The Will - Ungar vs. Brunson

The main ingredients of success in any game of skill are raw talent and iron will. Without will, talent goes unexplored. Without a certain degree of ability, will is merely misplaced ambition.

Games with mass appeal inevitably produce superstars who transcend the mere mortals they play alongside. These icons become our heroes by fulfilling the dreams of our youth and, in doing so, their accomplishments are remembered long after they leave their chosen field of battle. Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods… as long as their games are played, their names will be remembered.

Poker has its icons; Doyle Brunson, perhaps the greatest of them all; ‘Poker Brat’ Phil Hellmuth, the man we love to hate; Daniel Negreanu, Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson… these men and their peers have left their indelible mark on the history of the game. But none of them had the talent or the will to match Stu “The Kid” Ungar.

Born September 8th, 1953 in Manhattan, Ungar never had much of a chance at a normal life. His father, an illiterate bookmaker and bar owner, had Stuey working the books by the time he was twelve. It made sense; Stuey had already been gambling for half a decade.

Starting with hearts, Monopoly and a host of other games, Ungar developed his aptitude for cards long before his introduction to poker. While on a family vacation in the Catskills, he won his first gin tournament at ten-years-old, compounding the feat by beating the staff out of their tips. By the time he was seventeen, he was the greatest gin player in the world, winning hundreds of thousands, while protected by underworld ties. Five years later, having dismantled all comers, the action was gone. He needed a new game.

His strength as a card player was drawn from his ability to use his photographic memory and 185 IQ to analyze an opponent, before tearing him to pieces. He’d get a read on an opponent’s cards and then use pure aggression to dominate any moment of weakness. In gin, he’d usually have an accurate read of his adversary’s entire hand eight cards in. And he was cocky enough to tell him as much.

After gin brought Ungar to Vegas, he picked up poker quickly. As with everything, he launched almost immediately to the highest stakes available, learning at the table with each hand he played. Ungar’s first tournament was Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker, where Stuey finished 34th of 41 competitors. His second came two months later, when he entered the Main Event at the 1980 World Series of Poker.

Stuey was a curiosity to poker’s stars, but his entry was hardly seen as a major threat. He was a generation removed from his competitors in a game that valued experience as an essential. He’d only played no limit Texas Hold’em a handful of times, and his successes had all come in cash games, in which a player could go broke and reload as many times as he chose. Tournament play was a different animal, requiring patience and a keen instinct for survival; one miscue and it was all over. The pros knew this would be Ungar’s undoing. The pros were wrong.

The Kid doubled up almost immediately and started abusing his large stack, running the opposition over with a series of big bets and bluffs. He capitalized on their fear of early elimination in a tournament so many of them had waited so long for. At the end of the first day, with fifty of the original seventy- two still standing, the Kid was fifteenth. At the end of day two, with the field down to nine, he was second.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen another player who actually improved as the tournament went along,” Doyle Brunson remembers. “He used the World Series and all of us as a training ground.”

The final table read like a murderer’s row of poker, including multiple main event winners Brunson and Johnny Moss. A war of attrition from the start, the day saw just three players eliminated in its first six hours. When Gabe Kaplan got knocked out in sixth place, Brunson went on a tear. He eliminated Moss and heavyweights Jay Heimowitz and Charles Dunwoody. The Kid
was the last man standing between the big man and his third title.

With Brunson having set the line on Stuey at 100:1 prior to the tournament, the match up offered the Kid his desired revenge. Brunson was the favorite at 6:5, despite Ungar having the chip lead $400K- $300K. Ungar wanted a piece of that action; Brunson stepped up and accepted his $50K wager.

The final hand of the tournament started with Doyle limping on the small blind to make the pot almost $13k. The A-7-2 flop gave Doyle top two pair, while Stuey had only an inside straight draw. Ungar checked and Brunson bet $17k. Against most players, he’d have taken the pot down there, but Ungar made the call.

The turn brought the Kid’s miracle three, giving him the straight. He immediately bet out for forty thousand, knowing that a check-raise was more likely to scare the Texan away. Brunson paused for a moment and declared himself all in, pushing $275k into the pot. He’d later call it “one of the worst plays of my career.” The straight held up, and Stu Ungar had his first world championship win.

Here’s the beautiful thing about this hand: For the call of $17k on the flop to make any sense, Stuey had to figure he’d be getting paid off at 11.5:1. Put another way, he had to be fairly certain he was getting more than $150k from Doyle’s stack into the pot if he hit the turn. Stuey only called because he knew Brunson’s hand was strong enough to ensure an all-in if Stuey caught his straight. For the call to make any sense, Stuey had to have a surefire read on the greatest player of his day in this, the second tournament of his life.

It was a major turning point in poker’s history: the little New York Jewish kid had toppled the greatest of the Texas road gamblers. It wasn’t a changing of the guard; Brunson’s still going strong twenty-five years later. Instead, it signaled a broadening of the poker landscape. Ungar would repeat his championship run a year later before life caught up with him. Cocaine and sports betting would be his undoing. To the surprise of many, he made an appearance at the 1997 WSOP, where he decimated the field and took home the bracelet.

A year later, the man was dead. Now, only the legend remains. It’s the legend we’ll always remember.