The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time Book

In early 2001, a stranger from Texas started playing high-stakes poker at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. No ordinary novice, Andrew Beal owned one of the most profitable banks in Texas and relished challenges posed by hobbies such as advanced math theory and rocket science.

Within months, Beal locked the world's top professional poker players in combat. He played them "heads up," the pros combining their bankrolls and taking on the newcomer one at a time. Minimum table stakes: $1 million. Beal offered the pros the richest poker game ever played and even as he demonstrated this formidable skills, they hungered to take him on.

For three years, Beal ratcheted up the stakes, developed a world-class heads-up Texas hold 'em game, and devised unorthodox ways off cutting into the pros' advantage. On a few occasions, he left Las Vegas disgusted by his losses. On others, he threatened to win the combined playing bankroll of every high-stakes poker player in Las Vegas.

Even though the pros saw their edge slip to almost nonexistent, they continued to engage Beal at ever-higher stakes. The players' livelihoods and Beal's ambitions collided in May 2004 in a game where the bets started at $100,000 per card and the winner could carry away more than $20 million.

The Professor, The Banker, and The Suicide King opens the door to a world much imagined but never seen. With poker's surging popularity as a backdrop, its most able practitioners demonstrate the precariousness of their profession, where one wrong move, even at the pinnacle of their success, can pave the road to ruin. It is a world of outsized skills, egos, and ambitions.

Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of SHADOW DIVERS, said this book "plants the reader ringside for history's richest poker game, then won't let go until we know the hearts and minds of the world's greatest players, and the soul of the billionaire amateur who dared challenge them for everything they owned."

Publishers Weekly

The "professor" is Howard Lederer, a professional poker player whose rigorous analytical approach to the game earned him his nickname. The banker is Andy Beal, a multimillionaire obsessed with beating the world's best poker players at their game, limit Texas hold 'em, played for stratospheric stakes. The suicide king, a symbol of the aleatory nature of the endeavor, is the king of hearts, who holds his broadsword behind his head. It's a great mix, and Craig (The 5 Minute Investor) offers a knowledgeable and observant chronicle of the high-stakes games between Beal and the syndicate of professional players organized by the "Babe Ruth of poker," Doyle Brunson. The syndicate put up $10,000,000 to sit opposite Beal, trading $100,000 bets. Beal, for his part, took a mathematical approach, at one point running millions of computer simulations of various poker problems, in search of an edge against the pros, who rely on an uncanny intuition honed by thousands of hands. Craig includes enough details about the professionals to allow readers insight into their gambler personalities. Having interviewed many of the participants in this legendary poker battle, he describes it with an appropriate sense of awe, and readers will be awed as well. Agent, Eileen Cope. (June 2) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.