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As I write this on December 10th, 2007, I'm nearing the end of a very hard week. Upon hearing that Chip Reese had passed away from pneumonia on the fourth of this month, I immediately called up BLUFF editor Matt Parvis and told him I needed to be in Vegas to do this right by this story. Less than twenty-four hours later, I was in the air.
I can’t honestly say I “knew” Chip Reese — I’d had the privilege of interviewing him a handful of times and even talking a little baseball between takes; but I was media, and as has been well documented by now, Chip had little interest in the limelight the new poker offered.
Over the past week, I’ve attended his funeral, spoken to countless players, and have been told endless stories by his closest friends. I still can’t say I know Chip, but I feel like through their sharing I know him far better now than I did in life. Before, there was only the great player. Now there’s the great man.
Reese’s passing will prove a monumental event in poker’s history, and December 4th is always going to be remembered for it; but there’s one positive to take from all of this: In that death, we can fi nally celebrate the life that came before it. Chip was a private man, who until his landmark victory in the $50k H.O.R.S.E. event at the 2006 WSOP was a stranger to poker players outside of Las Vegas. With the pages that follow, I’m hoping to help change that now by sharing the lessons I’ve learned from his friends and competitors over the last six days.
When I’d gotten settled, I immediately made my way to the Bellagio, the unoffi cial capital of the poker world. Somehow I expected things to be different. In my mind’s eye, I saw players saddened by the loss of a giant, playing with red eyes and lethargic motions. Upon my arrival, I saw that I was applying my overly-dramatic runaway writer’s mind. The games played on. It seemed like nothing had changed. Just another seat to be filled. That’s poker.
I looked around for friendly faces amongst the players who'd known Reese best, but few were to be found. I did find Johnny Chan though, and he saw with me to off me some insight into Chip's appetites, and maybe also his reasonable nature:
"Chip, Doyle, Jack Binion, and I were on a trip to Paris. There was a wealthy man there - I think his name was Gilbert - and it was his dying wish to play poker with us. While we were there, we'd play poker all day and have nothing to do at night, so we'd stay in the room and play games.
One night Chip and Doyle were playing backgammon, so Jack and I went out for a walk. We found a Burger King and bought four burgers and took them back to the room. When Doyle saw there were only four burgers, he said 'Johnny, I'll give you $500 for that hamburger. (Johnny gave a good belly laugh here. This would become a common occurence in all of my interviews.) Chip said 'I'll give you seven' Jack and I eventually gave them both our burgers and went back out again.
I remember on that trip, we were playing one day, and Chip won a hand where he had four kings against Gilbert’s friend who had four queens. The friend was actually thinking he should fold at the end, but Gilbert kept telling him to call, so he fi nally did. It was for something like $200,000. The two of them started arguing in French, and then Gilbert said, ‘I made him call. He was going to fold. You should give him his money back.’ Chip just said ‘no problem’ and gave it back to him.”
Chip eventually won all of the guy’s money anyway.
Barry Greenstein was playing in a $1,000 buy-in event and I paid him some kind words about the blog he’d just recorded refl ecting on his own mortality when he heard the news. Barry has a new website, pokerroad.com, and he wanted to save a few gems for it, but he did teach me something about how Chip treated people:
“The thing you won’t learn about talking to Chip’s poker friends is how he treated everyone the same. For years we’ve been coming here and playing here. There’s a cleaning woman who works the poker room named Mai. You should see how he is with Mai.
When we play here, we can literally get any food we want, and Chip usually gets candy. Whenever he plays, there’s a mess of wrappers lying around, but when someone besides Mai comes to clean for him, he’ll tell them no thanks. He keeps the mess around so when Mai comes on shift, she can come take care of it, and he always tips her $25, which is almost half a day’s wages for her. He knew she had a family at home she was trying to support on this job and wanted to make sure they got fed. You should talk to Mai.”
There were plenty of employees like Mai who I wanted to talk to at Bellagio but, for Chip’s privacy and that of his family, an edict had been handed down not to talk to the press.
