Interesting article from Cigar Aficionado

[Inthacup]

This is an interesting clip from an article I read in Cigar Aficionado about gambling and golf:

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Walters has played at the very top of the golf gambling food chain, but even he has someone to look up to---Doyle Brunon. "Doyle Brunson is probably the biggest golf gambler there ever was," says Walters. "And he was perfectly legit. He'd play for half a million dollars and he'd sometimes lose and pay right up. Everything was straight up with him. He has a reputation for being on the up and up. That's how you play for big money. It's no different than the reputation of some big Wall Street guy."


Doyle "Dolly" Brunson is the card-playing equivalent of Arnold Palmer. He as won the World Series of Poker twice and was a long-standing regular of Binion's Golf Gamblers Tournament. He was a good golfer, though not an oustanding one. He had been a standout athlete in Texas, both in basketball and on the track. But a let injury sustained in a summer job at a gypsum plant ended his athletic career, and in essence began his gambling career. His card playing became widely known, though his prowess as a golfer was known to a precious few. Brunson doesn't play golf anymore: his leg is too bad now to support his swing.


His last match, in 1998, was a doozy. Proposed by fellow high-stakes card players Huck Seed and Howard Lederer, it was a Nassau format bet against Brunson and Mike Sexton. Seed and Lederer were the better players, so they agreed to play from the blue tees and let Brunson and Sexton play from the red tees. The stakes: a $168,000 Nassau, bet five ways which allows for a press on each side. Brunson made a key 35-footer on the 16th hole that rattled Seed and Lederer. Brunson and Sexton would go on to win $336,000. They did this with a moving gallery of about 30 carts with fellow gamblers betting between themselves on holes, shots, on anything.


"I guess the thing about me that made me a good gambler was that I wasn't afraid to lose," says Brunson, who still revels in how much he won in his last round of competetive golf. "You have to have action to get action. That has always been my philosophy, in golf or cards. If you go in afraid to lose, then you probably will lose. If you go in like you're going to win, your chances of winning are a lot better. I mean, I lost some, for sure. When I was playing my best, I overmatched myself from time to time. Billy Walters has gotten the best of me over time because he's a better player. But trouble with players who gamble is that most of them don't want to lose the money and that's all they think about. Myself, Bill Walters--we just think about playing and winning. If we miss a shot, it isn't because we choked thinking about the money. We missed because we didn't make a good swing or a good put, that's all."


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Very good article overall. There was a fascinating article as well about a blackjack scam. I think a lot of what Brunson talks about in the second half of the quote easily translates to poker.