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LAS VEGAS -- In Las Vegas terms, it's almost a rite of
spring: A talented newcomer plants his elbows on the cash-green felt of a
big-money table at the World Series of Poker. He gets on a roll, starts
talking some trash, and inevitably, the murmurs start. "He's the next Stuey,"
somebody will say. "He's another Kid."
But anyone who actually has played against Stu Ungar will disagree.
"He'd kill these guys," says Bobby Baldwin, a champion of the late 1970s.
"It wouldn't even be close."
"These guys" are the new generation of players expected to swell this year's
World Series of Poker to more than 6,000 contestants for its main events,
more than twice the number of contestants as last year's series, which drew
about three times the number of the year before. Stu, or Stuey the Kid,
Ungar was the swashbuckling enfant terrible of poker before it blew
up into a mainstream obsession in the 1990s. The diminutive son of a
bookmaker from Manhattan's Lower East Side, he won his back-to-back World
Series of Poker titles by the unheard of age of 27 and went on to win, and
lose, $30 million by one estimate before his epic taste for excess left him
dead, in a cheap Las Vegas motel on Nov. 22, 1998, at 45.
A legend even when he was alive, Ungar left a legacy that has always loomed
large at the World Series of Poker. It looms even larger for the hundreds of
players roaming the hangarlike convention hall at Harrah's Rio All-Suite
Hotel and Casino, where the tournament continues through July 15. His
biography, One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey 'the Kid' Ungar, the
World's Greatest Poker Player, by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson, hit
stores last week.
To his contemporaries, Ungar remains the ultimate gambler's cautionary tale,
the embodiment of hazardous risk. But to a wonky new generation of players,
decked out in Oakley snowboarder sunglasses and iPods, schooled on Internet
poker and striving for corporate sponsorship, Ungar is a renegade genius,
the last and wildest of a breed of players who learned the game in illegal
backroom card clubs and played the game for thrills, with rock 'n' roll
abandon.
As Alson, the co-author of Ungar's biography, says, "He was the Jim Morrison
of poker."
With his hollowed cheeks and surly pout, Ungar looked the part of the
romantic rebel. And having become a pet of the extended Genovese crime
family after honing his skills in the shadowy card parlors of New York of
the 1960s, as his biography recounts, he embraced the wiseguy swagger.
A faster mind
In Las Vegas, where he moved in the late '70s, he took up with a different
breed of outlaw. The reigning card sharks of the time were mostly
middle-aged "rounders" from the rural South who had honed their games over
decades, favored pale Stetsons and went by names such as Amarillo Slim
Preston and Doyle Texas Dolly Brunson.
"Back then, it was Texas oil men, gangsters, drug dealers," Dalla recalls.
"It was the Wild West. Now it's a technical game. The math guys are taking
over."
The older players chafed at Ungar's arrogant, abrasive style, but they could
not deny his talent.
"His mind just worked 99.9999 percent faster than everybody else's," recalls
Mike Sexton, a prominent player who often played Ungar, starting in the late
'70s.
While today's top young players tend to be studied in their boldness, Ungar,
by contrast, was known for his kamikaze fearlessness combined with a
predator's nose for weakness. "I remember him telling me, 'I just have to
make myself hate my opponents,'" Sexton says. " 'I just want to rip their
throats out.' "
Putting Ungar's prowess in perspective, Dalla, who serves as the media
director for the World Series, points out that Ungar won 10 out of the 30
major events he entered, despite losing many of his prime years to drug use.
This is a "staggering" record, he says. "There have been people who won more
than 10 $10,000 majors, but that's spread over 20 years, over literally
hundreds of tournaments."
But for those playing in Ungar's wake, his self-destruction remains an
indelible part of his allure. "He's a legend," says Shane Schleger, a
28-year-old player from New York City. "The type of personality that's drawn
to the lifestyle is bound to have a lot of vice in his life. I'm no stranger
to that."
"Let's just say," he adds, "Stuey died for all of our sins."
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