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  • Doyle Brunson

    Lifetime of luck; High-stakes gambler Doyle Brunson has won more than his share of poker hands. Be the stakes big money or life itself, the odds seem to favor the man they call Texas Dolly.
    By Mike Cochran
    Star-Telegram Staff Writer

    LAS VEGAS -- When he left Binion's Horseshoe Casino that spring night, Texas Dolly's mood was pitch black. After winning $90,000 the evening before, he'd just finished out of the money in the renowned World Series of Poker.

    As a world-class gambler and two-time Series winner, the $90,000 was not even a pleasant memory.

    He'd stuffed the handful of black, $5,000 chips in a leather pouch, stuck the bag in his pocket and forgotten about it. He was headed home for what he suspected would be a fitful attempt at sleep.

    It was around midnight when he arrived at his home on the golf course at the Las Vegas Country Club. He parked his Continental, stomped up the steps and stuck his key in the door.

    That's when the two masked gunmen appeared behind him.

    Until that ghastly night in 1998, Dolly joked that his biggest gamble had not been on a poker table but on an operating table. That ended when the intruders forced their way into his home and threatened repeatedly to kill him and his wife.

    Five times, the gunmen put a pistol to Dolly's head while making demands first that he disarm the alarm system and then for money from a safe that did not exist.

    Faking a heart attack, Dolly ran the bluff of a lifetime.

    As the tension reached a boiling point, one of the gunmen approached Dolly, cocked his pistol and declared: "I'm going to kill you!" Dolly's wife, Lelia, jumped in front of the man and cried: "Don't kill him! Kill me!"

    Startled, the gunman backed off.

    Later, pistol-whipped and bloody, Dolly lay handcuffed to Lelia, struggling to dial 911. He looked at his wife and smiled: "Did you think after 40 years we'd end up like this?"

    As a pre-eminently successful professional gambler, Adrian Doyle Brunson is no stranger to high-stakes wagers, to running or calling bluffs with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line.

    Back-to-back victories at the World Series of Poker in the mid-1970s earned the former Fort Worth resident some $600,000 and international fame. But he's won far more money in private games at Binion's Horseshoe and in the poker rooms of the glittering hotels like the Mirage and Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip.

    On a Las Vegas golf course a couple of years ago, he and his partner won $370,000 in an 18-hole match -- and grumble even today that they should have won more.

    For years, he financed a booming Las Vegas sports tout service, The Line Movers, and bet tens of thousands each week on his own touts, or betting tips.

    Eagerly, he once flew to Paris for a poker game with a dying billionaire -- and dropped $1.4 million. "But," he says, "it was about as good as any game I ever saw."

    Recognized for years as the best all-around poker player alive, Brunson traces his nickname back to the late Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, who called him "Doy-lee." He was "Texas Dolly" by the time they inducted him into the Las Vegas Poker Hall of Fame in 1986.

    Still, Dolly says his greatest tribute came two years ago when a group of his peers sat around kibitzing at the Bellagio. They could not decide whether Dolly's strongest game was Texas Hold-em, seven-card stud, low ball or draw poker.

    "That's the best compliment I ever had," he insists.

    Although identified always as the grand master of Texas Hold-em, Dolly says: "I really don't have a favorite game anymore. I enjoy them all."

    His lofty status in the Green-Felt Jungle hasn't changed much in the past quarter-century, except that longtime friend and fellow gambler David "Chip" Reese ranks right up there beside him.

    "Chip's probably the best, in my opinion," says Dolly, "I still think we're considered to be the top two."

    Brunson and Reese are two of six living members of the Poker Hall of Fame, a group that includes Puggy Pearson, Roger Moore, Jack Keller and Thomas Preston, better known as "Amarillo Slim."

    Dolly wrote a book several years ago called `How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker.' Gamblers and critics labeled it a classic, and it commanded $100 a copy. Revised as `Doyle Brunson's Super System' and priced at $50, it is now in its eighth edition and has sold 90,000 copies.

    He claims a sequel should be: `How I Lost Over $1,000,000 Playing Golf,' but friends say he exaggerates his golf losses.

    "He's won more money on the golf course than anybody on the face of the earth," contends a gambling and golfing buddy named Dewey Tomko. "The higher it is, the more pressure he's under, the better he plays."

    One time in Nashville, Tomko says, two guys named Willie and Sam were flogging them to the tune of $200,000 a day. After five days, Tomko was ready to call it quits.

    "Let's go home and regroup," he pleaded.

    No way, responded Dolly, a scratch golfer in his prime.

    "Ten days later, we had our money back plus a large profit," recalls Tomko. "He's got the heart of a lion."

    Explains Dolly: "The only time money means anything to me is when I run out of it."