Over the next couple of days, snippets from those who knew him slipped onto the internet. TJ Cloutier appeared on a YouTube video (Google “TJ Cloutier Reese YouTube” and it will be the fi rst link) and made a touching speech asking that a moment of silence be observed for a man of whom he made two profound statements: “He’s the best player of all time. Period” and “I never heard him say a bad word about anybody.” Normally the Rock of Gibraltar, even Cloutier was moved to the brink to tears. Patrik Antonius, made of similarly icy stuff, went past the brink, remembering his friend in a cardplayer.com interview. As the testimonials surfaced, I boned up on Reese’s story. It’s the stuff of legends now.
He was born in Centerville, Ohio on March 28th, 1951. Within fi ve years, he was beating kids twice his age out of their baseball cards in all manner of card games. He spent a year at home with rheumatic fever, entertained by his mother and the games she introduced him to, his remarkable mind taking to task the search for the paths to victory. He’d look back at that time and refer to himself as “a product of that year.”
Always a competitor, Reese excelled through grade school. He lettered in football, competed nationally in debate, and was voted valedictorian. At eighteen, the young Reese befriended twenty-four-yearold professional gambler Danny Robison. Despite Chip trying to duck out of a bet, Robison spotted his potential immediately. They became great friends. It was Robison who taught me about Chip’s devotion to his religion:
“We were playing a $60,000, best-ball golf match back in 1983 with a known killer and a drug dealer. We thought we had the best of it, but in reality they did. Still, we were up one stroke come the 16th hole. Chip hit his ball out of bounds and I shanked mine, hitting it out of view.
We went to find the ball and as luck would have it, it was still in bounds, but it was one inch from a tree and the tree was between me and the hole. I noticed though, that our opponents couldn’t see us, so I kicked the ball into a nice lie on the fairway.
‘Danny,’ Chip told me, ‘you can’t cheat any more.’ I was like ‘What do you mean “you”?’ and he told me ‘Danny, I took Jesus as my savior and promised him I wouldn’t cheat any more. If you try to, we’re going to fi ght, and when those two get here, they’re going to want to know what we’re fi ghting about and I’m going to tell them. Put the ball back.’
We lost that match, but I knew Chip was the smartest guy I knew, and that if it was good enough for him, maybe it could get me off the drugs. That’s how I found God. Let me tell you one other thing: He was a better father than he was a poker player, and he was the best poker player of all time.”
Chip earned his way to the Ivy League, attending Dartmouth College, where he spent less time majoring in economics than he did at the poker table. He proved so dominant in competition with peers and professors alike that his fraternity renamed their card room the “David E. Reese Memorial Card Room.”
His degree in hand, Chip awaited acceptance into Stanford Law. He made his way to Arizona for a year to live with a friend and sell real estate, heading to Vegas on the weekends to gamble away his earnings. He’d later refl ect, “I always thought I could conquer the world in anything I did,” sacrifi cing the money for adrenaline with the knowledge he’d find more later on.
It was on one such trip — with Robison meeting him in Nevada — that Reese’s life would irrevocably turn. At that time, the two young gamblers were most accustomed to 7-card Stud, a game that had only recently managed to eke out an existence in the Hold’em-heavy tables of Vegas. Starting with a bankroll of $800, they worked it up to $80,000 on $10/$20 tables in a month. Then Chip set his sights on larger prey.
Now 7-card Stud Split (no qualifier) had infiltrated the biggest game in town, with men he would come to know as Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson, and Johnny Moss amongst those playing. To Reese, those legends were merely nameless gamblers who were approaching the game wrong, playing a split game and placing too much influence on chasing the high. It was a hole he knew he could exploit.
