Oops

Last night I noticed, while wandering around waiting for a seat in a game at Binion's, that the photos of Stu Ungar on the walls are all labeled with his name misspelled as "Unger." That includes the one in the "Gallery of Champions," the one in the "Poker Hall of Fame," and a random one that is among a bunch of historic photos on the walls of the new poker room.

Oops.

Problem solved, mostly

I recently asked for suggestions from readers on how to solve the problem of wanting to play heads-up online SNGs with my nephew without somebody else grabbing one of the seats before we could both get it. There does not appear to be a good solution for Full Tilt Poker.

So instead I decided that the best approach would be to switch to a less heavily used site. But which one? UltimateBlecch and Absolute Puker were out of the question, for obvious reasons. I would have considered Cake, but a recent post on Red Bull and Poker nixed that. Before you put any money on that site, be sure to read what Ted found when he tried to cash out. What they put you through and what they charge you is nothing short of obscene. I finally settled on Bugsy's Club. It's a perfectly decent place, though a little clunky and inelegant in execution, and it's nearly dead. That's not what I want most of the time I play online, but for this specific purpose, that's a highly desirable quality.

Ben created an account there, with the fine screen name "IrwinMoneybags." Bugsy's Club doesn't have a super-easy funding mechanism like PokerStars does (see here); you basically have to use an e-wallet service or buy a specific type of gift card. Rather than bother with that, I just transferred a few bucks to Moneybags, the ability to do which is apparently a brand-new feature in the site's software.

An advantage of Bugsy's Club, I discovered, is that they offer heads-up SNGs as low as $1+.05, perfect for playing for funsies. A disadvantage is that there is no player search feature. (I confirmed this by writing to their customer support help desk when I couldn't find such an option. The response verified that they don't offer that function, but hope to implement it with their next software upgrade.) However, the site is so small that it's not hard to find somebody. Every table has a name, and there aren't many of any particular type. Right now I see that under the "heads up" tab there are two NLHE tables each at $1, $3, and $5. So I just took a seat in one of the cheapos and told Ben via IM the table name, and he took the other seat. There was not another soul in sight on the prowl for these games, so virtually no risk of facing an interloper. It's a pretty good solution to the problem.

So hear this, Full Tilt and PokerStars (because I'm sure they hang on my every word): You're missing out on big action by not offering a mechanism by which one can selectively choose one's opponents for a heads-up SNG grudge match. Me and my nephew are taking our $2 elsewhere!

We played two games last night--split decision, making us 3-3 overall so far.

Oh, another slight problem with Bugsy is that the hand histories will not import into any online hand displayer/converter that I have tried. Which means that if you want to see the sick call Ben made against what I thought was a well-timed bluff, you'll just have to slog through the hand history text the old-fashioned way:


Hand Number: 558,325,743
Table Number: 7,865,205
Event Name: Sit & Go Table Hotsy (#4865388)
Event Started: Monday November 24th 6:50:35 PM CST 2008
Event Type: Real Money Heads-Up Satellite
Event Buy-In: $1+$0.05
Total Prize Pool: $2
Game: No Limit Hold 'em
Level II: 50/100 Blinds (25 Minimum Chip)
Starting Chips: 10,000
Seat 1 : Rakewell starts with 9,550
Seat 2 : irwinmoneybags starts with 10,450
Seat 1 : Rakewell has the dealer button
DEALING HOLE CARDS
DEALING FLOP [ 6c 4d 6s ]
irwinmoneybags bets 575
Rakewell calls 575
DEALING TURN [ 2s ]
irwinmoneybags bets 875
Rakewell raises 2,225 to 3,100
irwinmoneybags calls 2,225
DEALING RIVER [ 7c ]
irwinmoneybags bets 1,750
Rakewell calls 1,750
irwinmoneybags cards were Qs 7h
Rakewell cards were 7d Js
irwinmoneybags wins 11,350 with two pair, sevens and sixes
Rakewell: ugh
SUMMARY Hand Ended: Monday November 24th 7:05:45 PM CST 2008
Total Pot: 11,350 Board: [ 6c 4d 6s 2s 7c ]
Seat 1 : Rakewell (small blind) lost 5,675, showed hand [ 7d Js ]
Seat 2 : irwinmoneybags (big blind) bet 5,675, won 11,350, net +5,675, showed hand [ Qs 7h ]