    No-limit Texas Hold'em remains among Dolly's favorite games, and nobody plays it better, colleagues say. `Sports Illustrated' once described Hold'em as no less Texan than the Alamo, and declared: "All it takes to play it well are a gunfighter's nerve, the endurance of a cattle drover and a drunken cowboy's respect for money on Saturday night."

    It is a big-bluffin', kissin' cousin of seven-card stud, one of poker's traditional games.

    Jack Binion, formerly of Binion's Horseshoe, maintains that Texans have an edge on their wagering counterparts simply because they're so coldblooded.

    "I guess it's the way they're raised, or something," he says, shrugging.

    A faded 1975 magazine article titled "High Rollers" described the stereotypical professional gambler thusly:

    "He's a Texan in his late 40s, drifting to overweight, a nondrinker, cigar-smoker. From a poor family, he learned to gamble as a teen-ager and was a high school dropout. After traveling many grueling years playing backroom card games from dollar ante to $100,000 pots, he's savvy, calculating, loves any gambling action but prefers the disciplined skill of poker.

    "He has a nickname, a good sense of humor and spins downhome gamblin' stories. He'll check the price of a suit before buying it with personal money, but will bet $100,000 without flinching because gambling money is merely a way to keep score."

    Though hardly a high school dropout, that ancient profile fits Dolly like a mink glove.

    I first met Doyle Brunson in 1955 when we both attended Hardin-Simmons University. Many of the students who descended on Abilene back then migrated from the dusty, wind-blown farming and ranching towns and oil centers scattered across West Texas, and Doyle was no exception.

    Formerly the star player on HSU's basketball team and one of the state's best collegiate milers, he had developed his athletic skills jogging into town from his family's farm outside Sweetwater. The legacy of those athletic years is incredible stamina and discipline and even concentration, all critical to the persona of a successful poker player.

    With hazel eyes atwinkle and a crooked but sunny smile spreading across his full, friendly face, he adds: "It takes a lot of endurance to haul this body around."

    Dolly has packed an extra hundred pounds or so on his 6-foot-3 frame, and both his excessive weight and his gambling career can be traced to the summer of 1953. He broke his leg in a construction-site accident before his senior year, ending his athletic activities and leaving him with a lifelong limp.

    He remained at HSU long enough to earn a master's degree and to sharpen his poker skills, then headed to Fort Worth.

    He was at his sales job one day when he stumbled into a poker game, bought in and won big. He asked himself: "Why am I trying to sell business machines when I can sit down at a poker table and make 10 times the money in one-sixth the time?"

    The answer seemed obvious, at least to Brunson.

    Most anyone can tell you that Cowtown was on the dark side of raucous in the 1950s and '60s, especially in the Stockyards area around Exchange Avenue and along the Jacksboro Highway. Dodging bandits and bullets, that's where Brunson and his cronies played much of their poker.

    "I saw five people killed out there [in the Stockyards], including two in a card game and two others at the bar," Dolly remembers.

    Despite those wild and deadly times, Brunson insists that he misses Fort Worth: "It really is a Cowtown, and I had a good time there."

    From the turbulent north side, Brunson and his buddies moved downtown to a bigger if less colorful game in a seedy old hotel. It was there that Brunson befriended a rising young gambler named Sailor Roberts. He and Sailor teamed up with Amarillo Slim and together they crisscrossed Texas, playing poker for nearly seven years.

    They played anywhere they could find a game, or even a bet, Brunson recalls.

    "We got to the point we were gambling on anything -- golf, pool, tennis, basketball -- as long as we had some sort of edge."

    The road years were both priceless and perilous as Brunson honed his poker skills and developed the sixth sense required of expert gamblers. Playing poker 18 to 20 hours a day also helped polish his incredible sense of recall, which all great players possess.

    Within minutes, he categorizes new players and evaluates from experience how they might react in different situations: Is the player good, weak, tight, loose, aggressive or somewhere in between?

    And will he call a big bet?

    Until the most recent brush with death, Brunson clearly beat his longest odds in 1962 after marrying Lelia Carter, a bubbly, dark-haired pharmacist from San Angelo. Several months after the wedding, Brunson learned he had developed melanoma, a deadly form of cancer.

    Doctors said Brunson would live no more than four months and recommended against surgery, warning that he probably would die on the operating table.

    "Our first child was due in five months, and I desperately wanted him to at least see the baby," Lelia says.

    With little hope of saving his life, and only a long shot at delaying death, Lelia persuaded Doyle to go to the renowned M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

    "The doctors told me I was wasting my money," she says.

    Defying enormous odds, Doyle survived eight hours in surgery. Inexplicably, surgeons later found no trace of the disease, and the only remaining evidence of that long-ago ordeal are the scars on his neck.

    "As hard as it is to believe, the cancer, somehow, disappeared," Brunson says. "Just like it wasn't there."