Chip convinced Robison to let him sit down with $30,000 of their money. The twenty-four-year-old was welcomed with open arms by the men who would eventually become some of his closest companions. Little did they know he would take the game for $360,000 in one marathon session that lasted more than seventytwo hours. He and Robison tore the town apart in a way that hasn’t been seen since. Amarillo Slim would remember years later in Michael Kaplan’s Aces and Kings: “What they did to this town was unreal. They did the same thing we did, only years later.” “We” meant Slim, Sailor Roberts, and Brunson. Reese and Robison earned the name “The Gold Dust Twins,” as in “everything they touched turned to…”
Jack Binion was already a Vegas institution when Reese arrived in town, as responsible as anyone for the formation of the World Series of Poker and the maintenance of Binion’s Horseshoe Casino. He taught me that Chip wasn’t always the calm, collected man he grew into, but that the signs were there:
“Chip was always pleasant, very personable, but he was a little wilder in those days. He and Danny, they bought a house and it was like a frat house. Every taxi driver in town knew who they were, because they sent out for everything and had the taxis deliver whatever they ordered. Danny’s a bornagain Christian now, but back then, he had a problem with drugs. The game saw Chip move past that life.”
Like any other unexpected big winner, Reese was put to the test over the next few months by cagey veterans expecting him to come down to earth. Unlike the others though, Chip kept winning, eventually drying up the 7-Stud action. As a compromise, he started playing mixed games, agreeing to a game of any given opponent’s choice to be played in rotation with his. So it was that Reese started developing his reputation as the best all-around poker player in the world. For the next thirty-fi ve years he’d maintain the label. He’d anchor The Big Game. He’d get elected to the Binion’s Poker Hall of Fame in 1991. He’d win the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event at the 2006 World Series of Poker.
The funeral was held the Friday after Reese’s passing. The assembled were a Who’s Who of poker and Vegas lore. Industry giants were joined by virtually every successful Vegas pro, with family and non-poker friends dotting the landscape. Poker player or not, the outpouring of emotion came.
Reese’s son spoke, calling his father the best man he’d ever known. It’s a sentiment often heard from sons remembering fathers, but one seldom echoed so loudly and so unanimously by those who follow to the podium.
The next one to speak was Chesnoff. Throughout the course of his speech, the audience both laughed and cried along with him. In a conversation a few days later, the high-profi le lawyer would explain his relation with and appreciation for his friend, educating me on his love of family and his remarkable, diverse talents:
“We did a lot of family vacations together. Our kids were the same age. He was always attentive to the kids, making sure they had fun. He just always wanted the kids to enjoy themselves. He was very affectionate. The kids all gravitated to him. I’m affectionate, but I’m a little stern… a disciplinarian. He was affectionate. Everyone’s kids gravitated to Chip, because he had a real appreciation for enjoying life. He was also interested in my work. I think he’d have been a tremendous lawyer. He’d go over cases with me. He was interested in how I’d approach things… very, very savvy. He was always two steps ahead… maybe three steps ahead. He had unbelievable oratory skills. His logic was beyond anybody’s. He was a brilliant guy. He would have been successful in any path… could have been a senator, a judge, a counselor… anything he wanted. He would have been a great ballplayer if he’d played. Maybe a novelist, because he had true insight into the human soul.”
After Chesnoff came two non-poker players: the coach Reese hired to watch over his son Casey’s development as a ballplayer and a long-time friend from back in his fraternity days. Being non-poker people, their speeches spoke more of Reese the person. When 1978 World Champion and Mirage Resorts CEO Bobby Baldwin spoke though, we were brought back to our little world.
I managed to catch up with Baldwin as he was leaving Bobby’s Room a few days later. That temple for the game is named for Baldwin, though I’d learn that wasn’t the original intention. Bobby helped me to understand that Reese was the lifeblood of high stakes poker and took it as his responsibility to help poker grow.
“Chip was our anchor. He was the glue that bound high stakes poker together. His passing will change the environment forever, because for as long as I’ve been around, poker has always started with Doyle and Chip.
Would you believe the three of us all met on the same day? When I arrived in Vegas, Doyle was the legend. I saw him playing, made my way to his table and introduced myself, identifying a few mutual acquaintances. Doyle answered ‘Pleasure to meet you, Bobby. Let me introduce you to two other new friends of mine. These fellas here are Chip Reese and Danny Robison.’ They’d just sat down with him for the first time.
