Ace Of Clubs
There’s an old line about how you can hop on one foot along a two-by-four as long as it’s flat on the ground, but raise that board up a couple dozen stories, and suddenly you’re not quite so confident. It’s the same board, same width, but the penalty for failure is, shall we say, severe. Along those same lines, imagine a two-foot golf putt. Two feet – that’s about the width of your shoulders. A kid could knock down those putts, right?
Now, imagine that same putt with $50,000 on the line. Not quite so easy, is it?
If you can imagine yourself in that situation without your guts turning to jelly, you might be able to play a round of golf with poker pros. They’re not the best golfers around – not by a long shot – but they can bring the best golfers in the world to their knees.
Many poker players spend a phenomenal amount of time on the golf course, in some cases more than at the table. And yet, for all that, many of them – well, let’s be honest, they’re not very good. We’re not talking “couldn’t make the pro tour” weak; we’re talking “three yards and a cloud of dust” weak.
But as with poker itself, pure physical talent isn’t the issue, not at all. Ask a poker player what his golf handicap is, and he’s as likely to say “No idea” as he is to throw out a (probably false) number. For a poker player, information is power – and information gained without sharing any of your own is the most powerful of all.
In golf, there are as many variations on the basic goal – hit ball into cup – as there are in card games. You can play straightup stroke play, low score wins. You can play match play, a hole-by-hole showdown. You can play a best-ball scramble, where teams get to play from the best stroke of each team member. You can play the classic Nassau bets, covering the low score on the front nine, the back nine, and all eighteen holes. You can add presses – doubleor- nothing bets – to the Nassaus. You can lose yourself in a dizzying array of prop bets, side bets and shot-by-shot challenges that can double, triple, or quadruple the bet on any given hole.
Confused? Good. Then you’re exactly where the poker-playing golfers want you.
The Players
The goal when setting the terms of any golf game is getting as many strokes as possible. In other words, you want your opponent to allow you as many extra strokes as you can get in order to level the playing field. Some guy off the street could play with Tiger Woods, if Tiger gave him two strokes a hole – in other words, the everyday schlub could shoot a 108 on a standard par-72, and Tiger would have to shoot even par just to match him.
But many savvy golfers will take unfavorable terms on the front end and then turn around and push the game into stomach-churning territory once on the course. And as with poker, there’s no greater master at putting you off your golf game than Doyle Brunson. Give Doyle an inch of rope, and he’ll make you put a mile at risk to get it back.
“You can come in betting $20,000 a hole, and Doyle will make you raise it to $50,000,” says Dewey Tomko, Brunson’s longtime fairway running mate. “That immediately puts you out of your comfort zone. And that’s all he needs to beat you.”
Brunson, of course, has a comfort zone a mile wide and a hundred stories high. He’s absurdly confident in his abilities, so much so that one of his most notorious golf stories involves him going driver-to-driver with the now-deceased Jimmy Chagra, one of the most notorious drug dealers in the world.
Brunson first met Chagra playing craps in El Paso, and when he heard Chagra was a golfer, Brunson’s ears perked up. “He’d lost a lot of money at craps and poker with us,” Brunson recalls, “so then he decided to play golf. He wasn’t as good as he thought he was.”
Brunson and his pal Puggy Pearson took on Chagra in a $250,000 Nassau game. All well and good, except that Puggy had, in Brunson’s words, “a dubious reputation as a cheater.” And of all the people you don’t want to cheat, a drug dealer suspected of murder is at the top of the list.
“I warned him to be very careful,” Brunson says. “And we were winning when Puggy put his ball in a sunspot. He moved it just a little – maybe three to four inches – but Chagra’s bodyguard saw us and called Puggy on it. Chagra came screaming out of the bunker at us, and they drove off the course.” Needless to say, Brunson and Puggy forfeited the money.
Brunson has suffered bad beats on the golf course that weren’t life threatening, too. He recalls an afternoon at the Las Vegas Country Club when he and his partner were one up with two holes to go. Brunson birdied the 17th, and one of the other team matched him with an astonishing chipin. On the 18th, Brunson birdied again, but this time his opponent eagled in a chip. In the sudden-death playoff hole, Brunson lost again to an eagle. “I went birdie-birdie-birdie-birdie, and the other guy went eagle-birdie-eagleeagle,” Brunson recalls with respect. “That cost us about $180,000.”
Brunson is an equal-opportunity golf gambler, though; he’ll go after rookies and veterans with equal force. Tomko recalls the first time Brunson broke him: “I was teaching school, making $6,400 a year, and I’d put together a bankroll of $98,000. Doyle invited me to play some golf in Nashville, and I’d just been playing poker for two straight days. I was exhausted, and I just wanted to go to my hotel. But he insisted, so I went out and played. And he busted me out of my entire bankroll. I went back to Florida without ever even making it to my hotel!” Tomko would get better, though; before long, he was both winning and losing a million dollars on a single round of golf.
Another guy who’s improved in a hurry is Phil Hellmuth. The Poker Brat claims a handicap of “about twelve, because I shoot well on good courses,” and has a long history of golf betting, seesawing between genius-level shot making and club-snapping frustration. Fortunately for him, the shot making tends to come when the spotlight’s the brightest.
“I had a standing game with Yosh Takano, $2,000 Nassaus, two-down automatic press,” – in other words, anybody who fell two holes behind automatically played double or nothing – “five times a year. This was back in the 1990s, and for those five years, golf was work.” Hellmuth had to hit the range constantly to stay in shape for those five annual matches, or he’d have been decimated – or, worse, embarrassed.
