiter, "is activated by winning or losing money." The difference is that while geniuses work hard at their art form or game, neurobiologist Steven Pinker reminds us they "may also have been dealt a genetic hand with four aces." Their muse may be art, chess, or poker, but impossible, even deranged leaps of insight – calling Matloubi's all-in bet with 10 high, for example – seem to be a common denominator dividing ordinary artists from great ones. The bottom line is that Stuey's financial recklessness and freakish neural circuitry not only broke him and killed him, they were also what made him unbeatable.