Chip was as responsible as anyone other than Doyle for the building of poker. He played until the last hand, shared his knowledge in books… he was just a wonderful competitor. A wonderful guy.
He was constantly whispering in my ear that I should run this tournament or build that room. That’s how Bobby’s Room came about. He needed a place to play ‘Chip’s Game,’ what most people call The Big Game. He told me to build a high stakes room for it. ‘Chip,’ I told him, ‘that’s going to cost $5 million.’ ‘That’s okay,’ he told me. ‘It’s not your money.’
When it was close to completion, I told him I wanted to call it ‘Chip’s Room.’ He told me that wouldn’t do: ‘If you do that, Bobby, no one will come to play!’”
Too funny. He followed that by explaining that people knew two things with Reese: First, that they were at a disadvantage at his table, but enjoyed his company so much they wanted to play anyways; and second, that most people will admit that Reese was probably the best player in the world. “Probably,” he smiled, “was to leave room in the discussion for themselves.”
Baldwin was followed to the podium by Brunson, who was giving an emotional speech he’d never thought he’d give, calling his comrade in arms “unquestionably the greatest game player ever.” Doyle still isn’t ready to talk about Chip as of this writing. The man was his best friend for thirty-fi ve years, and the void he left is still large in Dolly’s heart. He did, however, give me permission to put an anecdote from his speech on these pages, one that demonstrates Chip’s wry humor:
“We had this ritual. Card Player used to run a poll where people could vote for the best player. For twenty years they ran it, and every time they announced the results, he’d call me up.
‘Congratulations!’ he’d tell me. I’d ask him why and he’d say, ‘You were voted the second-best poker player in the world!’ ‘Oh yeah?’ I’d ask him. ‘Who was first?’ He’d answer ‘Guess!’ then hang up the phone.”
It was the essence of the Reese I was coming to know. Funny, personal, smart, clever, fun. He knew the big man could take it. These two men, one from Texas, one from the Ohio Valley, had found common ground at the poker table. They spent most days together playing the game or not for thirty-fi ve years. When even the mighty Brunson became choked up, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Doyle’s son, Todd, saw Chip through different eyes. He met Reese when he was just seven years old and, as a result, knew a different kind of closeness with the man — one that saw him as a mentor, even an older brother fi gure. Todd taught me about Reese as a father:
“Chip was a great father. Being a father was the most important thing in his life. He used to go to all of (son) Casey’s games… coached little league for a bunch of years and, if there was ever a choice between a poker game or one of Casey’s games, Casey was the easy choice.
I knew Chip since I was seven years old. He lived three houses away and I saw him every day. He was the Michael Jordan of poker… the guy that everyone wanted to spend time with and be like. The guy everyone wanted to be.”
The funeral ended and a reception was announced, though I didn’t go. The writer in me screamed, because the memories would flow, but it wasn’t a place for an outsider seeking good copy. I was coming to understand that Reese’s was too profound an existence to sully that way.
Two days after the funeral, my internal definition of Chip having shifted from “the player” to "the man,” Mike Sexton brought me back to reality. Mike was Stu Ungar’s greatest champion and, in talking to me about Stuey, he educated me on the attitude that made Chip perhaps the greatest of all poker players:
“I was talking with Chip a few years back about whether Stuey was the most talented player alive, and his answer taught me all a person needs to know about Chip Reese:
‘Talent-wise, yes. Quickest guy I know. His problem, Mike, is he doesn’t understand the object of the game. The object of the game is to increase your wealth, improve your lifestyle, and provide for your family. Stuey doesn’t get it and he never will.’”
It was a remarkably clear picture of Reese’s ability to look at the bigger picture. Sexton went on to echo what so many had said about Chip the player:
“As players go, Chip had the most going for him. His demeanor, the way he never criticized anyone. If he lost, he just knocked on the table and said ‘Take it, pal.’ He never went on tilt.
I was sitting with him one time before The Big Game started and this guy walked in offering him a $1,500/$3,000 heads-up Stud game. I sweated Chip for the thirty minutes they played, and when the guy got ahead he made an excuse about having to leave. Chip said, ‘Go ahead, I enjoyed it.’
