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Millionaires In Any Profession

Lots of people make their living (or supplement their income) playing poker. Forget winning against these guys. They have all the time in the world to play and are seasoned veterans at "reading people." For example, amateurs usually act shy when their hand is strong and just the opposite when their hand is weak. The pros are often friendly all the time, but they always know what's going on at the table — which is by far the key rule you should follow, too.

Doyle Brunson

The 1976 championship came down to Jesse Alto and myself. Jesse was a notorious steamer—a steamer's someone who gets hot under the collar and then plays weaker hands than he normally would. I had about three quarters of the chips, and I was dealt the 10 and deuce of spades. I thought to myself, 'If I could just have a flop and have a crazy hand here, then I can break him.' He happened to have an ace and a Jack of hearts. The flop came, and it was ace, Jack and a 10. I called him. Then the fourth card was a deuce. I raised him the rest of his chips, and he called it. I caught a 10 [and won the tournament]. The next year was just an accidental thing—I was the big blind again with a 10 and a deuce. The flop was a 10, eight, five, and I checked and my opponent checked. Then a deuce came up, so I bet, and he raised me, and I bet him for the rest of his chips. He finally called it, and the last card was a 10, which made it 10s full again.

Now they call a 10 and two card combo a Doyle. It's not a good hand, but I try to play it once each tournament for sentimental reasons. I play it real aggressively when I play it—I'll raise with it and I'll bet twice. Usually you win the pot when you do that. If someone starts calling me, I stop. Then I always show [the hand].

I've won nine bracelets for winning an event at the World Series. I don't have one left. I gave them to family members through the years and they probably lost one or two of them. I don't even know where they are. It wasn't that important then. The prestige isn't what it is today. Getting guys to play in the side games was the object of the tournament. Truthfully, we were more interested in getting it over with and getting to the real games.

Johnny Chan

In 1987, I put an orange on top of my cards as an air freshener. Next thing I know, I'm winning the World Series. So the next year I did the same thing. It worked again! I said to myself, 'This orange is all right.' But now when other people play me they'll do things like bring out bananas and grapefruits.

In 1988, it was down to three players. Eric Seidel and Ron Graham had about a million in chips [combined]. I was hoping one would knock the other out, so I'd finish in second. I would have been happy with second. I never dreamed I would have won it. When Eric knocked out Ron, I said, 'Hey, all right.' Down to two players, Eric had an eight-to-one chip lead on me. I chopped him down, but then I lost the biggest pot in history back then—$1.5 million. I had pocket eights and he had pocket nines. I was down to the short stack again. But next thing you know, I had him all in and broke him.

The producers of Rounders asked me to sign a release to release the footage [of the final 1988 hand] for the movie. My daughter wanted to meet Matt Damon, [so] I told 'em I'm not going to sign the release unless I'm going to be in the movie. They thought about it, and a few days later they said, 'OK, Johnny, you got it.' So I was happy and I was in it. I taught Matt Damon and Ed Norton how to play poker. Then we filmed at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

Phil Hellmuth Jr.

In 1989 I had kind of convinced myself that I was going to be the world champion. Even the message on my phone was, 'You're talking to the reigning world champion of poker.' I said, 'I'm going to win it and I'm going to win 100 percent of the money outright.' At a lot of past World Series, there had been splitting of the prize money. The discrepancy between first and second place is a lot of money—in 1989, it was $400,000. So people would say, 'OK, I'll give you $100,000 if I win, you give me $100,000 if you win.' But I'd been telling everybody I would win all the money outright. I said the only exception was if I ended up one-on-one with Johnny Chan. And sure enough it came down to Chan and me. But it wasn't until [the very end when] I had him all in that we stopped and made a deal. Right before they dealt the flop, I said, 'Johnny, you want to talk?' When they dealt the cards, I won. Had I not opened my mouth, I would have won the full $755,000 [awarded for first place]. The deal cost me $100,000.

Can you imagine telling your mom and dad that you're not going to finish college and that you're going to play poker for a living? My dad has a PhD, a JD and an MBA. He works as an assistant dean at a university. The man is education. My decision wasn't a hit. They were really pissed. This was when I was 21. I had my ups and downs in poker, and when I was 24, I really started to see some big ups. I asked my mom to go anywhere in the world with me. So she and I went to the Florida Keys. [I took trips with my brother and sisters too.] Then I said, 'Dad, look, it's time for you and me to go somewhere. I'm making a lot of money, why don't we go Australia or New Zealand?' He said, 'No, I want to watch you play in the World Series of Poker.' I said, 'No you don't.' He said, 'You're going to win it this year, aren't you?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Well I want to be there.' I said, 'Please come back in three weeks and we'll talk in a more reasonable way, because I'm just going to ignore you the whole time. You won't get any time with me.' Three weeks later, he still wanted to come. So I said, 'Fine, if I win it, I'll buy you a new car.'