I still can't decide if his call of my bluff-raises on the flop and turn there were Stu-Ungar-brilliant* or completely idiotic. Either way, it worked, and put him a long way towards winning the match, and I had to take the next one in order to keep even. Anyway, it was fun, and it appears that Bugsy's Club will be the new home of the series of great uncle-nephew heads-up challenges. I shall keep you posted as I proceed to crush him like a bug! :-) *Perhaps Ungar's most famous sick call was this hand, as recounted by James McManus in this article:

After his victory in '90 and a dominant run in the live games, Matloubi
began to be spoken of as "the new Stuey Ungar." Ears burning, Stuey challenged
Mansour to a series of heads-up, winner-take-all matches for $100,000 each
during the Four Queens Poker Classic in February of '91. Brimming with
confidence, Mansour happily put up $50,000 and sat down to play. After a seesaw
battle between two aggressive champions, Stuey had about $60,000 when he opened a pot for $1,600. (The blinds were $200-$400.) Mansour called with 5-4 offsuit.
On a rainbow flop of 7-3-3, Mansour checked to Stuey, who bet $6,000. Mansour
called again. Both players checked the king on the turn. When a queen appeared
on the river, Mansour had missed his draw. Even so, he smelled weakness in Stuey
and moved all in for more than twice the size of the pot. Stuey stared him down
for 10 or 12 seconds. "You have 5-4 or 6-5," he coolly announced. "I'm gonna
call you with this," though all he could show Mansour was 10 high.

When he saw the two hands, even Phil Hellmuth was startled. "Wow, what an
unbelievable call! Stuey can't even beat a jack-high bluff." Mansour later said
he felt "like a bulldozer just ran over me. I still love Stuey, but what the
heck is going on!" As Barry Greenstein and others have noted, Stuey "was a hard
player to bluff, since he was an expert at figuring out when his opponent was on
a draw that didn't get there." The extremely narrow range of hands Stuey had put
Mansour on, 5-4 or 6-5, were just about the only two he could beat in a
showdown, so it took total confidence in his read to call a bet of that size.
"When a guy makes a call like that against you," Matloubi admitted to Hellmuth,
"you just give up. It's like he's taken all of the wind out of your sails. I
decided that I couldn't play any more heads-up no-limit hold'em, at least not
that day, if not forever." Stuey's defeat of Mansour and the way he'd
accomplished it cemented his reputation as the game's reigning no-limit genius.

Poker history quiz answer

I was expecting that somebody would figure out the significance of the door marked "16" in my photo in the previous post once I put up a second picture tomorrow. But I was not prepared for the mystery to be solved less than 30 minutes after I posted that one stark image!

OK, Mookie, you got it. You'd win the prize, if there were one.

Saturday will be the 10th anniversary of the death of Stu Ungar on November 22, 1998, in room 16 of the Oasis Motel.

Here's what the Oasis looks like today:







That picture of the parking lot is taken from the far end, looking back toward the entrance on Las Vegas Boulevard. Room 16 is near that entrance, on the south (left in this photo), just this side of the white pickup truck.




Here's how the place is described by Des Wilson in Ghosts at the Table:

As for Stuey, 18 months later he was found lying face-down on a bed in a sleazy
flophouse motel called the Oasis, the kind of cesspool that has only porno
movies on the television set, burn holes in the carpet, seedy drapes, a
cockroach to the square inch, and where you risk your life just breathing the
air. Only Stuey wasn't breathing. He was dead at 43.

I can't confirm the burn marks or the cockroach count, but the place really is nasty. I've stayed in a lot of Motel 6 franchises in my life, and all of them look like the Bellagio compared to the Oasis. Should you want to find it, for whatever reason, it's about a block north of the Stratosphere, on the east side of the street, and about a block south of the Olympic Garden strip club, just south of the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Oakey. By odd coincidence, it's also directly across the street to the east from the White Cross pharmacy that was the locale for a key scene in "Lucky You"--the one in which Huck loses his WSOP Main Event buy-in to his father in a foolish game of "Guts." My guess is that you might be able to see the Oasis through the windows in that scene; the cameras definitely would have been shooting in that direction. But confirming that would require watching the movie again, which isn't high on my priority list.

It had been my plan to bribe tip the desk clerk to let me into room 16 for a couple of minutes to snap some photos, but that proved to be unnecessary. By a nice little stroke of luck, the "seedy drapes" had been left open and I could peek in through the trellis-like wooden grating over the window. The photos didn't turn out great, because of the slats, the horrible grime on the glass, and the darkness inside and daylight outside causing reflections. But this shot lets you see most of what there is to see:



Just out of the picture on the right is a dresser with the TV set on it. The doorway to the right of the foot of the bed leads, I assume, to the bathroom. And that's it. That's the whole room. Given the general nature of the place, it could well be the same bed that was there ten years ago. Hell, it could be the same bedsheets, still unwashed.

