Stu Ungar is a player whose name is dropped to oblivion. This is probably due to his death nearly 10 years ago. We nevertheless believe that Stu Ungar is a great name when it come to poker and by that, in fact Ungar was an extraordinary poker player who had everything until one day in November 1998 …

One afternoon in 1998, Stu Ungar was found dead in a motel in the most miserable of Las Vegas. An obscene film in the TV and vomit on the carpet. Ungar was taking hard drugs, and police have not found it necessary to consider whether it was about murder. There was not no money in the hotel room and money to the account of Ungar. If it were all in possession of an account – because his life was a mess. His friends collected money to pay for a funeral.

The life of the one of the best poker players ended like that. It is estimated that won gains of around EUR 90 million during his short life – he was only 38 years old when he died. His intelligence is measured at a peak of 185, but Ungar was used for poker and gin Rommy. He won the World Championship of Poker three times – it is so far the only one to do that. And only the lonely death at Oasis Motel in Las Vegas he was prevented from winning a fourth time.

Parent of the Mafia

With his superior intelligence, Ungar could choose any profession, but he chose to play cards – it became his passion and livelihood. Because of its social environment, a more respectable profession was not a real possibility. His family was Jewish, they came to the United States before World War II.

He had not breathed for the cheap refreshment of his father, who was located in Lower East Side in Manhattan. The bar was the home of gangsters and criminals of Italian and Jewish neighborhood. He was a skinny little guy a process hyperactive, and he liked to listen to adults of the bar. His father also worked as an accountant and lender, but because of the fact that he could not read quickly, the tasks of counter Stu have spent because of his talent for mathematics.

The environment was miserable. Ungar told himself that his bar mitzvah, first communion Jewish, the police focused on the guest list because of the large number of suspects in the celebration. When his father died a year later, the gangsters have become friends of Stu.

At the time, Stu had the reputation of being a wizard with numbers and maps. He was recruited as a member of the gangster family, the Genoveses. A member of the mafia in the name Victor Romano, who had been penalized, had several club maps in Manhatten illegal for being members of the mafia. It was Romano who left Stu Ungar play, and he gave the mafia protection at the same time.

About the environment, Stu Ungar said:

“At that time, in the sixties, I was mostly with Italians. But I also met Irish. The Irish were the most brutal murderers, the coldest and most terrible that I have encountered. Evil bastards. I was a teenager, but I hung out with gangsters, and most people were afraid to meet this kind of gangster! At school, I was the smallest of the boys, but I was always the greatest friends the bigger and more brutal “.

Quickly, it was given the name “the Kamikaze Kid” to Stu, because he played cards without fear. But it is also called “The Kid” because he was small, thin and had the air of a young boy. He never weighed more than 50 kilos. It always ran instead of walking, and he spoke very quickly using the jargon typical of Lower New Yorker found in Superman comics, comics by Will Eisner or the novels of Philip Marlowe.

He started to play gin Rummy, but immediately, all other players in Manhatten and the East Coast were frightened of him because of his invincibility, and he was forced to replace Gin Rummy by poker. Nobody wanted to play against Stu.

While playing, he used his superior intelligence and his ability to get a memorative impressive sense of control cards and opportunities of its opponents. His opponents claimed that he had a sixth sense. But in terms of its invincibility, it was his memory and his sense of mathematics.

Stu as human

As humans, Stu was how? He exerted a tremendous generosity towards others and towards his wife. But it was dependent on drugs and Thursday he won enormous sums, but at the same time it has lost at Racecourse trotting where his impressive talent to read opponents remained without effect. So nice and generous it is in the private, as was the level of brutality and ruthless behavior at the poker table. He was aware of his goal to win the pot and the opponents to bleed white.

Stu Ungar himself said the following regarding his life:

“They called me a monster. When I was 15 years ago, I slaughtered the people who have played professionally for 30 years. I turned to ridicule. Yes, perhaps I was a monster “.

Stu Ungar played night and day, and his days were without structure. It began with horse racing because they have given excitation impossible to predict: “I needed to fix this challenge. There is no real challenge when you win against a group of idiots playing cards. But give me a horse race and let me guess the winner – this is what let me live. ”

Stu has consistently lost all its gains by playing the horses.

Despite his lifestyle, he met a girl, Madeline, whom he fell in love, and they had one daughter:

“I loved Madeline with all my heart. She persuaded me to marry, and I can not forgive him. But anyway, I give thanks to the gods it did, otherwise I would not have had this child “.

However, the link ended in divorce and a sense of failure as regards the relationship with his daughter.

World Championship

When Stu Ungar died in 1998, the popularity of poker was not as strong as today. However, the game was popular, and there was a lot of money to win. The world championship was not an official event in Las Vegas. He won the world championship of poker in 1980, but it was not possible to take the pot of $ 300,000 because he had no social security card for identification. The following year he won again, but the money was spent on horses.

The following years, his life was full of games and drugs. Consumption of drugs was suicidal. He drugged the same way he ate his food very quickly and without blink. He recounted:

“I had a party in a hotel room. There were people I did not know. Girls love the party, they were drugged in the same way that hyenas eat carrion. After that, I decided to stop buying drugs at a price of 50,000 euros and then see how people consume. So I started buying them for my own consumption only. ”

In 1997 he returns to Las Vegas for the World Championship. He had the air and it felt like a bum, and he lacked the $ 10,000 he had paid to participate. He borrowed money and he won the title. For now, he is the only one to have won the title three times. The gain was a million dollars, and gave half to the man who lent him $ 10,000 and the other half has disappeared during a few months.

Since the death of Ungar, poker is obviously become a popular sport. Several million people play poker online and they see television poker, and today, Ungar would milliadaire if he had not lost its last game against death in the hotel room in Las Vegas.

Ungar has not blamed the social environment mafia or friends of the accident. He said:

“Poker is a proverb says that the worst enemy at poker is oneself. As for me, this proverb is telling the truth. Our God has given me a talent, and no one else has had this talent. Maybe I have not used enough, this talent. I’m not a big man, but the evil that I was mainly a nuisance to me. But I also know that I hurt others, especially people I loved.”