So he was there when I won the World Series of Poker. But I did ignore him the whole time. I wouldn't even let him watch me play in the final event. He had to watch all the action from TVs in the casino. When that last card came off and I was the new world champion of poker, my arms shot up in victory. And the first thing I did was look around for my dad. He was running up the aisle. We've got $1.3 million in cash sitting on the table, so the security guards are stopping him. I'm like, 'No, that's my dad, let him through.' I remember embracing him. It was one of the most special moments in my life.

Amarillo Slim Preston

In the beginning we didn't give a damn about the title [of World Series Champion]. You couldn't eat a title. I've got a room full of trophies, and I can't think of anything they've ever done for me except gather dust. No one cared. But the side games [during the tournament] were out of sight. All the hometown heroes came out to play. And prior to about 1980 there wasn't more than five good players in the world. Shit, it was soft as butter for us. All these hometown champions came out and we made whores out of them. They'd go home, gather all the money up and bring it to us.

I'm not being smartassed, but [after I won the championship in 1972] I did every TV show there is. I did The Tonight Show 11 times. Me and Johnny got along real good. In fact, we went to Wimbledon together twice. In the early '70s, we had [famed country singer] Marty Robbins sing 'El Paso' to us while we were eating. Everyone thought that was really something because celebrities started showing up. We'd rub elbows and some of them wanted to play. They still do. And we welcomed them, because most celebrities couldn't track an elephant in four feet of snow. Their poker is a little weak.

FHM

Chris Moneymaker

On the first day of the tournament I looked around my table and at least half of the guys had Internet shirts on. Back then, the Internet shirts generally meant that the guy qualified online. I was wearing my PokerStars.com shirt, so I felt like everyone was pretty much in the same boat as me and as nervous as I was. I found out some of the guys' names. One was Krazy Kanuck, who is one of the best players on the Internet, so I wasn't happy to see him. There was another guy who was real quiet and never brought attention to himself, so I never really thought much about him. Then a couple of hours later, he and I got mixed up in a pot and I laid it down to him. Someone complimented him and asked, 'What have you done since winning?' Later I walked over to the [Gallery of Champions, which has pictures of past World Series winners] and realized the guy was [1995 champ] Dan Harrington. It was like, 'Oh, wow, I better start respecting him more than the rest of the table.'

The night I won the championship I grabbed $15,000 and took a check for the rest. We ended up at a strip club. Everything was on me. At like, 6:30 a.m., the owner came up and said, 'You need to pay the bill. You owe $25,000.' I was like, 'Well, I only have $15,000, but I have a check for $2.5 million.' He was like, 'I can't cash that check. I need cash.' I was like, 'Oh, great.' Eventually, one of the people with us called Huck Seed, who's a former World Series champion, and he came over to help pay the bill.

World Series Of Poker. FHM. September 2005.

Bold Bets Skill trumps luck, but that doesn’t stop poker pros from risking piles of cash on totally absurd wagers. Amarillo Slim Preston bet tennis pro Bobby Riggs $10,000 that he could beat him at a game of ping-pong, with one condition: Slim got to choose the paddles. Slim showed up with two skillets—he had been practicing on the sly—and promptly waxed Riggs 21–8. As incentive to lose weight, poker legend Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson put up more than $100,000 at 10-1 odds that he could drop 100 pounds in less than two years. After losing nothing the first year, he took off 100 the next, and his pals paid up more than a million bucks. High-stakes poker stud Ted Forrest won $7,000 by running a marathon in Las Vegas in 118-degree heat. (Gives new meaning to the phrase, “Run, Forrest, run!”) He finished in five and a half hours, but the track was so hot he separated the sole of his foot. Howard “the Professor” Lederer, a staunch vegetarian, collected $10,000 from his friend David Grey after Grey dared him to eat a hamburger. Grey has a standing offer to win his money back if he only eats two olives, his least-favorite food, but he still hasn’t done it. Three-time World Series of Poker champion and legendary madman Stu “the Kid” Ungar blew $80,000 the first time he ever set foot on the golf course—before he even made it to the first tee. He lost it making pickup bets while duffing around on the putting green. Poker hotshot Phil Ivey routinely gets smoked in golf by his friend Erick Lindgren, but in 2004 Ivey bet Lindgren $500,000 that he would beat him at least once in a 72-hole match in the next eight years. Ivey has hired a golf coach. The bet has yet to be settled.

Negreanu, Lindgren, And Arieh Would Fit Right In At Your Thursday Night Home Game

Josh Arieh is in the Bahamas on the first tee, standing in the monstrous shadow of the Atlantis resort, pondering an intimidating shot with a bunker down the left side and a cluster of palm trees lining the right. But first things first: “What are we playing for?” “Two hundred dollars a hole,” replies his good friend and fellow poker pro Erick Lindgren. “That’s a bet.”

