One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey the Kid Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player

by Nolan Dalla, Peter Alson, Mike Sexton (Foreword by)

Overview

Stuey Ungar, the son of a Lower East Side bookie, grew up in a New York of the 1950s and '60s that was straight out of Damon Runyon. By his early teens, he had dropped out of high school and was spending most of his time in the city's under- ground card rooms. So prodigious was his talent for playing gin rummy that he soon found himself bankrolled by members of the Genovese crime family. After thrashing every top gin player on the East Coast, he was forced to broaden his horizons--traveling around the country to find opponents and also learning other card games, including poker.
At twenty-one, he moved to Las Vegas for good and quickly found mentors in poker legends such as Jack "Treetop" Straus, "Amarillo Slim" Preston, Doyle Brunson, and Chip Reese, who embraced the skinny five-foot-five kid with the Rimbaud aura. Soon enough, Ungar was playing in the biggest games at the famous Dunes poker room, learning the finer points of the game at incredible speed.
In 1980, competing in his second tournament ever and playing a game--no-limit Texas Hold'em--he'd just learned, he shocked the poker universe by winning the World Series of Poker. He would go on to win the event a record three times. In One of a Kind, authors Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson tell the startling tale of a man who managed to win millions of dollars and live the highest of high-roller lives without ever quite understanding or respecting the value of money. Whether tossing away his winnings at the racetrack or on a single roll of the dice, Ungar was notorious for gambling every single dollar in his pocket on a daily basis. The risk that he embodied in his gambling carried over to his personal life. He had no concept of night or day. He didn't own a wristwatch, didn't have a bank account, and for years had no home address or personal possessions. For all his gambling successes, at the end of his life he bounced between hotel rooms, casinos, and crack houses, dependent upon the kindness of friends and strangers.
This intimate, authorized biography 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416510185
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	07/15/2005
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	799 KB

About the Author

Nolan Dalla is the lead sports handicapper for Casino Player and has written for Gambling Times, Card Player, Poker Digest, Poker Pages, Poker Player, and The Intelligent Gambler. He was the head of public relations for Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas and is now media director for the World Series of Poker. A native Texan, he currently resides in Las Vegas.
Peter Alson is the author of the highly acclaimed memoir Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie and coauthor of One of a Kind, a biography of the poker champion Stuey Ungar, and Atlas: From the Street to the Ring: A Son's Struggle to Become a Man. Alson's articles have appeared in many national magazines, including Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Alice, and their daughter Eden.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

The Kid

No one noticed him at first.

It was May 1997, fifteen hours before the start of the $10,000 buy-in at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) championship event, and in the satellite area, a low-lit collection of baize-topped hold'em tables in the back of Binion's Horseshoe casino, most of the players were too caught up in the business at hand to pay attention right away.

When one player did at last recognize the diminutive man wandering around the periphery of the room, he muttered something to the fellows at his table, and a couple of them turned to look. Then a couple more looked.

Stu Ungar, the two-time world champion of poker, was not unaccustomed to drawing stares in a poker room. The man they called "the Kid" was the most feared tournament player in poker history. Yet here it was, the eve of the championship, and this was the first time he'd been sighted during the more than three weeks that poker's greatest stars had been gathered at the Horseshoe in Las Vegas for their annual shoot-out.

As Stuey continued to navigate his way through the room, the whispers grew louder. He tried to ignore the eyes that widened at the sight of him. It wasn't easy. He had once been dubbed in print the "Keith Richards of poker," both for his rock-star aura and for his spindly little-boy body and mop-topped boyish good looks, and he had always loved the attention. But this was different. This was not the kind of attention he was used to. Starstruck awe had been replaced by morbidfascination. Those who knew him were appalled by what they saw. Up close, the boyishness was gone. Stuey's face was sickly white, ravaged by years of hard, careless living and drug abuse. One side of his nose was collapsed from snorting too much cocaine. His skin was papery and looked as if it might rip at the slightest touch. More disturbing, in a way, was how he'd let himself go. He was unshaven. His fingernails were long and dirty. His clothes looked slept-in. And he smelled.

For a man who had won millions of dollars playing in the highest-stakes games in Las Vegas, it was humbling to have to walk into this room this way -- and worse still because the millions were gone, squandered on drugs and outrageous sports wagers. In a matter of hours, Jack McClelland, the tournament director, would utter his famous command "Shuffle up and deal," and the twenty-eighth annual championship would commence. Unless Stuey could persuade someone to back him, he'd be watching the action from the rail with the rest of the poker world's unwashed masses.

The night before the main event was a time of feverish desperation in the satellite area. Players who hadn't yet won an entry were taking last-gasp shots at scoring a seat in an event that happened only once a year. Most of the players who had already won seats, or who had the luxury of buying in for the full ten grand, were upstairs in their rooms, or across the street at the Golden Nugget. They were resting up, getting a good night's sleep, taking baths, getting massages. They knew that they were going to need every ounce of energy they could muster if they wanted to make it through the grueling four-day marathon.

Those still playing satellites were the luckless losers who hadn't been able to catch a break for three weeks but didn't want to admit defeat. They were stubbornly pursuing the dream -- a dream that, even if they achieved it, would put them at a huge disadvantage relative to the rest of the field. Imagine a runner needing to win a three-mile race in order to qualify for a thirty-mile race later the same day against opponents who had qualified weeks ago and were fully rested. That was the uphill task facing most of the men (and the few women) now in the room.

