Weekend in Vegas Led to Career in Poker

Author: Simon Dexter

David ‘Chip’ Reese, who died at the age of just 56 last week, was hailed by no less a figure than Doyle Brunson as “the best poker player who ever lived” and given his absolute command of every variant of the game, it was a difficult conclusion with which to argue. Aged just 40, Reese became the youngest-ever player to be inducted into the WSOP Poker Hall of Fame.

In total, he won three WSOP bracelets, the first of which came in 1978, but played in far fewer tournaments than the majority of professionals, preferring high-stakes cash games, usually for seven-figure sums. Indeed, he was so busy winning these sizable cash games that he didn’t play in the WSOP for a decade: “Had I known that the bracelets were going to become so important, I would have played in a lot more tournaments,” he said in Vegas last year.

That was following perhaps Reese’s best-known WSOP victory when he emerged victorious in the HORSE event, collected .78 million in the process. The game lasted three days and when asked how he planned to celebrate, Reese replied “by sleeping”.

Those who are firm believers in fate will enjoy the tale of how Reese was to become an accomplished poker player.

He studied Economics at Dartmouth College where he was a decent player and intended studying Law at Stanford Business School after he graduated. En route to Stanford to start his course, he stopped to spend a weekend in Las Vegas. Here, he turned 0 into ,000 after winning a tournament; by the time his Law course was due to start, he was up by more than 0,000 and had his possessions redirected from Stanford to Vegas where he subsequently settled.

Displaying a fantastic penchant for understatement, he once said that “law doesn’t have the same monetary incentive as poker”, something which Reese appreciated more than most.