A wager is a given (these guys would gamble on Scattergories), but the stakes are slightly out of scale. After all, they’re playing miniature golf. As is their gambling custom, the pot grows exponentially, with the stakes doubling as soon as one guy falls behind. (Earlier they shot pool with poker pro and best bud Daniel Negreanu. The bet on the first game was $100. The last? $6,400.) But even when thousands of dollars are on the line, these poker pros compete with all the intensity of a couple of duffers on their day off. On one hole Lindgren falls behind after trying to putt through a sand trap…but Arieh finds a way to lose, four-putting from three feet away. “Oh, you just hate to see that,” Lindgren jabs as Arieh’s ball slides by the hole again.The last hole, a par 3 measuring all of 108 feet, is ultimately worth $1,200, about double what the average American makes each week. Why risk serious cash on such frivolity? “It’s all about the action,” says Lindgren, a blond, square-jawed Californian. “Not me. I’m a hustler,” counters the boisterous Arieh, an Atlanta native. “I need an edge.”

To prove his point he calmly taps in a two-footer, giving him the match. Lindgren peels off some cash and hands it to Arieh as they make plans for the night. “Let’s grab some cocktails, maybe shoot some dice later,” Lindgren says. It’s just another day on the traveling tournament poker carnival, where time away from the tables is spent partying, gambling, and touring the globe—not bad work, if you can get it. And Negreanu, Lindgren, and Arieh are the heart of a Rat Pack of young, charismatic stars who are emerging as new gods for a poker-crazed generation. (The other members of the close-knit crew, like dashing Spaniard Carlos Mortensen, petite blonde Jennifer Harman, and soft-spoken Indonesian John Juanda, are ripped from a Hollywood casting agent’s wet dream.)

Yet when you watch them together, they’re strikingly normal, a far cry from the novelty act poker stars of years past, like cartoonish cowboy Amarillo Slim and New York prodigy turned coke-fueled maniac Stu Ungar. Negreanu, Lindgren, and Arieh would fit right in at your Thursday night home game, talking smack and tossing back beers. “These are not larger-than-life poker characters. They’re like guys I went to high school and college with—they just happen to be talented at poker,” says Brian Balsbaugh, president of Poker Royalty, a management firm that exclusively reps all three. But that dude-next-door quality, while genuine, masks a deep reservoir of poker smarts. “These young guns are fearless warriors, constantly out there rambling and gambling and accumulating chips,” says Mike Sexton, TV host for the World Poker Tour. “In my opinion, they would be millionaires in any profession—they are that much smarter than everyone else.” Sexton adds that there’s another important distinction between Lindgren, Negreanu, and Arieh and the pimply faced newbies flooding card rooms around the country: None of them is older than 30, yet they’ve paid their dues.

Only 28, Lindgren was named the World Poker Tour Player of the Year in 2004 after winning two events and taking home more than $1.55 million. But the former JUCO basketball player was nearly broke in 1998, paid to keep the tables full at a Northern California casino—but risking his own money in the games. When he had winnings, he blew them on ill-advised sports bets.

If you met him on the street, Negreanu may be the last person you’d expect to be a poker superstar. At five-foot-nine and less than 150 pounds, he is far from an intimidating physical presence. His favorite hobbies are video games and stand-up comedy, and he’s a vegetarian who hits casinos with dishes specially prepared by his mother.

Unconventionality is a Negreanu hallmark, especially at the poker table. He’ll play any two cards, and he remains jocular even when a tournament is on the line, a ruse that masks his old-school ability to divine what opponents are holding. This unorthodox style, combined with a telegenic image, makes him one of the most popular players in the game. “The adoration is a bit silly,” he says. “You see all these guys, and they think they are superstars. I’m like, ‘You know what? You’re just a poker player. You’re not Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise.’ I just play poker well; that’s all I do. But I do feel a genuine responsibility to reach out to these young kids and try to guide them. This is a hard life, and they don’t know that.”

Maxim

As neighbors Negreanu and Lindgren see each other regularly; they hang out less often with Arieh, who lives near his family in Atlanta (where Lindgren joined him for a raucous New Year’s Eve). But when the gang convenes, usually at one of the $10,000 buy-in tournaments that are held a couple of times each month, the good times and shop talk mix into a potent—and winning—cocktail. By sharing information about other players and identifying mistakes in their games, they make each other better. “We don’t sit around and talk about bad beats,” Arieh says. “We’re trying to figure out why we lost good hands. There are things we can’t prevent—namely, plain old bad luck—so if there’s no way to prevent it, then there’s no reason to talk about it. But if there’s something we could’ve done differently, done better, we figure it out.”

This time last year Arieh was a relative unknown. By hustling pool, dominating poker games around Atlanta, and playing online, he made a comfortable living, but not so comfortable that he could pony up the $10,000 to enter the 2004 World Series of Poker.

The Bahamas tournament, when all three busted out early, was one of the few times of late when one of the three was not in the running for a six-figure payout, but they know there will be countless friendly—yet competitive—showdowns in the years to come. “Every one of us deeply respects the game, so when we play each other it’s all out. It’s like a chess match, because we know so much about each other,” Negreanu says. “But I genuinely root for Erick and Josh. The bond of friendship is more important than the money, because we’re all going to make enough money anyway.”

Brad Reagan. Three Kings: The Poker Pack. Maxim. June 2005.

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