Chip Reese Special Tribute

“He Was Just That Much Smarter Than The Rest Of The World”
Remembering and paying tribute to the late, great Chip Reese

BY STORMS REBACK

DAVID “CHIP” REESE, WHO DIED IN HIS SLEEP December 4 at the age of 56, was more than a great poker player. He was a legend.
Reese’s mythic existence began even before his birth when his parents gave him the nickname that most would later assume was a reference to the game he’d mastered. While the poker chip would indeed become the currency of his life, “Chip” actually sprang from an encounter his parents had on their honeymoon with a former football player at Ohio State who bore that name.

Born in Centerville, Ohio, the heart of Buckeye Territory, Reese might have played for Woody Hayes himself if he hadn’t contracted rheumatic fever at the age of six. Forced to miss his first year of elementary school, he gained an entirely different sort of education at home while playing cards with his mother. Upon recovering, he used his newly acquired skills to win nearly every baseball card in the neighborhood, even from kids just about twice his age.

Reese went on to attend Dartmouth College, where he gained a reputation for beating professors at bridge, gin rummy, and poker. When he deigned to play his peers, he so dominated play that his fraternity brothers at Beta Theta Pi ended up naming the card room after him.

He graduated in 1974 and was on his way to Stanford Law School when he made a brief pit stop in Las Vegas. He arrived with only $400 in his pocket, but quickly built up his bankroll playing Seven-Card Stud, a game he was so proficient at that Doyle Brunson later asked him to write about it in Super/System. Before that summer had ended, Reese won a $500 poker tournament at the Sahara Hotel, good for a $60,000 payday, enough to convince him to skip law school and play poker full-time.

Naturally, he was asked about this decision many times during the course of his life, and he gave two oft-quoted responses. One was, “Law doesn’t have the same monetary incentive as poker.” The other: “I decided to choose the more honorable of the two professions.”

The Object Of The Game

Reese would go on to win a World Series of Poker bracelet in the $1,000 Seven-Card Stud Hi-Lo event in 1978 and another in the $5,000 Seven-Card Stud event in 1982, but he quickly lost interest in tournaments because the stakes were too low. “Unless it was the biggest game in the world, Chip Reese wasn’t going to go play,” explained World Series of Poker Media Director Nolan Dalla. “It just wasn’t worth his time.”
From the very outset of his career, his focus was playing in cash games for the highest possible stakes.

During his first year in Las Vegas, he convinced Danny Robison, his partner at the time, to let him use $30,000 from their bankroll so he could play $400/$800 Stud Hi-Lo with such poker luminaries as Johnny Moss, Puggy Pearson, and Doyle Brunson. The gamble paid off. Four days later, he’d won more than $300,000.

From that moment on, he was only ever interested in playing in the so-called Big Game, which migrated around town between establishments like the Dunes Casino and Binion’s Horseshoe until it eventually found a semi-permanent home in the Bellagio. Reese would be not only a regular participant in this game but also a consistent winner until the day he died.

How was he able to thrive where others went broke? What set him apart from his peers?
Those who knew him best credit his easy-going and highly professional demeanor for much of his success. “He never chastised the dealers,” said Mike Sexton, who had known Reese ever since their days together back in Ohio. “He never criticized an opponent for the way he played a hand. He understood what it meant to treat the tourists right. All the successful business people who played with Chip over the years, even though they knew they were going to lose to him, they thoroughly enjoyed playing with him because of the way he conducted himself.”

Whereas so many of today’s young guns make the mistake of “tapping on the glass”—scaring fish away by mocking them—Reese was a master at enticing such players to play just a little longer. He understood, perhaps more than anyone in the history of the game, that being friendly and polite wasn’t just good form but good business.

“He was probably the most socially intelligent person I’ve ever met,” Daniel Negreanu wrote in a recent blog. “Fully understanding what it meant to be a professional and fully understanding his role as not only a player in the game, but as a ‘host.’”

