The only years Ungar didn't enter the ME were 1992 & 1993 (plus 1998 shortly before he passed away).

Stu Ungar's Complete WSOP Main Event History:

1980: 1st
1981: 1st
1982: no cash (Day 2 [3:30pm])
1983: no cash (57th Day 2)
1984: no cash (109th Day 1)
1985: no cash (Day 2)
1986: no cash (early Day 1)
1987: no cash (Day 1)
1988: no cash
1989: no cash (176th Day 1 [just 15 minutes in!]; maybe 175th)
1990: 9th
1991: no cash (76th Day 1)
1992: N/A
1993: N/A
1994: no cash (Day 1)
1995: no cash (131st Day 1 [late; maybe early Day 2])
1996: no cash (Day 1)
1997: 1st


I didn't set out specifically to collect the above information but picked it up along the way while researching the WSOP for the last decade+ (pretty sure I can claim the title of World's Greatest Unknown WSOP Historian).

For all the hate for Ungar in this thread, he's ironically the best proof that if you dropped a current player into those old days, they would have dominated through pure aggression.

Wow, nice find. So Ungar's legend was partly built around him lucking out in the right spots. First directly back to back, then degen, then coming back for that last, record breaking.

the link just takes me to the front page of the forum. how do i find the thread?

There's obviously some luck involved but unlike basically everyone else back then he understood that being hyper aggressive against people who were scared to play back at him would either let him build a huge chip stack or bust pretty early which even today is a good tournament strategy. Now take into account how much more top heavy payouts we're back then and it's even more correct.

1980 main event

4th- 73k
3rd- 110k
2nd-146k
1st- 365k


1981 main event-
6th-30k
4th/5th-35k
3rd- 75k
2nd-150k
1st- 375k


The year he got 9th in the main:

3rd- 167k
2nd-334k
1st- 835 k

The years they had a million dollar first prize the payouts got really wonky with a massive jump from 2nd to 1st.


For all of his demons he was obviously was ahead of his time as far as tournaments go.

Most current player,s if "dropped into those old days" would have lacked the intuitive skill needed to excel at a game without any material to help them improve and would have sucked at poker.

The common argument for many years has been those old school legends were too passive, folded too much, cared too much about their tournament lives, and just didn't put the kind of pressure on that you face nowadays. Ungar certainly was the antithesis of that and gave at least some evidence that the theory is correct.

Of course its correct that they played too passively compared to today's standards of play. Doesnt mean the likes of Dan Smith and Sean Winter etc would have been able to understand that and exploit it if they played 50 years ago. In fact everything about how those people approach poker makes it likely that they would just copycat what everyone else was doing at the time and get destroyed by the likes of Ungar.

Exactly. The guys who put in a ton of work and study with solvers etc wouldn't have these tools back then and would do a lot worse than people who are good at figuring things out for themselves .Someone like Shaun Deeb would do way better 40 years ago than some solver nerd.

Yes today's players are able to improve much faster thanks to the tools and resources available to them.

When someone says a great player from today would crush back then, they're obviously saying as a hypothetical if they went back with all of the knowledge that they have today.

On the flip side you can't say a great player from the 70s (with their knowledge from their era) could come in to today's game and crush.

I think in one of Doyle's or Mike Sexton's books, they mentioned that Stu Ungar was the the best player in a shorthanded high ante game. By contrast, when they had a 9 player game, he was the worst player.

Why do people make these arguments though? It is an incredibly dumb thing to say

I agree with you mostly. But regarding your second point, a lot of (dumb) people actually, unironically, seem to think that if some random MTT grinder was put into the games 50 years ago, without carrying over their current knowledge, they would still crush the games somehow.

The same people who say stuff like "Pele wasnt that good, he wouldnt even get into a Premier League first 11 these days" with a straight face and dont understand how moronic the statement is even though its technically true if you moved 1960s Pele magically to 2024 - Im sure you Americans see similar arguments for NBA or NFL or whatever.

Its either a completely redundant thing to say, or its a dumb thing to say. If you understand that its redundant, why even say it? Most people making those kind of statements actually somehow believe that players from today would crush the games 50 years ago even without transferring their knowledge.

Same reason some old school players pronounce that "kids today never would have made it in the old days because they didn't know how to look a man in the eye and tell he was bluffing".

Recency bias is a killer drug.

"In 1990, Ungar was found on the third day of the tournament unconscious on the floor of his hotel room from a drug overdose. However, he had such a chip lead that even when the dealers kept taking his blinds out every orbit, Ungar still made the final table and finished ninth without playing another hand, pocketing $25,050."

Billy Baxter was staking him and was begging and pleading the with TDs to let him play Stuey's stack. He refused to back him again until 1997 which he won.

Actually, if most of the table is a bunch of donks playing extremely suboptimal, GTO poker will win you far less than if you played an extremely exploitative style.

I miss the good ole days of this forum... you know, before every conversation devolved into the GTO vs. Exploitative play debate.

If Stu Ungar existed in 2024 poker, we would be naming and shaming him for spitting on dealers, throwing objects at dealers and making female dealers cry.

Source:


Imagine if we had video of Doug Polk or Tom Dwan spitting on a dealer?

It wouldn't matter how much Stu won or how good he was or what kind of tips he gave to cocktail when he was in a good mood.

I personally measure people by how you treat people who can do nothing for you. Spitting on another human being is scum-tier.

Tom Dwan is on the way to become a Stu from the 21st century.

Actually Tom is the perfect exemple of how Stu would be doing nowadays if he was alive.
Owing money to drug dealers and poker players.

Just living the best of the degen life while high on meth.

It's very possible that if Ungar existed in 2024, he would have likely been lifetime banned from all CET properties and would have been named/shamed if he tried to enter any other poker venue.

He probably should have been lifetime banned in 1981 after the spitting incident alone.

Nobody is in here saying he was a good person. He was a deadbeat dad degenerate gambler druggy. He was also way ahead of his time in tournaments.

Stu Ungar wouldn't have been allowed to exist in the live poker world in 2024.

Is there anyone in the poker world today who has emulated his abusive antics that isn't permanently 86'd from CET/MGM/Sands et all?

OP referred to Tom Dwan as a crybaby copycat or something, and we have 5 pages of posts talking about how Ungar would have faired in modern poker.

I'll go back to my first sentence, we likely wouldn't know who Stu Ungar is if he were born 20-30 years later.

Stu Ungar on PokerStars/Full Tilt between 2004 and 2011 would have been an interesting conversation.

He could do all sorts of abusive antics in the privacy of his own home and no one would know and I have no-doubt he'd be recognized as one of the best.

We'd just know him as StueyNYC123 or something.

He probably should have been banned from poker rooms and the WSOP in the early 80s, if any of stories are indeed true.

Who knows. Maybe with an actual threat of a ban he'd conduct himself better. Treating dealers like absolute garbage back then was tolerated so scumbags did it way more.

I have never understood the Stu Unger love or anyone idolizing him. He was hyper-aggressive in a time when almost no one else was and as a result, he won some tournaments and went on a few heaters. Other than that, he was a degenerate gambler who was an awful person, dead-beat father, drug addict, and a cheater. He behaved poorly, berated dealers and floormen, and treated most others like complete crap. Why his name still comes up all the time is beyond me. Who GAF.

I agree with everything you said, but I have no idea why you said it in response to my post.