Transcript
Introduction
"One of the players had just returned from the Bellagio. In the poker room, he saw the son of a poker world champion and some Texas banker playing heads-up Texas Hold’em with over $15 million on the table. The amount simply would not register in my mind. I remembered from my earlier poker days stories about Doyle Brunson and Puggy Pearson playing rounds of golf for more money than Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino made in a year. I overheard pros describing their winnings in inches of $100 bills. But $15 million on the table? This much cash would weigh over 250 pounds. Don't ask how I know this. Suffice to say that people who weigh bundles of $100 bills keep a low profile. It just seemed like more money than even a phenomenal poker player could accumulate, much less risk in one game."
"The banker's place in the game didn't make sense at all. 'But he's a billionaire,' another player told me when I tried writing this off as urban legend. Even if the banker could throw around that kind of money, why would he?" "That curiosity started me on the road to the richest poker game of all time and took me inside the world of high-stakes poker. For most of a year, I learned about the unusual and impressive skills that separate the best players from the rest of the field. The enormity of their successes and failures and their shortcomings, which almost always stem from their strengths."
"I also had the privilege of witnessing the problem-solving skills of that Texas banker, Andy Beal. Beal, one of the great entrepreneurial minds of the information age, had accumulated great wealth, yet managed to remain almost completely anonymous. In fact, the Bellagio allowed him to register under the name anonymous."