The money came and went, won at the card table-and the table action described here is excellent stuff-then lost at the track or ballpark. As mesmerizing as he was at the poker table, however, he was also a rough piece of work (as seen particularly through interview snippets with Dalla, originally his ghostwriter): rude, derisive, a poor winner and a worse loser, a man-child who had been insulated from the mundane tasks of everyday life, incapable of responsibility. By the time of his bar mitzvah, he was wired in and wired up: “What good was a fucking Treasury bond to me? Was I gonna be able to take that to a dice game? Give me the cash.” His genius was gin, but he made his fortune at poker, where he won the World Series of Poker three times. He was like a gladiator on the green felt, write gambling-journalists Dalla and Alson ( Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie, 1996) in this jumpy if dispiriting account. But he brought something special to his milieu: a natural card sense aided by a fantastic memory and mixed with a risk-taking persona. He was to the manner born: his father was a bookie and loan shark on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and young Ungar knew all about gambling long before the Lottery and OTB.
What began as a ghostwritten autobiography of the most feared tournament player in poker history became a biography by default when Stuey “The Kid” Ungar’s dope habit finally killed him.
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