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Texas Dolly' shows his hand


Doyle Brunson, who this weeks joins The Sunday Telegraph as our poker columnist, once gambled away $6 million in a month. 'When you've been through what I have,' he says, 'you're not going to sweat over losing a pot'. Interview by Matthew Norman

Perched on a stool at the bar of his hotel suite, a crutch at his side, a deceptively fragile-looking old gent removes his 10-gallon hat and smiles wearily. "Well, I am kinda getting used to all the fuss," he says in a gentle Texan burr. "It's been going on a while now." I'd asked if he finds it weird to have become a figure of such Hollywood-style veneration that one of the three PR people who ushered me into his presence needed a special key to activate the lift. "But yeah, the extent of it does still surprise me."

Doyle Brunson: a true icon

I bet it does. Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson's progress from dodging bullets in the back-room bars of the South to dodging questions in a 39th-floor mega-suite at the Rio Hotel, Las Vegas - the venue for the recently concluded World Series of Poker - must take some believing. "Yeah, it's been quite a journey," says the man known to the game as The Living Legend.

Whether or not Doyle Brunson is the greatest poker player who ever lived, he is indisputably its one true icon. He is more than a historian of the game's ascent from seedy dives to the peak of the FTSE 100: he is the history of poker personified.

Half a century ago, aged 21, he quit his salesman's job to play poker - a game he had picked up, like so many Southerners, as a small boy, and from which he could earn more in three hours than he made in a month selling business machines. With friends, he toured the saloons of the Deep South, trouncing rednecks at seven-card stud and five-card draw, and taking a chance on being pistol-whipped for his winnings on his way back to the car.

This very day, it later emerges, he has launched a bid for the World Poker Tour (WPT), a highly successful, globally televised series of poker tournaments. He is willing to pay $700 million. Quite a journey indeed.

Not that Brunson reveals his business hand to me. The man who plays million-dollar pots with no effect on his heart rate is hardly the man to betray an investment move. When I mention his Decca-and-The-Beatles decision not to invest in the WPT on its formation, no flicker interrupts the well-practised passivity of his features.

The WPT bid is far from the only thing keeping him busy just now. Besides his poker website, doylesroom.com, and the regular job fleecing all comers at the tables - not to mention starting his column in The Sunday Telegraph - Brunson recently published his long-awaited update of Super/System, the 1977 instruction manual and poker bible that launched a thousand pro careers and a million self-deluding fantasies for keen but useless amateurs like myself. It is a marvellous book, translating complex theory into beautifully concise and readable English. "I've always been able to express myself better writing than speaking," he says.

Brunson's sixth book, his autobiography, comes out in October, and it should be what this good ol' boy might call, if he weren't far too modest, one helluva read. Born into poverty on a Texan farm shortly after the Great Depression, he was a star college athlete - a potential four-minute miler, no less - when his right leg was crushed in an accident. Hence the crutch. At 28, surgeons cut him open to find his body riddled with malignancies. "I was a big dog," he says, using the poker shorthand for underdog, "to live four months." Yet weeks later he was entirely free of cancer. His doctors were stupefied.


"Spontaneous remission, they call it," says Brunson. "Why and how, I don't know, but somethin' miraculous happened." Soon after that, his wife Louise developed uterine cancer and, as she was due to go into theatre, the tumour vanished. In 1975, their daughter Doyla was diagnosed with a crippling spinal disorder. Louise organised a marathon prayer session and within three months Doyla's spine had corrected itself - only the third such case, Doyle says, known to US medical history at the time.

This was the last of the medical miracles, sadly, and when Doyla died at 18 from a heart valve problem, her father turned to religion. "I never took no notice until my daughter died. I was so devastated, it was a year before I could play poker again. I explored all the eastern religions, but none of them made any sense to me. So I'm a Christian. I don't go to church as much I should, but I do have faith."

I wonder whether all this horror was the catalyst for his genius with cards. "Maybe so. All of that puts everything else into perspective, and it was kinda liberating for my poker. See, you cannot be afraid to lose your chips. You have to be aggressive the whole time."

But isn't that macho aggression to the point of psychosis? Is it why women tend not to be quite as good as men? "I don't know about psychosis, but actually some women are just as good. Look at Jennifer Harman," he says, of a petite blonde he cites as the best of her gender. "For five years she was with my son Todd" - also a world-class player - "so she's like a daughter to me. I love her dearly. But at the poker table, she is just ruthless. I mean, she'd drink your blood to win a pot. In saying that, I'd do the same to her. I'd drill the gold fillings right out of her teeth if I could."