Here's how Ungar's final days were described in his biography, One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey "The Kid" Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player, by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson, pp. 292-293. (Since I'm about to steal some of their material, let me throw in a plug for the book: Buy it here. I just ordered a copy myself, something I've been neglecting for a couple of years.)










And here's a couple of photos lifted from the same source, thanks to amazon.com's "search inside" feature:





It appears that the stone reads, "A great person, but a greater loss."

I'm not sure that I would describe Stu Ungar as "a great person." Frankly, he was a mess. He seems to have had no idea how to sustain a friendship or family relationship, and tended to mess up the lives of others nearly as badly as he messed up his own. Forget the stupid commercial with the frying pan smashing the eggs. To see your brain on drugs, just look at Stuey Ungar. He burned through relationships the same way he burned through money and narcotics. It's terribly sad to look back and see what a waste he made of a brilliant mind and an astonishing talent for poker. I can only imagine the feelings of those who knew and loved him, as they watched the self-destruction occur in real time.

I do not think that I could have made or sustained a friendship with a person as pathological as he was. Were he still alive, I would probably rail about him on this blog even more mercilessly than I do Phil Hellmuth, because by all accounts he was a terror at the table--not just in how he played his cards, but in how he behaved. He had no manners, no tact, no grace, no etiquette, no respect for others. He is said to have mercilessly berated opponents and dealers alike. James McManus spends a good part of two of his "history of poker" Card Player articles on Ungar (here and here), and says, "He was also an obnoxious winner and a terrible sport when he did lose the occasional match."

I really can't stand people like that. Nevertheless, I can stand in awe of his ferocious, prodigious, unequalled talent at cards. Perhaps the kindest assessment comes from McManus: "The bottom line is that Stuey's financial recklessness and freakish neural circuitry not only broke him and killed him, they were also what made him unbeatable."

Requiescat in pace, Stu Ungar.

Poker gems, #153

Stu Ungar, as quoted in James McManus's article on the history of poker in Card Player magazine, July 30, 3008 (vol. 21, #15), p. 102.


I just have to make myself hate my opponents. I just want to rip their throats out.

Poker gems, #96

Stu Ungar, as quoted at http://pokerpostings.blogspot.com/2008/03/poker-digest-of-day.html.


It's hard work. Gambling. Playing poker. Don't let anyone tell you different. Think about what it's like sitting at a poker table with people whose only goal is to cut your throat, take your money, and leave you out back talking to yourself about what went wrong inside.

Poker gems, #78

Stu Ungar, as quoted in Graham Sharpe, Poker's Strangest Hands, p. 149:

No one has ever beaten me playing cards. I have only beaten myself.

Poker gems, #57

Mike Sexton, in a tribute to the late Chip Reese, in Poker Player newspaper, December 24, 2007, issue, p. 27.

Years ago, I was talking to Chip about another Hall of Fame poker player that we lost too early, Stu Ungar. I asked Chip if he thought Stuey was the most talented player he had ever seen. Chip said, "Natural ability-wise, yes. Certainly he was the quickest minded guy I've ever known. Stuey's problem is that he doesn't understand the 'object of the game.' The object of the game is to accumulate wealth, improve your lifestyle, and provide for your family, and Stuey will never get it." Chip did.

...

Poker players always admired Chip for his success, his demeanor at the table, his lack of ego, and that he never steamed or went on tilt. I'd suggest we remember him for one guy who truly understood the object of the game.

Poker gems, #40

Gabe Kaplan and A.J. Benza, commenting on "High Stakes Poker," Season 1, Episode 11, after Barry Greenstein jokingly comments that there are now three kinds of poker players--Texans, Jews, and foreigners:

Kaplan: In 1980 I made a bet with Doyle [Brunson]. He took all the Texans in the tournament [WSOP main event]--there were only about 70 players--and I took all the Jewish players. It came down to two Jewish players and two Texans, and Stu Ungar won.

Benza: Was Stu from Texas?

Kaplan: Yeah, the lower east side of Texas.


[Note: The last four players were Ungar, Brunson, Johnny Moss, and Jay Heimowitz.]