Thank you Ray for sharing.

Ray,

In old WSOP videos they have Tuna being presented as a "mentor" to Brad Daugherty, the first person to win $1,000,000 in one poker tournament (WSOP ME 1991). What is your assessment of Brad's poker abilities? Did Tuna have a piece of him? In what way was Tuna the mentor of Brad?

♥ this thread

i havent seen brad in years. last i heard was he is in vegas. he was good friends with tuna and they were almost inseparable for a long time.
brad played very tight so his style was much different than mine. but he did fine playing in the middle limits. i think tuna had a decent piece of him when he won.
not sure but i think also him and rod peate made a deal. both of which were really great guys but like every winner in a big tournament they played in higher games than their ability allowed at the time. set them back some.

He had that **** down to a science. He was certainly eccentric in demeanor and life pursuits but as far as the game goes, he knew exactly the image he was giving off and exactly who that image was apt to draw in. He sucked in all the wannabe superheroes who were hopped up on Supersystem (and that was exactly the quarry he was after)

My sample size with him isn't a fraction of yours and maybe my experience was atypical but he was far and away the biggest pain in the ass I ever played against in cash games. I eventually nitted up so bad against him that I couldn't play him anymore at all.

sure he was a pain. he also had a lot of phil helmuth in him. if someone sucked out he might stand up and yell at them for being such a suckout. both of them competed so hard that losing is devastating. thats why both made lots of money.

Ray:

Is it true that he ate a lot of cheeseburgers when in a tournament he got knocked out while playing well but the cards didn't cooperate?

I sort of remember reading an interview in which he said this.

If i could go back in time I would do the fattest line of blo w/ Stu. I think I would have been like 10 tho

tuna liked to eat plenty. he was getting real fat at one time so i talked him into at on wsop to diet and just eat vegi's. he didnt of course but did switch alot to watermelon and would eat plates full of it, especially at breakfast.

those were the days when we were comped for everything no matter what and just ordered what we felt like eating at the time from the restaurant at binions. the good old days.

Seriously. Grinning from ear to ear reading it.

Also...

One of the lesser-known patch deals in poker history:

I know that Ray Zee knows all this but I don't think many poker players, especially the boom players know Tuna Lund was the number one machine pro of all time. Bob Dancer is the most famous video poker pro but Lund made more money from machines than any other gambler in history. And Brad Daugherty was right there too.

I first observed Tuna at the 1992 WSOP. I was new to the gambling world and I didn't know anything about him at the time but he appeared to be a great poker player. By 1996 I had developed into a mini machine pro. That's when I started hearing all the stories about Tuna and his exploits working the casinos on video poker and slot progressive plays.

Tuna had one of the very first slot teams in Nevada. The legend is that some guy they called Kenny the Klone showed up in Reno in the eighties. This guy was supposedly a mathematical genius. But he had gambling problems. His money management skills were not the best in the world. He figured out that there were video poker progressives all over Reno/Sparks/Carson/Tahoe that frequently went positive. He taught the strategy behind these progressives to Tuna who quickly took that football and limped on off with it.

Tuna also knew a hell of a lot about slot progressives as his team was all over them back in the day. And any time a lucrative promotion came up in one of the casinos Tuna and his team would come in and monopolize the whole damn promotion. This went on for years.

When Tuna disappeared out of the poker world everyone was wondering where he was at and what he was doing. I ran into his sister in downtown Vegas and she told me that he was holed up in Florida on a video keno play. He was also raising two kids as a single parent.

Tuna reappeared back in Nevada about 2002. I saw him upstairs in the El Dorado/Reno with him and his team on a video poker play. It was 20 coin dollar Full Pay Deuces Wild. There were six machines and his team had them all locked up. I quickly did the math on the play. It was worth $900 an hour minus what he had to pay his team.

A friend and I were working a Draw Till U Win with a promotion play at Casino West in Yerrington. We were crushing them and nobody in that little burg knew what the hell we were doing. Except some guy pulled into town in a big RV. He came into Casino West and quickly figured out what we were doing. At least the guy wasn't shy about telling us he knew what we were doing.

So we get to talking to him. Tuna's name came up. He told us he was partners with Tuna on a video keno play in Florida. We asked him about the particulars on the play. He said he found this play in Florida but Tuna was on it. They became partners on the play so as not to butt heads with each other.

It was a dollar 8-spot play with the bet being $4. They were paying people $30 an hour to play the game. They got ripped off for two big jackpots when the person who hit the solid 8 was payed the money but then got security to escort them off the premises. Even so, him and Tuna made $8,000,000 in four years on the play.