‘Mike,’ he told me, ‘that’s why I’m successful. Most players are like that guy. When they win, they win a little. When they lose, they lose a lot. I’m the opposite.’
He was the greatest takeoff man ever. He’d never leave against someone who was losing.”
My next thirty-six hours were spent writing articles about Chip for ESPN and BLUFF Europe, finishing the last of my smaller pieces late last night. Today, I conducted my last interviews with Chesnoff and Brunson, as well as with the final two men we’re going to visit now. The first was Sexton’s WPT cohort Lyle Berman. I asked Lyle to tell me a story about Chip. He instead pointed out that we were talking here about a truly unique individual:
“I’d rather focus on his uniqueness. He lived the life most people dream of. He was the ultimate gamesman. When you judge him against his peers, he’s really accomplished a great deal. He didn’t just master poker, but every game — backgammon, gin — and he did it for so long. He made friends easily and offended nobody. Everybody just enjoyed playing with him
I knew him mostly from his gambling days. traveled with him a little bit. We traveled together a few times. In order to be as good as he was, you have to be good and incredibly disciplined not to go off in all of the things you can go off in, from casino games to drugs to playing above your roll. When he didn’t play, he was like a little old woman, calling three people to fi nd out what happened. He just wanted to know the situation at all times.”
The final interview was with Eli Elezra, who in Reese’s last years was constantly one of those fi gurative “three people” Berman referred to. Elezra’s journey with Reese was a little different than the others, because he knew at fi rst that Chip was just trying to keep him in the game. He showed me Chip’s warmth and his competitive spirit:
“Ten-twelve years ago, I was a businessman coming into The Big Game. He really knew how to keep his customers. ‘Hey buddy, we’ve got the right game for you.’ He was in touch with me because he wanted to get me going. I was part of the business; he was very professional. Doyle, Chip, and I played so many three-man sessions for fi ve-six years. After that, they knew I was there to stay. We’d borrow money from one another to keep the game going.
For the last three years, it was a real friendship. He’d use me to inform him about games at Bellagio who’s in, who’s up, who’s steaming… you know, everything. Why would he want to know? He was so good at what he did that it bothered him to know the game was going and he wasn’t there.
I was his co-captain for the PPL (the Professional Poker League, the massive Reese project that ended with UIGEA). We flew around in the private jet to recruit players. That private time was remarkable. He was so kind to everyone.
No one ever said ‘I hate Chip.’ He was never in those moods. A few times, I was with him when he lost $500k or $700k. Those nights, he’d pick up his money and leave without saying goodbye. Did he steam? Yes, but he’d steam away from the table. Phil Ivey does the same now.
I learned by watching him. Watching the king.”
The king. The more I’ve learned about Chip Reese, the more I’ve learned that’s what he was. He was the greatest poker player to ever live, but the thing that touched so many was that he was equally a father, thinker, strategist, politician, adviser, prankster, lover of life, and friend. He was truly a great person.
I need to thank Johnny Chan, Barry Greenstein, Jack Binion, Danny Robison, David Chesnoff, Bobby Baldwin, Doyle Brunson, Todd Brunson, Mike Sexton, Lyle Berman, Eli Elezra, and the host of others who shared their experience with me for this article. I still don’t know Chip the way they know Chip but, through their words, I’ve come to know him better in death than I knew him in life. With a man of his caliber, that made the hard week more than worth it.
It’s obvious to me now that poker will never be the same without Chip Reese. It’s not because we’ve lost the player who won that famous H.O.R.S.E. event, or the one who was elected to the Hall of Fame so young, or the one who stormed Vegas all of those years ago. It’s because we’ll be without the person who missed poker games for his son’s baseball games, kept smiles on the faces around him, and inspired so many to the standard he set.
Thank you for all you’ve taught us, Chip. We’re better people for having known you, even if only a little bit.
In addition to the players named above, Gary Wise thanks BLUFF Magazine for assigning him this story. Without their help, he’d never have gotten to know Chip Reese a little better.
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