Drawing Dead
By: Michael Craig

I recently saw a woman at a poker tournament wearing a shirt that said, “Poker is not a matter of life or death. It is much more important than that.” I’m sure this shirt was created by the same philosophers responsible for T-shirt codas like “I’ve got the nuts” and “Poker players do it on the flop.” (I’ve never figured that one out. Maybe someone can explain it to me.)

Every so often, however, a T-shirt will stumble onto a deeper truth. Howard Lederer has told me that one of Doyle Brunson’s best stories concerns life and death at the poker table. Brunson is one of the all-time best storytellers and I’ve heard him tell a few, but not this one. Prefacing the story by saying he couldn’t really do it justice, Howard said, “Have Doyle tell you about the time he and Johnny Moss were in a game for three days straight. Johnny had a heart attack and was hospitalized but he made it back before the game broke up – because it was only a mild heart attack.”

Ted Forrest told me an updated tale on the same theme. A legendary Seven-card Stud player was recently hospitalized with congestive heart failure. Larry Flynt announced he was convening his highstakes game, so the player left the hospital and showed up, according to Ted, “looking terrible.” Phil Ivey was backing this player, who could not turn down getting staked in a good game. Ivey told Forrest, “A little thing like congestive heart failure isn’t going to keep my horse from making it to the gate.” The player was a big winner that night.

I was recently surprised to learn that two of my friends in poker, Chris Ferguson and David Grey, made a World Series final table in 1999 and found out the player with the second-most chips suffered a heart attack and could not play. (Grey eventually won his first World Series bracelet at this final table.) The players agreed to give him fifthplace money and remove his chips from the table.

Originally, I wondered about the negotiations that concluded with that result. Far more interesting, however, was the late Andy Glazer’s coverage of the incident starting the night before. (His reports, which are still posted on ConJelCo’s web site, are a treasure trove.) With twenty-one players left, this player “started turning red-faced and having chest pains.”

The tournament director encouraged him, because he was one of the chip leaders, to take a few hands off and get some air. When he found out the next break was twenty-four minutes away, he declined. “’I’m staying here. It’s too important to me.’” Glazer concluded this portion of the report by saying, “The red-faced player’s color eventually returned to normal, and fears of a heart attack gradually gave way to jokes about drawing dead.”

At 2:30am, the final table had been set. According to Andy’s next report, the player then “went to the Bellagio to play more poker, and suffered the heart attack …. Incredibly, he had wanted to leave the hospital to play his seat in the final table, but his doctor told him if he left the hospital he would die, and common sense finally prevailed.”

One of the most famous stories from The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King was about when Ted Forrest and Hamid Dastmalchi played at The Mirage for four days without a break and Hamid had to be taken off the property on a stretcher, the result of fifty chainsmoked packs of cigarettes and ten times that many bad beats delivered by Forrest.

Ted subsequently added two details he had overlooked when he initially told me the story. First, during the match, Dastmalchi was complaining about the Binion family, the World Series of Poker, and, in particular, how he thought the championship bracelet they gave him was cheap. (Dastmalchi also had a well-publicized gripe with the Horseshoe over its refusal to honor a large quantity of $5,000-denomination chips – “chocolate chip cookies,” they’ve been called – he possessed. He had to go to court to get them redeemed.)

Hamid told him, “They say it’s worth $5,000, but I’d take $1,500 for it.”

Ted said, “Sold,” and tossed three $500 chips across the table. Forrest later received a package from Dastmalchi with the bracelet, which he still has.

The second detail was how the game broke up. I just assumed that Hamid was unable to continue. In fact, Ted quit the game and Hamid was then taken to the hospital. A short time later, he left the hospital, returned to The Mirage, and got into another game. Forrest, who seems like he could take a shotgun blast standing and swallow a hammer, found this out after recovering and returning to the casino a few days later.

Although William “Wild Bill” Hickock has been immortalized for his murder at the poker table, and his cards (two-pair, aces and eights) will forever be known as “the dead man’s hand;” my favorite story about a player actually succumbing is the late, great Jack Straus. Straus suffered a fatal heart attack during a high-stakes game at the Bicycle Club in 1988. According to Anthony Holden’s Big Deal, Straus had said he wanted to die at a poker table. Many poker players say this, but Straus supposedly added, “…and if there’s a God, I’ll be stuck when it happens.”