One of a Kind

	I’ve achieved everything a man could want … but I have nothing at all. Stu Unger

Ungar is certainly a fascinating subject and this book by Dalla and Alson is a must read for those interested in not only the psyche of a great poker play but the lifestyle of a reckless gambler and drug addict.

The kid was prodigiously dysfunctional, a manic sports gambler and cocaine addict who won an estimated $30 million during his life, but who, after his death in 1998, needed a collection from his friends to pay for his funeral. But he was one hell of a poker player.

Stu ‘The Kid’ Ungar won and lost as much as $10 million during a career that began at age 10. He won the no-limit Texas hold ’em titles an unprecedented three times in 1980, ’81 and ’97 at Binion’s World Series of Poker. The 1997 purse for the $10,000 buy-in event was $1 million, but Ungar was broke two months later.

Stu’s life reads like few others and it is clear his is a unique story.

Born in 1953 in New York, Ungar was the son of a bookmaker who managed a bar on the fabled Lower East Side.

A gifted student when it came to mathematics, Ungar was allowed to skip two grades of elementary school.

At age 10, while vacationing in the Catskills with his family, Ungar learned to play gin rummy. Initially, he hustled waiters out of their wages and tips.

Ungar’s father died of heart failure in 1966 and his mother suffered a stroke the following year. At age 14, Ungar dropped out of school to hustle some of New York’s top gin rummy players.

In one marathon gin rummy game, Ungar won $10,000. But in just a few days he lost it all at the Belmont and Aqueduct horse tracks. It foreshadowed what would be a roller-coaster gambling career.

As an example of that, Ungar, on one Thanksgiving weekend several years ago, won $1 million playing poker. That same weekend, he lost $1.8 million betting football games. Ungar once lost $1 million in a single craps session. He also once shared a $1.8 million Pick Six horse bet win with a team of gamblers.

It was Ungar’s gambling losses in New York that sent him fleeing to Las Vegas in the late 1970s — one step ahead of a bookmaker to whom he owed a five-figure debt.

Ungar scraped together $1,500 and entered a downtown Las Vegas gin rummy tournament. He won the $50,000 first prize to pay off his bookie debt.

But Ungar soon had developed such a sterling reputation at the local gin rummy tables that he could find no one foolhardy enough to take him on.

Ungar’s card-counting skills also quickly got him banned from every blackjack table in town. That’s when Ungar decided to learn no-limit Texas hold ’em, a game that would bring him his greatest fame as a gambler.

As a poker rookie in 1980, Ungar entered the $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold ’em World Series championship game at the Horseshoe. At 27, he was the youngest player to capture that title.

Practically every dollar Ungar won ended up behind the cage with a sports bookie and his legacy apart from one daughter, Stepahnie, is this compelling but sad tale.