Article

The Lone Star

Welcome home honey – how did you do? Inquires Doyle Brunson's wife as he walks in the door. "Not bad," he replies, hanging up his Stetson. "Broke even." Despite having scooped countless millions of dollars at the felt, poker legend Brunson has been "breaking even" for 50 years – he simply refuses to talk about wins or losses at home.

Brunson was the first player to earn $1 million in poker tournaments. He's won ten World Series of Poker bracelets in the course of his career, and is tied with Johnny Chan and Phil Hellmuth for the record. He is also one of only four players to have won consecutive main events at the World Series of Poker – in 1976 and 1977. It all makes the title of Doyle's classic book "Super System: How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker" seem a little quaint, especially when you consider that in 2004 and 2005 he won more than $2 million in tournaments alone. There's no dispute that every poker player today owes a debt to Doyle for helping spark the poker revolution.

A YOUNG MIND

Aged 73, Doyle still plays every day. While many of his original contemporaries from those Texas games have retired, Doyle is still going strong. "I see Puggy, but I don't see Slim that much. They're both a few years older than I am, and they've both kind of retired and live a lot more sedentary lives than I do. I'm still going at it strong as ever – maybe stronger."

Doesn't he ever get bored of poker? The great man has said he'll quit when he quits winning, but has he any idea when that might be? "I still win more often than I lose. I've kept an active mind. Through the years I've never stopped doing things, thinking about things, and I still think young. I don't think old" says Doyle.

Proof of this is the time not so long ago when Doyle used his quick wits to foil some robbers who met him at his door. "We were coming home one night to my house and when we got to the front door there were two bandits dressed up and they were going to rob us. I faked a heart attack right on the spot. I remembered Titanic Thompson used to do that when he was being robbed. Only he carried a gun in a shoulder holster. When grabbing for his heart, he would come out with his gun blasting away. Anyway, when I started falling to the ground, the bandits got scared and ran off."

Doyle certainly no stranger to thinking on his feet. Even very early in his poker career, he would sit for hours, dealing himself countless hands to calculate poker's odds in the days before people had software to do it – cracking the math at a time when their opponents believed it was purely a game of guts and psychology. In addition, robberies were a constant hazard. He once watched helpless as a fellow player's head was shot off – literally.

TEXAS INTUITION

Doyle once said that he could play poker with a table full of players and not look at his hole cards. His theory was that, so long as they didn't know that he hadn't looked at his cards, he could outplay most of his opponents and still win. This theory was put to the test at the World Poker Tour Championship event at Bellagio, when he bust out holding Q-8 – a hand that surprised many.

"This guy makes a 60,000 raise before the flop – it was just a token raise to me, so I bet 500,000 more and moved all-in because I thought I could win the pot right there" says Doyle. "Well, the guy called me down with two Jacks." But Brunson is unrepentant. "It wouldn't have made a difference what I had. My two cards didn't matter. It was the situation."

There's talk in the Brunson camp of an autobiography detailing his incredible life playing in those early Texas games and meeting some extraordinary characters. But Doyle says it's on the "back burner". He's equally reluctant to give in to requests to make a film of his life. Scripts have been drawn up, but so far he hasn't green-lighted any. "I'm as famous as I want to get," says Doyle. "If I was 40 years old, it would be nice. But now I'm 73. What do I need this for?"