I would like opinions on him. Ive seen the movies, seen the documentary's, watched the WSOP videos, know all there is to it.

I want to know what you guys think about him, and what made him such an amazing player at the table.

My opinion is that, I have never seen or heard of such an amazing player. No matter what people say about his life, I think there is still yet to be a poker player that is close to his skill. Maybe in the future there will be, but as of now I think not. Phil Ivey is a great player, the best alive poker player right now possibly, but he contains nothing special to put him that far ahead. Phil Ivey still suffers downswings, and tough grinds against other players. But he isn't that far ahead in skill to be named "The Best of All Time". But who knows? Im not even 18 yet till next month, so I haven't really felt the tension all of you have.

best ever. close thread.

He seemed to be a card savant.

Not just poker, but freaking any card game.

Today, a lot of the heavy lifting has been down for NLHE so a lot of players know the correct play because someone else basically told them.

But players like Stu Ungar are the few gifted enough to derive the winning play for themselves without the benefit of some computer model...

anyways, 99% of poker players aren't good enough to wash his jock strap let alone be compared to him.

He always has amazed me. I also read/saw everything the internet has to offer me on him. I myself wonder what seperated him from a normal (great) player. They say his chips just always moved. I really wish they had footage like they do now at the wsop, where you can see hole cards and all.

In online enviroment, I don't think he would stand a change vs. current high stakes cash pro's. He would have more of an edge live, but still probably lose.

This is of course speculating, but it's a different time now. Games are a lot tougher.

He was just levels ahead of his generation. Fwiw Brunson said he would pick Ungar over Ivey in a HU match.

Chip Reese is considered the best cash games pros ever by the pros. I think Stu is one of the top 5 best live players ever. The problem with Stu is that because of his off the table problems he never really sustained his own bankroll. It's really hard to determine if he would be the best. I think this is a question that is best answered by the pros.

When you live and die like he did the legend grows stronger with each story. James Dean, Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, etc - it's great for immortality.

this

theres no way he would be so dominant in todays games because the there are alot more better players around today than there were then. dont get me wrong, i think he'd still be pretty damn good but he would have all the other great players of today to contend with. if you had a time machine that could hold one person im pretty sure you could find plenty of candidates to send back in time to about that era and they'd totally crush those games more than they do now.

that hard to say aswell, he could still be the best as the game has evolved he could of evolved aswell.

yes i agree that we would expect that he would evolve as well but that doesnt mean he would be as dominant because a more educated and generally better player base wouldnt allow it as much, which was really my point. lets say his ROI then was (i'll make up a number) 100% and lets say that the second best player intodays MTTs (I'll make up another number) was 17% and Stu's was 20%.....that would be pretty damn good right? he'd probably also experience busto alot due to BR management ldo

its kind of a silly thing to debate anyway imo. you can only beat and crush the the opposition of the time. when i play sport sometimes we totally smash the other team because they are missing players or just arent that good.....thats not my fault and if i can beat them by a big margin then thats what i will do although sometimes its more satisfying to beat a good team in a tough game than to win in a landslide.

He could have, he might have, he might not have. It's all rather silly to even bother with. In his time he was obviously great but comparing past to present is just daft.

Roger Federer would have wiped the floor with Rod Laver in tennis had they been able to meet. Would Rod Laver have been able to adapt to the strength, stamina, ability and improvement in equipment had be been around to play tennis today? we will never know.

Saying that Stu Ungar wouldn't be as dominant in today's game is like saying Isaac Newton wouldn't have been as dominant in physics today.

Genuis is genuis and if Stu was starting out today, the same genuis that enable him to learn, adapt, and crush the game at that point in time would be the same genuis that would enable him to do the same in this point in time.

Same with Newton. The only thing that changes is their respective starting points, that is all.

The red herring when speaking speculatively like this is that we can't help but default their starting points to their respective eras, but in reality THIS WOULD NOT BE ACCURATE.

If you adjust his starting point to today (i.e. a 14 year old Stu Ungar today born in 1996) he would absolutely CRUSH the game. Genuis is genuis. He'd take the latest knowledge base and START FROM THERE. Add that starting point to his genuis and today's field wouldn't stand a chance.

Same thing with ANY genuis in any field. Adjust them to modern times, and they would still kick all kinds of ass since they wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.

I think most people do not have an appreciation for just how smart you have to be to be a trailblazer and to do things that have yet never been done.

Too many people in today's day and age have an over inflated opinion of their own skill because they benefit due to alot of heavy lifting already having been done for them.