    Doctors called it a spontaneous remission, but Lelia called it a miracle. "It's made a Christian fanatic out of me," she says with a throaty and heartwarming laugh.

    Dolly was on hand for the birth of his first child, a daughter they named Doyla. A second daughter, named Pam, and a son, whom they christened Todd, soon followed.

    Years later, there would be a tragically ironic turn of events. Doyle had risked his life on the operating table to see his daughter born. But at age 19, Doyla, a college student at the time, died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart defect.

    Both mother and father naturally were devastated, but Doyle took his daughter's death brutally hard. Friends worried that he might not recover.

    Eventually, of course, he did, emerging even stronger both mentally and spiritually.

    While the 1962 cancer episode made a "Christian fanatic" out of Lelia, it also made a world-class gambler out of Brunson. After recuperating, he returned to the poker table with renewed vigor, confidence and resolve. At games in Houston and Oklahoma City, Odessa and Dallas, he played like a man obsessed.

    The photo finish with death had left him with an even greater disregard for money, an attitude essential to high-stakes gambling success. Doyle's playing, always aggressive, became instinctive.

    "And you wouldn't believe -- I won, won, won, won and won. . . . Some innate something clicked. I was reading my competitors more accurately, and I felt a self-assurance I never had. I went from being a mediocre player to, I guess, the best player around."

    Brunson's roadshow partnership with Amarillo Slim and Sailor Roberts ended abruptly after a mid-'60s trip to Las Vegas, where they gambled away their six-figure bankroll. They would, however, claim revenge of sorts. All three returned to Vegas in the '70s and won the World Series of Poker, the equivalent of three high school golfing chums winning the U.S. Open.

    "The Series has got such an aura about it, such a mystique . . . and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger," Dolly says.

    Jack Binion, who founded the World Series, has launched a rival tournament called the World Open at his casino in Tunica, Miss. ESPN televised portions of last year's Open and viewers saw Dolly's son Todd, 31, finish second.

    A charismatic chip off the old block, Todd is very much like his father, right down to the quick grin and quiet confidence. He also shares many of his dad's gambling traits, including a fondness for high-stakes games.

    "It sounds pretty conceited if I say it, but I do play in the very biggest games," Todd says.

    Like his father, he began playing poker back in Texas, though not in the risky back-room road games but at Texas Tech in Lubbock. He flirted with a legal career, but gambling won out over the long haul.

    Todd inherited his mother's financial conservatism but his father's fearlessness at the gaming tables, which is a provocative mix. He says he can argue dollars with a gardener, then bets hundreds of thousands on a poker hand "without thinking twice."

    "Fearlessness tempered with reason," he says, grinning, "is the best combination you can have in poker."

    By the time Dolly won his first World Series of Poker in 1976, Vegas was home. His Texas cronies had quit inviting him to play because he had become almost unbeatable, and hijackers and high sheriffs were still haunting the Texas gambling scene.

    Then and now, Dolly plays limit games, but no-limit remains his preference.

    "Limit poker is a science, but no-limit is an art," one of his pals told me in Los Angeles several years ago when I was in town researching a free-lance story on Dolly. "In limit, you are shooting at a target. In no-limit, the target comes alive and shoots back."

    Dolly's relentless quest for action has taken him across the country and into such foreign outposts as Ireland, France, England, Australia and South America.

    Although it cost him $1.4 million, the Paris adventure with the doomed billionaire was a "great action game," he contends to this day.

    "You've heard how sometimes you get lucky right before you die? Well, he did. And he did die. But it was about as good as any game I ever saw."

    Back home in Vegas, Brunson was telling a friend of the Paris adventure and Lelia overheard him say he'd lost $1.4 million. She was aghast. Fretting that he might squander the family fortune, she threatened to divorce him if he didn't change his lifestyle.

    She's bluffing, Dolly figured.

    She wasn't.

    They did indeed split, but they were back together even before the ink dried on the divorce papers.

    The two gunmen appeared in black clothing and ski masks that fateful spring night and ordered Brunson to open the door to his home.

    He refused.

    "Then you'll die right here," one said, putting the gun to Brunson's forehead.

    His mind racing, Brunson grabbed his chest and feigned a heart attack.

    The two men dragged him inside, then realized the alarm system was beeping and would go off momentarily.

    They demanded the code. Brunson refused to give it up. One of the men again placed his pistol at Brunson's head.

    "I'm going to kill you," he said.

    Brunson didn't know if the intruder was bluffing, but he did know they probably would kill both him and Lelia if the alarm was deactivated. Growing impatient, the gunman struck him in the head with the pistol, breaking his glasses and sending blood spurting everywhere.

    He fell, again clutching his chest.

    "It's my heart," he said.

    Hearing the commotion from an upstairs bedroom, Lelia descended the steps and was caught up immediately in the life-and-death saga.

