I watch this thread break out on 2+2 with repetitive regularity. All the young Internet guns try to wrap their heads around why Stu Unger was such a legend while they are busy storming the bastions and remaking poker into their New World. They argue questions about whether his reputation was really deserved or is it just a ghost the old timers cling to? How good was he really? How good would he have been? Would he have had been equally as good in post boom poker. I think the answerto that last one is an unqualified Absolutely. I believe that the new aggressive style would have suited him just fine. When it came to tournament poker, the style in which you played it had nothing whatsoever to do with his success or failure.
25 years of observation leads me to believe that there are 3 kinds of losing players in poker, and they remain universal no matter how the game changes. There are the people who simply never grasp the larger game theory at work and they quickly go broke and disappear. Then there are the players who do grasp the game theory behind it all but have an inability to execute it (those who can't, teach), and then there are the ones who have real talent, but an inability to manage various other issues of personal management and lifestyle leaks. Stuey was this last kind. And they are the majority. Straight, he could play above the rim, but any possibility of wealth was always going to be consumed by personal demons.
Lets qualify a few things before we start. I do not play poker except recreationally, I had no idea who Stuey was, and once upon a time, I was younger and prettier. However, my people have made their living at the game since forever and poker has dominated the larger part of my life no matter where I've gone. As a result, the WSOP was a yearly stop for me from about 1988 until I had my kids in 1999. During that time I've gotten to know personally, or know about, most of the biggest names in the business. And in 1997, I met Stuey. I was an unlikely person being granted an unique view into a few short hours of history.
On the second to last day of Stuey's run to his 3rd title, I got to sit on the rail and sweat him while he played down to the final table. Earlier I had gone with my mother, who had finished 12th in the main event that year, to grab a bite at the old deli counter at Binions, and there ran into Stuey. My first impressions of him were of a slight, edgy being with a ton of personality, who talked a mile a minute in that New York accent about how well he was doing and about his daughter Stephanie. Like everyone else that year, we were shown a picture of a beautiful, young, dark-eyed girl with whom he seemed to share a fairly honest relationship as denoted by his promise to turn his life around. That struck me as unusual at the time. What also struck me as odd was the sense of isolation from everyone else that seemed to encompass him. it was especially notable in such a social atmosphere as the WSOP. I would understand later that it was a sign of past bridges burned. As he went back to take his seat, my mother told me that he was a legend in Gin Rummy and Poker, and that he had ruined his life with cocaine.
A very short time later I found myself sweating him from the seats a few feet away. Stuey put on a show and really played it up inbetween hands chatting to me and showing off hands. He was in control of the tournament and, for that moment, seemingly in control of his life as well, and I provided him with a pretty girl to play to that afternoon.
Watching him that afternoon was like watching nothing I had ever seen before in a poker tournament, and I had seen a few of them. You could compare it to watching David Beckham take the field with the L.A. Galaxy. Anytime he has the ball his skills are so noticeably above and beyond everyone else out there that it's like watching two different games happen at the same time. Watching Stu that day was like watching Beckham or Joe Montana or Tiger Woods. They could make everyone else seem like they were standing still.
I don't think it's all that hard to understand poker and its theories and math anymore. The information is all out there. What’s hard is being able to execute it, to factor through all the information you have compiled on that player within his current and long-term trends, current table texture, how you are perceived based on actions and card history and what the bets and actions are telling you. What's hard is to compile such information and sort through the possibilities at lightning speed in that moment as well as set up plays and take advantage of happy accidents delivered by the cards. When Stu was on game he could do that better than anyone I've ever seen. He’s was just so many steps ahead of every other player in that moment that they might as well have been playing with their cards face up. It stayed with me that afternoon and I have yet to see another display come close to it on the poker table. The ability to ask the right series of questions and to recall the correct pieces of information at just the right moment and piece it together. When it happens faster than even you realize yourself, that’s what they call instinct.
Stu Unger's life never turned around, and I thought often of the sadness and disappointment that his daughter must have experienced watching him try and miss. When word came of his death it came with sadness and very little surprise. What would have been possible had he led a life intact? Life is full of unanswered questions. It's supposed to be. Stu is one of those unanswered questions for us to think about.
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