Sometimes being a good host meant accommodating hit-and-run artists. Sexton likes to tell the story about the time such a player challenged Reese to play $1,500/$3,000 Stud heads-up. Reese’s opponent won just about every pot during the first 25 minutes of the session, then fumbled for an excuse to leave.
“I understand,” Reese told him. “You go on ahead.”

After the man took off, Reese turned to Sexton. “Mike, that’s why I’m successful playing poker.”
Sexton was perplexed, for he had just seen Reese lose $30,000 in less than 30 minutes.
“Most players are just like that guy,” Reese explained. “They win a little bit and they get up and leave, but when they lose they go off for a whole bunch. When I play poker against a guy’s who’s stuck, I’ll stay there and play with him until he wants to quit.”

On another occasion, Sexton asked Reese if Stu Ungar was the most talented poker player of all-time. Reese’s response said as much about himself as it did Ungar. “Talent-wise, maybe so. Certainly he has the quickest mind of anyone I’ve ever met. But Stuey’s problem is that he doesn’t understand the object of the game, and he never will. The object of the game is to increase your wealth, improve your lifestyle, and provide for your family. Stuey will never get it.”

Increase Your Wealth

While Ungar snorted up or gambled away his winnings, Reese used his to build his bankroll and acquire possessions that could never be lost. At the time of his death, he owned a 13,000-square-foot home in Las Vegas, an oceanfront condo in Santa Monica, and a lakeside retreat in Montana. Because he mostly played in cash games, it’s hard to estimate exactly how much he won over the course of his lifetime. Suffice to say it was a lot.

“Chip was going to have multimillions whatever profession he went into,” said Sexton. “It didn’t matter if hewas a real-estate agent, a stockbroker, or a businessman of any kind. He was just that much smarter than the rest of the world.”

Reese earned money in nearly every venture he tried, including backgammon, chess, and sports betting. He and Doyle Brunson were said to have devised a system for betting on baseball that was extremely successful for many years. However, the two also collaborated on countless schemes that didn’t turn out so well, like funding expeditions to raise the Titanic and locate Noah’s Ark. Fortunately, their poker winnings easily made up for these losses.

Reese earned so much money playing poker he served as something of a bank for his fellow rounders. He was often the first person players approached after they went bust, and Reese rarely refused them even though far more money went out than ever came back. “He helped a lot of players when they were down and out,” said Sexton. “He loaned money he knew he would probably never get back again. It was just his way.”

Improve Your Lifestyle

As accomplished as Reese was at acquiring money, he was equally adept at spending it. Whereas so many poker players pour every dollar they earn back into the game, Reese constantly rewarded himself for his skilled play, traveling whenever and wherever he felt like.

One of his favorite pleasures was fine dining. “He ate like a king,” said Dalla. “He had a real world-class palate. Dinner with Chip was a two-hour meal. There was no such thing as fast food in his diet.”
So many excessive meals eventually added up to a big weight problem. At one point, Reese weighed close to 300 pounds. To encourage each other to diet, he and Brunson once made a $50,000 weight-loss bet. Reese promptly gained 17 pounds.

Several years ago, he took a more proactive approach by undergoing gastric bypass surgery. While the operation succeeded in getting his weight problem under control, there is some speculation that it may also have contributed to his death, as one of the risks of the surgery is an increased susceptibility to blood clots. All that is definitively known is that in the days preceding his death he had been suffering from symptoms of pneumonia.

The rigorous lifestyle a professional poker player must endure certainly couldn’t have helped. “When we play poker and we play these long hours, we really do run our bodies down,” said Barry Greenstein. “I know when I played in the smoke-filled rooms, as Chip did also, a lot of times I would say to myself, I wonder how much this is cutting out of my life? Over the last couple years, I’ve probably lost a few years. And with staying up a day or two, that has to take its toll too.”

Provide For Your Family

The third aspect of Reese’s “Object Of The Game” philosophy was the easiest for him to accomplish. He always considered the happiness of his son Casey, his daughter Taylor, and his stepdaughter Britteny first, not simply by taking care of them financially but emotionally as well.

