The Art of the Deal by Dr. Jerry Buss
The Art of the Deal by Dr. Jerry Buss
Poker players are very, very competitive, I rank them right up there with the top athletes, to tell you the truth. You get in the Daniel Negreanus and Ted Forrests and Chris Fergusons and the Brunsons and the Chans and of course Barry Greenstein. Boy, these people are competitive. They will lay it right out there on the line. When you see some of these athletes, where they go as fast as humanly possible and go up in the air knowing that they could get destroyed by a block of some sort, they put it all out there every time. Well, that's they way poker players are. How many times do you see them make these huge bets where somebody could easily have them beat? The competitive levels are certainly very similar. The conditioning is quite a bit different.
In California in the 1960s, there was a proliferation of casinos. Walking into the Bicycle and Commerce and seeing the enormous number of tables, you never would have seen that before. Of course, the whole concept of tournaments with $1 million in prize money outside the World Series was unheard of.
I think 20-25 years ago was kind of the first poker boom. That's when the World Series Started, and that's when some of the new casinos were built. That's about the time I came in.
Probably the person I've been playing with longest is Johnny Chan. Johnny was always just really very nice to me. He knew I was an amateur and that I couldn't play every day. One time in 1987, we were playing a game of poker and I said to Johnny, "You going, to play in the World Series?" He said yeah. I said, well, here's a $100 chip. Let me buy one percent of you." He said Ok. I said, "If I get to the championship, I'll give you some tickets to the Lakers' championship game." Of course, as history would have it, Johnny Chan won the World Series and he gave me I think $10,000 from my return there. Of course, I gave him some tickets and the Lakers won the world championship. The next year, we said, "Well, we better do that again, that was pretty lucky." So we did it and that was the year he won back to back in the World Series and the Lakers won back-to-back championship here in L.A. We tried it a third time, but we both came in second. One of these days, if I catch him in the right mood, I'm going to buy another percent of him because I sure would like to win another championship.
I used to play with my mother. She love five-card stud and we used to play for Hershey bars when I was six. I got to be pretty good, because if I didn't win she'd just eat the candy bar right then and there. I guess it was one of those life lessons.
To be approaching a really high quality of poker, you have to play 3 to 5 times a week. It's like anything else, golf, Ping-Pong, archery, swimming. I mean, if you're going to compete you have to compete all the time to keep those edges sharp. I just don't have that kind of time.
It wasn't in a tournament, but I was playing in a ring game with probably seven of the best players in the world. I had an early flush. You could tell from the way everybody was betting that they were on some big draws. After the turn, you could hear at least two of them had made their hand and one of them was probably still on the draw. The final card gave somebody an Ace high flush and there were two full houses out. I hit a straight flush on that last card, and that was against Johnny Chan, Chip Reese, and Phil Hellmuth. I'm not sure they remember that game but I certainly do.