Apart from the dental and vampirical ambitions, and the ungodly gifts for maths and psychology, what are the secrets? "There are none. It's all about timing and situation. But one thing's for sure. You can't be folding ace, king of hearts, like you did yesterday, and expect to win." I have been boring him with my own brief appearance in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) main event, from which he, too, was to depart the next day, to a standing ovation.

"You gotta be fearless about losing your chips. And when you've been through all I've been through, you're not going to sweat over losing a pot, however big. All I know is, once I got over the cancer, it all kinda clicked into place, and I went on the biggest winning streak of my life."

A year ago, following less gruesome surgery, Brunson went on the exact opposite. "I lost $6 million in a month," he says, with all the emotion you or I might expend on losing a tenner on the Grand National. "I'd just had gastric bypass surgery to get my weight down. They do this laparoscopy, and tie up your stomach so you can't eat as much. I'm down to 255lbs now. Before, I was 400." Good God, that's nearly 30 stone. "Yeah, I was big. I reckon the procedure saved my life. But I didn't give myself time to recover. In the end, I went to my place in Montana by the lake, rested up a couple of weeks, thought about the hands I'd lost. And when I came back I began to recover."


And what a recovery. A while ago, this bashful beast of the baize beat 666 rivals to a WPT title, earning more than $1 million, and then won his tenth World Series bracelet (winners of WSOP events receive a piece of majestically vulgar gold jewellery). This was an astonishing achievement, given the massive field and his age, and equalled the all-time record for World Series wins set days earlier by his fellow two-time world champ, Johnny Chan.

"Winning those two titles was a great relief, 'cause the question in my mind was, am I losing it? I thought, I'm 71, maybe I can't play any more. I don't see any other 71-year-olds out there."

I don't know if you read the novels of Philip Roth, I say, whose writing seems to get better the deeper he moves into his seventies - unlike most of his rivals. "Yeah, it's that way with poker players too. Usually when they hit 50, they start declining. But since the gastric bypass, I feel like I'm 30 again. I feel fantastic, except for my leg. And they say they can fix that, but I just don't have the time."

Why ever not? "Most days, when the right people are in town, I play 16 hours." You're kidding. Without wishing to be rude, is this an addictive illness? "I reckon most top pros are compulsive gamblers, yeah. It's just that we've found a way to win. But a lot of players win big and blow it all on craps or sports betting. I used to have bad habits myself. You do get hooked on the action. But the real motivation for me is the money. That's the reason for my internet site. There's a real big strawberry out there. And anyway, what am I gonna do? Sit in a rocking chair drinking martinis by the pool until I die?"

Even so, 16 hours a day does seem crazy. But at least it explains why poker pros don't seem to know what's going on in the rest of the world. I mention the luminescent lack of interest here in Vegas in the London bombings. "I'm afraid that's true. Friend of mine, right in the middle of Desert Storm, comes to me," he chuckles, "and says, 'Doyle, who's Saddam Hussein?' " Now you are kidding. "No I'm not. Same guy once asked me what language they speak in England." Name him. "Dewey Tomko," says Brunson, naming a well-regarded pro. I take an emergency gulp on my octuple scotch and start spluttering. But … but … but … Dewey Tomko … didn't he used to be a teacher?

"That's right. He taught kindergarten. But Dewey don't believe in watching television or reading newspapers. He says there's nothing but bad news there. He once asked me if the Isle of Man was near water. Another top player, name of McCorkindale, he didn't know what Vietnam was. Right in the middle of the Vietnam war. People here are so isolated, it's terrible. But I guess it shows the dedication, the obsessiveness."

A PR chap flashes the five-fingered gesture warning of five minutes to wind up. Do you not find all this Hollywood stuff a little wearing, I ask? "To be honest, I do. It is tiring. And the fame's a double-edged sword. Whenever I do make a play at the table, there's three guys quoting from my book about what I just did. Verbatim. It's flattering, and yet it's aggravating. If I could, I'd go back to being an anonymous poker player, 'cause that's the best life there is. It's just that the plum's so big right now. And poker's gonna get bigger yet."

With the strawberries and plums falling on the winning line of the jackpot fruit machine that is modern poker, be sure that as you read this, Texas Dolly will be hobbling away from a table, a million bucks down, or more likely up, on the game leg he is too busy to have fixed, to head home to a breakfast rolling-pin as dawn breaks above the Vegas smog.

"Sure, Louise screams at me," says Doyle Brunson, replacing the cowboy hat and offering his hand. "But this is what I do. It's what I've always done. And if I drop dead at the table in the middle of a monster pot, hell, I'll die a happy man."
# Doyle Brunson's High Stakes Poker - The Games Page