I lobbied hard to get Tuna into the Video Poker Players Hall of Fame after his death. Tuna shunned the limelight and not many video poker pros knew much about him at the time. I still get pissed when they tell me Tuna never did anything for the game. He just took the money and ran. But rest assured that Hans "Tuna" Lund made more money from machines that any person who ever walked the earth.

That was cool. I like it better when TV DOESN"T show the hole cards.

Lol, I'm can't believe there's a Video Poker Players Hall of Fame, hilarious

good story, thx

Back in the early 90's, a friend and I once drove from San Jose to Redding, CA (which is farther than it looks) to play in a little tournament that Tuna was "hosting". He was such a gentleman to everybody there and made all feel welcome, even a couple of little dweeb poker wannabes from San Jose.

It was kinda like Chris Moneymaker without the fame, I guess.

I'd known about his and Brad's VP exploits a little, but didn't realize the degree to which he was crushing the things (thanks to the posters who've filled in details). That makes me so damn happy.

Regards, Lee

Being around in those days must have been a trip. Would have loved to seen vegas in old days. Smoking always seemed to go along with poker. However Idk if we should ever bring it back. Couple years ago i used to spend a lot of time in dungeon of foxwoods playing cash and my clothes would reek of cigarettes because upstairs was the smoking section. Can't imagine what it was like back then haha.

smoking was terrible. you had to sit next to the flaming ashtrays with smoke coming from them as well as the cigs. few were considerate in their actions. its why i quit as a full time player and kind of retired from the game.

There's something wrong here...

The first tournament I ever got heads up in was a weekly MTT at the Atlantis like 10 yrs ago, at the FT, there was this total fish that kept shoving all in, making weird calls, and bumbling things that implied he didn't know what the hell he was doing; a couple of times he turned over his cards on the river and said something along the lines of "oh, I thought I only had one pair, looks like I had the flush, didn't even see it..." Chuckling at his happy "mistake".

Anyway, we get heads up and just like that his entire demeanor changes, he starts min raising me every hand, shoving on my Ax opens, putting the freeze on me, forcing me to fold as I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I thought this guy was going to be a piece of cake and here he had me completely flustered. He straight up told me "I've been doing this for years son, I'm going to beat you." And he did. I was like damn, sandbagger got me, felt like Newman against Forrest Whitaker. This was my introduction to Hans Tuna Lund, it was right before he got really sick. The guy was definitely a boss at the table, glad to have had the experience.

Here's an example of a Tuna Lund video poker play:

The Reno Hilton put on a drawing promotion where there were two $5000 winners per day. You got a drawing ticket for every 4 of a kind at video poker. There was a 12 machine bank of dollar 8/5 Bonus Poker out on the floor. This is a 99.17% game but there were quarter percent meters running on the royal flush, 4 aces, small quads and generic quads. This brought the game up to 100.17%. Plus the slot card was worth .25% cashback.

Tuna's team locked the bank up. They were generating 95% of the drawing tickets. In effect, the Reno Hilton was paying Tuna $10,000 a day to play a game in which he held a .41% advantage.

I dressed up as Hans Lund for Halloween a few years back and nobody knew who I was.

Thats because Halloween is just one day. You have to wear the same shirt for a week to be identified as Tuna Lund.

There were a lot of rumors back in the day that Tuna put up the seed money for Death Row Records. Does anyone know if this is true?

God, I miss Tuna.

Here's another Tuna Lund play. A casino in Carson put on a promotion where they paid double for top line hits at live keno. Live keno is generally about a 75% game. Getting paid double on something like a 4-spot or 5-spot would bring the game up to maybe 110 or 112%. Tuna seen where the rules didn't disqualify the 1-spot. He bought 100 games on the 1-spot at max bet.

The math of the 1-spot is pretty easy. There are 80 balls in the tank. They draw 20. So the frequency is 1 in 4 and you get payed 3 for 1, so a 75% game. But with it paying double you are getting payed 6 for 1. A 50% edge.

Shortly after taking the bet keno personnel realized they were in trouble. They disqualified the 1-spot from the promotion. But they had no choice but to honor Tuna's bet.

The Video Poker Hall of Fame is part of the yahoo group, vpFREE. So far only writers, software and game designers have been inducted. I think Tuna should have been the very first inducted. The flak I get is "Tuna never did anything for the game. He just played it." Well, Willie Mays never did anything for the game either. He hust played it.

I can't take VPHOF seriously until Tuna is inducted.

this thread is absolutely awesome.