Poker history is full of memorable personalities, and Stu Ungar often takes the top spot in the list of legends. A questionable genius who was accompanied by drugs throughout his career, he left an indelible mark on poker. A player as gifted as Stu is born once every hundred years, which makes it all the more painful to see self-destructive behaviour that can't be stopped.
If we were talking purely about talent, many would agree that Stu had no equal opponent. There was no one in the world who could beat Stu in gin rummy, and the talented youngster was equally confident in poker, where he rose extremely quickly to an imaginary pinnacle. But how did the whole Stu Ungar story come about?
Early childhood
Stu's story began on September 28, 1952, when he was born into a Jewish family in New York City. His father, Ido, owned a bar called Foxes Corner, which was known for having all sorts of illegal activities going on. The back room of the bar was used for illegal games, where Gin Rummy was most often played. It was a two-player card game, the rules of which resembled our joker.
The father was well aware of the environment in which his son regularly found himself and did his best to keep Stu out of the bar and at home to study. Stu did well in school, skipping 7th grade thanks to his great grades, and his parents had high hopes for him. But school was no longer enough for the ever-curious youngster and he took up gambling at an early age. He began to sneak into bars more and more often and quickly made friends among the shady patrons. He became fascinated with the game of gin rummy and won his first tournament at the age of 10.
The beginnings of gambling
When Stu was just 15, his father died of a heart attack and Stu was left to care for his mother, who had suffered a stroke and needed care. Stu was forced to drop out of school in the tenth grade and take up gambling full time to support himself and his mother. The young talent steadily improved, and by the age of eighteen he was a regular regulator in the illegal gambling scene of New York City. But it wasn't long before he ran into an interesting man - Victor Romano.
Romano was a well-known face of the local underworld, exceptional for his photographic memory and his love of gambling. Many said of Romano that he could recite off the top of his head the definition of any word in the English dictionary, and he gradually translated this advantage into counting probabilities in cards. The two quickly hit it off, and Romano became Ungar's mentor and protector. Especially the latter was necessary, as Stu was known for his volatile nature and for routinely loudly criticizing opponents and insulting their play. Many times Romano had to extinguish conflicts and explain that Stu didn't mean it personally - he was just fully focused on the game.
Invincible
The years went by and young Stu steadily improved until he became the best gin rummy player in New York. By the time he was 20 years old, he had already won more than $10,000, but his success quickly became his curse. Since Stu was known to be unbeatable in gin rummy, there was soon no one in New York willing to play him for any amount of money. So Stu had no choice but to go out into the world.
In 1976, at the age of 23, he went to Miami, where he found potential rivals. It didn't take a year, however, and that pond dried up as well. There was no choice, and in 1977 Stu settled in Las Vegas. But his reputation had long since spread beyond New York, so it wasn't long before there was no one in Vegas who wanted to play gin rummy with him either. The casinos asked Stu not to participate in their tournaments, as the players felt they could never beat him. The final nail in the coffin for Stu's career was playing with one of the best players of the time, Harry "Yonkie" Stein. Stu crushed him 86-0, thus closing his options to play the game for good. So Stu had no choice but to look around for a new game. And that was poker.
In the next part of this series, we'll take a look back at Stu's poker beginnings and the incredible 1980 WSOP ME, in which he played heads-up with the legendary Doyle Brunson. But the flip side of that success was drugs, which sent Stu into a hellish spiral....
Source - Wikipedia, One of a Kind book, PokerNews, PokerStrategy, GamblingStories, YouTube
