One of a Kind
Atria, 2005
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Stuey Ungar, the son of a Lower East Side bookie, grew up in a New York of the 1950s and ’60s that was straight out of Damon Runyon. By his early teens, he had dropped out of high school and was spending most of his time in the city’s underground card rooms. So prodigious was his talent for playing gin rummy that he soon found himself bankrolled by members of the Genovese crime family. After thrashing every top gin player on the East Coast, he was forced to broaden his horizons–traveling around the country to find opponents and also learning other card games, including poker.
At twenty-one, he moved to Las Vegas for good and quickly found mentors in poker legends such as Jack “Treetops” Straus, “Amarillo Slim” Preston, Doyle Brunson, and Chip Reese, who embraced the skinny five-foot-five kid with the Rimbaud aura. Soon enough, Ungar was playing in the biggest games at the famous Dunes poker room, learning the finer points of the game at incredible speed.
In 1980, competing in his second tournament ever and playing a game–no-limit Texas Hold’em–he’d just learned, he shocked the poker universe by winning the World Series of Poker. He would go on to win the event a record three times. In One of a Kind, authors Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson tell the startling tale of a man who managed to win millions of dollars and live the highest of high-roller lives without ever quite understanding or respecting the value of money. This intimate, authorized biography illuminates the dark genius of poker’s most charismatic and mysterious star, who could ruthlessly peer into and read other men’s souls but seemed baffled and powerless when confronted with his own.
“A fascinating, cautionary tale.” — Chicago Tribune
“Reader beware the seductive blue flame. To illuminate the triumphant yet scorchingly hideous forty-five years Stuey Ungar spent among us, Dalla and Alson have produced an acetylene torch of a book. There was no other way to write a story like this. One of a Kind is a lesson in no-limit hold’em as well as a terrifying pleasure.” — James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street
“A standout among this year’s bumper crop of poker books.” — New York