“Usually when you think of poker players, you think of people who go on the road and don’t spend enough time with their children,” said Greenstein. “Chip was just the other way around. He always put his children first. It didn’t matter what the situation was. If there was something to see that his kids were doing, that’s where Chip was.”

Reese essentially scheduled his entire career around the lives of his children. One of the reasons he played in so few tournaments during the ’80s and ’90s is that poker tournaments demand so much time, time he preferred to spend at home with his kids.

“Family was always a priority with Chip,” said Sexton. “If his son had a baseball game, he would never miss that. It wouldn’t make a difference what he was losing in a poker game.” In fact, according to one of the many legendary stories about his life, Reese was once down $700,000 in a cash game when he left to watch one of Casey’s Little League games.

Reese resumed playing major tournaments only after his children asked him to so they could watch him on television. He did it for them and no other reason. He had very little interest in acquiring fame. “There’s a piece of you that wants having everyone running up to you and asking for your autograph,” he once said before quickly adding, “It doesn’t really mean anything at the end of the day. You know what they say about fame and everyone knowing you: It lasts for 15 minutes.”

Even though his peers continually acknowledged his greatness at the poker table, the general public didn’t hear about it until he won the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event at the 2006 World Series of Poker. Winning what many players consider the “new world championship” validated what they already believed, that he was the best all-around poker player in the world. Harrah’s recently announced that in addition to the usual gold bracelet, future winners of this event will receive a trophy named after Chip Reese.

While the first two aspects of Reese’s Object Of The Game philosophy were emphasized during his life, it was the third one that was underscored the most after his death. “I’m sure at his funeral the word ‘children’ and the word ‘kids’ are going to be said hundreds of times because he was such a devoted family man,” predicted Greenstein, and he was right.

The Top Dog

Reese’s funeral clarified what so many already knew: He was one of the happiest guys in the world. In nearly every photograph shown to the standing-room-only audience, he was smiling. “I knew him for 35 years,” Brunson said before a crowd that included Steve Wynn, Lyle Berman, Steve Lipscomb, Jeffrey Pollack, Jack Binion, Mike Sexton, Nolan Dalla, and Bobby Baldwin. “I never saw him get mad or raise his voice. He had the most even disposition of anyone I’ve ever met.”

Brunson went on to say that Reese was “unquestionably the greatest game player of all-time,” an assertion that’s hard to argue with. When he was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1991 at the age of 40, Reese became the youngest player so honored.

Greenstein agreed with Brunson. “I think if you polled his peers, he became the greatest player in poker,” he said. “I think that’s where they’d put him. You know it’s obviously between him and Doyle. Doyle’s obviously more known and done more things in the tournament sector, but when it comes to the cash games, Chip was the top dog for over 30 years.”

Perhaps the best answer to the question of who was best came from Reese himself. In what very well might have been the last interview he ever gave, ALL IN’s Katie Lindsay asked Reese just a week prior to his death about what it takes to become a poker legend.

“I think you have to be in the arena doing battle over a long period of time,” he answered. “Doyle probably said it best when a reporter asked Doyle about who the best young players are in poker, and you know what Doyle’s answer was? He said, ‘Ask me in 20 years who the best players are.’ This is a business that you don’t really find out overnight who the best player is.”

Later in the same interview, he added, “Nobody plays perfect every day, but it’s who can consistently do the job every single day and who can manage the adversity when the adversity happens. You can take the top 50 poker players in the world, and how they do is not going to be determined by how they are doing when they are catching good cards, it is going to be determined by what they are doing when they are catching bad cards.

“That’s what poker really is about,” he continued. “It’s not about who plays the best cards, it’s about how you handle yourself and how you perform under pressure when things are going badly.”

Storms Reback is a freelance writer from Austin, Texas, and the co-author of All In: The (Almost) Entirely True History Of The World Series Of Poker.