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 (Atria Books, 316 pages)
There's an old saying in poker that at the table your worst enemy is yourself. I'll tell you one thing: in my case, truer words were never spoken.” --Stu Ungar
"Stu, or Stuey the Kid, Ungar was the swashbuckling enfant terrible of poker before it blew up into a mainstream obsession in the 1990's. The diminutive son of a Lower East Side bookmaker, 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" (
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/fa...anted=all&_r=0).
One of a Kind is the best account that we have of The Kid. The book was originally intended to be Ungar’s autobiography, but he tragically died before it could be written. What we do have is a collaboration of many minds: writers Dalla and Alson, who pen a compelling read; poker friends Mike Sexton, Billy Baxter, Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, and others who supported Ungar; and Madeline and Stephanie, Ungar’s wife and daughter. Stuey chimes in too: some of the book is told in his own words, which were transcribed from hours of interviews with Dalla.
Gambling Wunderkind
The book boldly calls Ungar “the world’s greatest poker player,” a tag that was debatable fifteen years ago and implausible now. But who cares that Ike Haxton would probably crush Stu? Most people know that Ungar’s best game was gin, a game in which, thanks to near-perfect recall and uncanny intuition, he was truly unbeatable. Stuey didn’t just crush his foes; he humiliated them:
Gin is a lot different from any other card game. You can’t bluff or put moves on people. Gin is a game of control. I used to break my opponents down. They’d crumble right in front of y eyes. I got a lot of satisfaction from that—seeing the smirk disappear from their faces and turn into fear. They’d come in wearing ties, with their hair neat, and after five hours with me their tie would be undone and their hair would be all over the place. They’d have this look in their eyes like they realized they couldn’t win. It was ****ing beautiful (78)
Before long everyone had heard of the young kid from Brooklyn, and no one gave him action. Hence his entree into poker. Was fun to get another account of those early WSOP days when Ungar won back-to-back titles in 1980 and 1981.
Not About the Benjamins
When Stu entered those seductive Vegas casinos, "it was not the Roman décor that intoxicated him so much as the ringing of slot machines, the whirring rattle of the roulette wheels, and the musical chatter of chips and coins. In some respects, he was like an alcoholic stumbling into a distillery” (70). The atmosphere and the sweat of a big game were more important than money. Once, after he won a massive Pick Six parlay in horsebetting and claimed not one but two tickets worth 700K each, the thrill of victory evaporated before he reached the cage. “I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “I guess reality kinda set in, that the money really wasn’t that big a deal” (187). Everything in Stu's life, from gambling to poker to women to drugs, was one long roller-coaster ride.
By the late 1990s, Ungar had become an anachronism: “barely forty years old, he was living in a city that was changing before his eyes, addicted to a drug that had been trendy years earlier, and down on his luck when the financial boom the the 1990s and a new generation of high rollers were beginning to make his five-figure sports wagers seem pedestrian” (234). Maybe worst of all, he had lost the respect of his friends and peers. After bailing Stu out of jail, Chip Reese vowed never to speak with him again. After securing a final 25K stake, Stu was fleeced at no-limit holdem by Erik Seidel, Johnny Chan, and another Kid Poker, Daniel Negreanu. Broke and unhealthy, Stu lurked around the poker room at Binion’s, begging for ten bucks here, fifteen there, and finally bilked two white chips from a busboy who’d been thrown a tip. Ouch.
**
This book delivers. At times the writing is so crisp and gripping that I wanted to pick up Alson’s other book,
Confessions of An Ivy League Bookie. Anyone read this? Dalla remains at the center of the poker world, holding court as the WSOP media director and resident wit/buffoon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp9ERm-u7gE. Read
One of A Kind if you want to learn more about the early WSOP days or the psychology of addiction.
A one-hour documentary, also called One of A Kind, is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pt2AOIz1wk