    Suddenly, one of the men went berserk, cocked his pistol, ran toward Brunson and screamed: "I'm going to kill you for what you've done to us!"

    That's when Lelia leaped in front of him and cried: "Kill me! Don't kill him! Kill me!"

    Brunson would say later: "No heroine in a novel could have done better. I was so proud of her. I believe he was really about to shoot me when she did that."

    Looking stunned if not totally flabbergasted, the man stopped in his tracks.

    In the end, the intruders struck Brunson several more times, removed the pouch containing $90,000 in chips from his pocket, riffled his billfold for several thousand dollars in cash and disappeared into the night.

    Although handcuffed to Lelia, Brunson managed to dial 911 on a cellphone.

    "I'm lying there pistol-whipped, I've got blood all over me and I've been robbed," he recalls.

    "And they put me on hold."

    On a sparkling Sunday afternoon in the Nevada desert, I sat with Doyle and Lelia Brunson in their casually elegant Mediterranean-style home and listened as they related the events of that bizarre spring night three years ago. Dolly spends a great deal of time in this new home, relaxing, watching TV, playing with his dogs, dabbling with a computer, entertaining grandkids and great-grandkids and swimming in a pool carved out of rock and featuring the soothing sounds of five waterfalls.

    They left their previous home the day after the robbery, but they can't shake the lingering memories of pain, anger, relief and irony.

    Although the gunmen have not been caught, only a total fool would risk a return assault on the current household, located in a gated community on the western outskirts of Vegas.

    "I've got guns everywhere," Dolly says. "I don't intend to go through that again."

    What's more, the house, with the glitzy Strip aglow to the east and the mountains off to the west, is loaded with security devices and guarded 24 hours a day by security officers.

    "Whatever time I come in, they follow me home and wait until I get inside," Brunson says.

    As we talked that day, Lelia expressed second thoughts about her bravado the night of the robbery.

    "If I'd known you were bluffing," she told Doyle with a smile, "I don't know if I'd have jumped in front of that gun."

    Finally, there was a strange twist that adds a bit of mystery to this tale, along with a chilling "What if?"

    The Brunsons have two small but hyper dogs, a poodle named Casper and a bichon frise named Cutie, and Dolly loves those animals almost as much as he loves his grandkids. Cutie barks at anything that moves, and Casper bites anything that moves suspiciously.

    "Casper thinks he's a German shepherd," Dolly says, and both animals pounce on most anyone who enters the house.

    The dogs were upstairs with Lelia when the gunmen dragged Dolly through the door and began beating and kicking him. She and Doyle wonder still why the dogs did not scramble down the stairs and attack the gunmen.

    "Neither dog barked," Dolly says. "Neither made a peep. Make of that what you will . . . but it was something supernatural."

    If Casper had menaced the gunmen, the intruders probably would have harmed and maybe killed the dogs. Doyle and Lelia say that would have set in motion a tragic chain of events, beginning with Brunson going after the gunmen.

    Nobody messes with Brunson's beloved dogs.

    "It would have gotten Doyle killed for sure," Lelia said. "And probably me, too."

    There is no explanation for Casper's restraint, but both Dolly and Lelia believe beyond a doubt that it saved their lives. Casper, incidentally, wasted little time reverting to form.

    "He attacked the cops when they arrived," Dolly says, sighing.

    Mike Cochran, (817) 390-7702
    [email protected]

    Editor's note: Dodging cops and robbers and an occasional bullet, Doyle Brunson came of age in Fort Worth's north side gambling dens during the turbulent 1950s and '60s. Later a fixture in the poker palaces along the flashy Las Vegas Strip, the erstwhile Sweetwater farm boy is recognized as one of the best and boldest no-limit poker players of all time. In a series of rare and candid conversations with an old college buddy, the gambler known as Texas Dolly reflects on life -- and death -- in the Green-Felt Jungle.



  • #2
    Interesting reading Jeff. Thanks

    Comment


    • #3
      longest post that i ever read & enjoyed & didnt have a clue what it was all about! LOL

      Comment


      • #4
        Great article....and the guy is a legend. He's not the man anymore in high stakes no-limit poker, a lot of great players now, but still one of the best ever known to play the game. Thanks for the posting Jeff.

        Comment


        • #5
          Great stuff. Doyle Brunson is truely a larger than life character.

          Comment


          • #6
            thanks jeff. i am having a hard time believing it. great story.

            chuckz

            Comment


            • #7
              Interesting but I have a question. Why didn't he or the cops just call binions and say that if anybody came in with a large stack of $100 chips to keep them occupied until police arrived?

              Comment


              • #8
                Hartley,
                I'd bet, he did arrange something with Binion's, but it wasn't for the cops to know about.
                lol
                Rich Rosenthal

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