Michael Craig: The Professor, The Banker, And The Suicide King: Inside The Richest Poker Game Of All Time

While extensive TV coverage and life-changing prize pools have fueled (and been fueled by) the current poker craze, the simplicity of Texas Hold 'Em is key to its popularity. As the expression goes, "It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master." In a hundred one-on-one matches against Michael Jordan, an amateur basketball player could expect to lose a hundred times, but if the cards fall right, a poker novice could feasibly top the greatest high-stakes professional players in the world. Poker contains enough of a gambling element that luck plays a factor in the short term, but skill always wins out over the long haul. Nevertheless, responsible poker pros need to make room in their bankrolls for "the variances," those awful stretches where optimal play meets bad fortune and nothing can be done about it. When Andy Beal, a self-made multimillionaire banker from Texas, took on a consortium of poker elite in a series of matches at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, he pushed the stakes to such stratospheric numbers that the pros lost some of their edge. A few bad sessions, and Beal could have potentially busted them all.

Though a little too perfunctory in its biographical details, Michael Craig's riveting book The Professor, The Banker, And The Suicide King goes down to the felt for a confrontation that has already become the stuff of poker lore. When Beal first wandered into the Vegas poker rooms, he could safely be considered "dead money," easy pickings for big-game players who were more accustomed to the hard work of taking money off each other. But Beal closed the gap in a hurry: In a game that boils down to mathematics and psychology—weighing probability and odds against a read on opponents' hands—Beal sought to master the numbers while disciplining himself to reduce the betting patterns and physical "tells" that the pros were undeniably more skilled at observing.

Over the course of three years, from 2001 to 2004, Beal issued a challenge to a group of top players—led by the legendary Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson and a hall-of-fame roster that included Howard Lederer, Jennifer Harman, Ted Forrest, Chip Reese, and Chau Giang—to play a series of contests for escalating stakes. The only game Beal agreed to play was "heads-up" (i.e. one-on-one) Limit Hold 'Em (a fixed-stakes game, as opposed to the popular No Limit, in which a player can push all his chips into the pot at any time), and he played it with astonishing aggression. To protect themselves from financial ruin, the pros pooled their money and had a shared stake in each other's successes (and failures), but with the blinds (forced bets) starting at $10,000 and $20,000, and eventually topping out at an unseemly $100,000 and $200,000, all the players were subject to multimillion-dollar swings.

Beyond the gut-wrenching play-by-play of the biggest cash game in history, The Professor, The Banker, And The Suicide King suggests that high-stakes pros have more gamble in them than they might care to admit. Such high rollers spend years amassing bankrolls thick enough to play at the steepest limits—currently, "The Big Game" at Bellagio runs at $4,000/$8,000 stakes—but they seemed willing to lose it all against Beal, who systematically whittled their edge down to almost nothing. Poker players bristle whenever the game is talked about as a form of gambling, as if it were just another casino fix, but for a terrifying spell, the best of the best were a few cards away from the brink.