Hellmuth now mostly goes for hole-by-hole games, and occasionally throws in a betting cube, a sign that the stakes for a given hole are now doubled. It can take a $2,000 hole up to $16,000 in a hurry; it can make individual putts worth $50,000 or more. It’s not a tool for the fainthearted, which is why Hellmuth can sling it like a Frisbee.
“I’m not that good, but I have my moments,” Hellmuth says with characteristic modesty. “The more money’s on the table, the deeper I seem to dig and the better I seem to play.”
Not everyone has that kind of steel stomach. Brunson, Tomko, and others feast on the kind of golfers who clench up when there’s serious coin on the line. Tomko can spin eighteen holes’ worth of stories about golfers who would be up, way up, only to give it all back with a shanked shot on the 18th hole. “The key to golf is like the key to gambling,” Tomko says. “You don’t want to be in this if you’ve got a weak heart. When you’re standing over a putt, you have to think that there’s nowhere else you’d rather be, nobody you’d rather have making this putt than yourself. That’s why Doyle won so much; he can putt the eyes out of the ball no matter how much money you’re talking. If there was a million dollars on the line, I’d take Doyle over Tiger Woods any day.”
The Bets
Of course, just playing straight golf – even golf with five figures on the line every single hole – often isn’t enough for gambling aficionados. No, they need to spice up the action with every kind of wager imaginable, from the ridiculous to the flat-out dangerous.
“Back in the old days, we had more money than we knew what to do with, so we’d just bet it on the most ridiculous things,” Tomko recalls. “Nowadays, guys will invest their money, pay their taxes, but back then, it was pretty much football bets, horse racing, and golf bets.”
He recalls betting the late Stu Ungar $300,000 that Ungar couldn’t shoot 130 for eighteen holes. Now, for the uninitiated, you can probably hit 130 using a two-by-four. Ungar took the bet… and then proceeded to whiff his first eight swings off the tee.
But Ungar occasionally got the best of Dewey, too. Tomko once bet Ungar $100,000 that he couldn’t beat Dewey even when teeing off from the 150-yard markers and using a tee anytime, anywhere. So Ungar showed up with every length of tee imaginable, and teed it up out of rough, out of water hazards, out of anything that could possibly have impeded his shot. And that time, Ungar took home the coin.
Brunson has orchestrated his share of strange prop bets, too. He once bet David Benjamin $100,000 that he couldn’t break 90 from the back tees in a year after learning the game. Benjamin made it by a single stroke. And, in one of the stranger bets imaginable, Brunson bet that Tommy Fischer, who traditionally shot in the high 70s, couldn’t break 90 while carrying his own bag … and walking backwards. But Fischer did it, shooting an 88 to win the bet.
One of the most famous golf prop bets in recent history took place during the 2007 World Series of Poker. Erick Lindgren had busted out of the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tournament and told Gavin Smith he planned to spend the whole next day golfing. Players being who they are, talk spiraled, bets were laid, and Lindgren found himself on the business end of a gargantuan prop bet. Lindgren had to play four full rounds at Bear’s Best, an insanely difficult Vegas course, in a single day. He had to walk all four rounds, and he had to shoot under 100 in every round from the pro tees.
Lindgren started his day at 5:45am and, according to a Wicked Chops report, played well enough that Smith, Chris Bell, and several others bought out early. Phil Ivey stayed in the mix right to the end, though, and paid up $200,000. Lindgren collected a total of $340,000 for the day’s work, but at a heavy cost.
“I saw Erick after that marathon, and he looked like death,” Josh Arieh recalls. “Those aren’t the kinds of bets I like to make.” Though Arieh does remember playing Daniel Negreanu and making the mistake of betting that Negreanu couldn’t make an impressive up-and-down shot twice in a row. Negreanu not only did, he ended up reversing a round-long slide of betting losses. “I was about to win $7,000, and I found myself down $12,000,” Arieh laughs. “That’s how fast it can change.”
The Reason
So what drives poker players from the green felt to the green? Ask them, and the same word keeps coming back: competition.
“It’s the art of competition,” says Arieh, who now plays more golf than poker, often with famous partners like St. Louis Cardinals pitcher John Smoltz. “You have to control yourself far more than you do at the table. It’s as pure as competition can get.”
Some promoters and networks have tried to yoke poker and golf together. Jack Binion crafted a high-rollers golf tournament in the 1970s in which Brunson and others played wealthy golfers around the country, often traveling to their home courses to fleece them. More recently, ESPN aired High Stakes Golf, a competition where golfers put up $1 million of their own money per hole.
But televised high-stakes golf has three strikes against it. First, you’ll never see pro golfers out there; the PGA tends to frown on this kind of gambling, and that cuts into the crossover appeal. Second, much of the appeal of this kind of golf is watching guys choke under pressure, and there’s only so much golf you can watch where the players aren’t any more talented than you, just richer. Third, the networks’ appetites for running games where poker players bet a million a hole may be a bit down in the weakened economy.
Still, as long as there are golfers, there will be gambling on golf, even if it’s not televised. And there’s always a game available, if you’ve got the stomach and the stones.
After all, if you’re any kind of golfer at all, you’re at least as talented as most poker players are. So what are you waiting for? Tee it up!