PLEASE - you are not comparing the likes of Isaac Newton and say Albert Einstein to Stu Unger are you?

i saw that "one of a kind" documentary and movie few weeks ago..i was impressed A LOT..

to my mind, you can't compare him to ivey or anyone. and it's such a wrong statement to say "he wouldn't be able play as good now, because there are so many good player" wtf? he learned how to play nlhe in wsop! and won it! or any other card game he could learn in few days and beat a guy, who was playing for 30 years.

FREAK OF NATURE. he was card player and could read people, he didn't need to play 1billion hands to be a pro in no limit hold'em..he just needed to play for a while..that's it..so yeah..as someone said "a genius is a genius". he would be hardest man to beat if he was still alive, if he was just born and start playing poker or whatever

All I know is reputation, and only the old timers who played with him could say.

So I'll just wildly speculate. {failure to insert smilie here}

I thought Ungar's *reputation* was that he was a master of the tournament, perhaps also an excellent player in some of the cash games, but not an all-around player, and prone to throw tons of money away playing Gin against those who were more expert than himself. As for tourneys, at least part of his success must be attributed to the fact that the majority of his opponents had not yet seen the implications of tourney play for LOOSE and aggressive play. It's a matter of pure speculation how he would have fared in a different time.

Maybe he was the Paul Morphy of poker, but not the Kasparov, if that analogy makes any sense to the chess players among us. (Morphy was a brilliant combinational attack player, with an instinctive but not fully developed grasp of position in a time when positional advantage had not yet been revealed in theory. Kasparov was a highly aggressive, but also deeply nuanced and well rounded player who thrived even among geniuses of the first calliber. Again, all reputation!).

Fairly certain he was meant to be a better at gin rummy than poker player by quite a way.

Didn't some guy like Billy Baxter beat him out of a million bucks or so in Gin? Maybe Ungar was one of those guys of whom they say, if he was the fifth best player in the world, he'd seek out numbers 1 through 4, and lose everything.

-------------------------------------------
Edit: Okay, after rereading, I see Baxter's success vs. Ungar in Gin (which he claims he never lost to Ungar except in his first defeat in a tourney) depended significantly on playing to Ungar's pride and getting him to take a series of side bets.

I would doubt it. I think Ungar was pretty much unbeatable at gin.

Note that I edited my above post, but also consider the fact that Ungar claimed to be unbeatable at gin before he was actually beaten... which makes sense, really... and his reputed Gin losses did not take place in a public arena. Again, world class tourney player, not known as a world class *gambler*, and capable of blowing off money on bad gambles in addition to his other self-destructive habits.

Stu played in a simpilar time and his "problems" would probaly be magnified in this day and age. Let's give him the credit he is do, a prodigy, great player, maybe one of the best. Let's not discount Ivey though. Ivey has swings because u can look him up on PTR, Stu all u can do is watch the highlights of him pwning everyone and the TV movies of him beating someones 4 of a kind w/ a royal flush. Or maybe u will see a youtube clip of him put someone on 10 of clubs and 7 of hearts and low and behold he was right damn Ivey lost a million last night how can they mention him in the same breath as this guy. Don't compare apples and oranges u do neither justice.

Maybe you are confusing Gin with Razz. He did take a big hit to Archie Karas in Razz. But he was clearly the best Gin player to ever live by a wide margin. The only reason he played poker is because after a while no one would play him in Gin. He once played 86 matches vs. a play considered the best of his generation and won all 86. He could never throw money away playing Gin against a more expert player than himself because no such play as ever existed.

Stu Ungar ITT?

He was obviously one of the best of his generation, and I think baring the players that played with both, I think it's not going to be possible for any of us to say whether or not he could crush today's games like he did back then.

Shame.

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okay, I got carried away

but just saying, genuis is genuis and from my understanding, he was a poker/card playing genuis.

and whenever people from a 'modern age' look into the past, they always do so with an inflated view of themselves as to be superior to those in the past, when in reality, we are standing on the shoulders of those in the past and will thus be a little taller. (paraphrasing famous Einstein quote).

In regards to poker, most of us benefit because all the heavy lifting has been done and we often inaccurately equate knowledge with ability.

That is, we fantasize about taking our knowledge to the past and crushing the WSOP back in 1979. And so we will then equate ourselves to the likes of Stu Ungar which is just not a fair or accurate comparison.

We easily forget just how good someone like Stu would be IF he started from the same knowledge base and pool we started from. I submit that if he did, he would be more or less as far ahead of the field now as he was then.

that's all i'm sayin...

p.s. proof of all this is that he comes back and wins WSOP in 1997. Seriously, how can you think he wouldn't stand up to players today?