Better in than out, though, despite the disadvantage -- especially for a two-time world champion. Stuey saw Billy Baxter getting up from a table across the room and made a beeline for him. Baxter, a large, cheerful southerner, was a great lowball player who had won so many gold bracelets in deuce-to-seven lowball draw at the WSOP that one player jokingly began calling it the "Billy Baxter benefit tournament." Oddly enough, Baxter had never played in the $10,000 event, but after entering a $1,050 buy-in satellite (essentially, a one-table mini-tournament to get into the tournament) on a whim, he had managed just moments before to win it. He was now the proud owner of a slip of paper entitling him to a seat in the Big One; not surprisingly, he was in a good mood.

"Hey, Billy," Stuey said, drawing near. "Lyle turned me loose. I'm giving you the first shot at backing me tomorrow." Stuey's voice was pure Lower East Side New York -- a guttural, rapid-fire, wiseguy mumble that recalled Mugsy from the old Bowery Boys shorts. Stuey was referring to Lyle Berman, a multimillionaire businessman, who would be inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2002 and would become a driving force behind the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour. Berman had backed Stuey selectively in the past, but his timing had always been lousy, even when the Kid was on top of his game. Berman had wanted no part of Stuey in his current condition and had already told him so.

Baxter's luck with Stuey had been a bit better through the years, though on at least one occasion, in 1990, he experienced the downside of backing a drug abuser when Stuey failed to show up for the final two days of the WSOP. A sharp businessman and professional sports bettor, Baxter considered himself Stuey's friend. Their friendship complicated matters. "I liked Stuey," Baxter said. "I always wanted to help him out when I could."

In this case, however, even flushed with victory, Baxter did not feel comfortable. Stuey looked horrible. It was hard to imagine him finishing the four-day event, much less winning it. Baxter wasn't the type to throw away ten grand on a gesture.

"Stuey, I haven't been going all that great in sports lately," he said. "Try to get it from someone else. I mean, I'm sure you can get a hundred people in this room to back you."

At one point that had certainly been true, but no longer. A quick look around the room forced Stuey to face the truth: he was no more than an object of pity here, maybe even a butt of jokes. He turned and slunk out of the casino. No one knows exactly where he went, but somehow he managed to scrape together a few bucks and buy a vial of crack. Midnight found him in a den in the worst part of town, sucking on a crack pipe, trying to forget about the depths to which he had sunk and all that he had lost.

It seemed almost impossible to believe that four days later he would be back at the Horseshoe, a phoenix risen from the ashes, celebrating one of the greatest comebacks of all time.

Copyright ©2006 by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson

Editorial Reviews

On the surface, Stuey Ungar followed a life path that rivals every mother's worst nightmare: Raised in Manhattan's gritty East Village, "The Kid" hung out in gangster bars, dropping out of high school when he became more enthralled by gin rummy than by books. An obsessive, nonstop gambler, he mastered the game so completely that he was forced to abandon it: Nobody would play him. He turned to poker and conquered all competition, winning the world's poker championship three times; then fell victim to his own manias and weaknesses. Not long after his 45th birthday, he was found dead in a seedy hotel at the wrong end of the Las Vegas Strip. This biography pays a cautionary tribute to "the greatest poker player who ever lived." A tragic life; an absorbing read.

Begun as an as-told-to by Dalla with Stuey Ungar, this biography tells in painful detail the story of the poker and gin superstar. Ungar is certainly a fascinating subject. He was prodigiously dysfunctional, a manic sports bettor and cocaine addict who won an estimated $30 million during his life, but who, after his death in 1998, needed a collection from his friends to pay for his funeral. Unfortunately, the complexities of Ungar's personality aren't satisfactorily unraveled by the authors. They offer stories from the likes of poker legend Doyle Brunson and Mike Sexton, television's reigning poker guru, of Ungar's fabulous skills as a card player and spectacular need for "action," but few insights into the source of Ungar's self-destructive demons: he died prematurely at age 45 from the ravages of drug abuse. Without any analysis, the repetitious account of years of poker ups and downs, sports gambling losses, manic acts of generosity and descents into drug abuse, as tragic as it is, becomes tedious. Still, without distorting or downplaying Ungar's depredations, this is a heartfelt, respectful and accepting biography. Agent, Greg Dinkin. (July 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

What began as a ghostwritten autobiography of the most feared tournament player in poker history became a biography by default when Stuey "The Kid" Ungar's dope habit finally killed him. He was to the manner born: his father was a bookie and loan shark on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and young Ungar knew all about gambling long before the Lottery and OTB. But he brought something special to his milieu: a natural card sense aided by a fantastic memory and mixed with a risk-taking persona. He was like a gladiator on the green felt, write gambling-journalists Dalla and Alson (Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie, 1996) in this jumpy if dispiriting account. By the time of his bar mitzvah, he was wired in and wired up: "What good was a fucking Treasury bond to me? Was I gonna be able to take that to a dice game? Give me the cash." His genius was gin, but he made his fortune at poker, where he won the World Series of Poker three times. As mesmerizing as he was at the poker table, however, he was also a rough piece of work (as seen particularly through interview snippets with Dalla, originally his ghostwriter): rude, derisive, a poor winner and a worse loser, a man-child who had been insulated from the mundane tasks of everyday life, incapable of responsibility. The money came and went, won at the card table-and the table action described here is excellent stuff-then lost at the track or ballpark. The fame and the money, the authors suggest, along with Ungar's loneliness and insecurities, resulted in a severe cocaine habit, so severe it collapsed one side of the nose when passageways had dissolved. Ungar took to crack as an alternative. The story gets more and more awful, until Ungar dies in1998, at age 45, in a vomit-splattered motel room. The gambler made into an object of fascination, absolutely dazzling from a distance, increasingly noisome the closer you get.

Kirkus Reviews