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Stu Ungar - the Tortured Champion

Ungar, who was born in New York City and raised on the city's Lower East Side, became a professional gambler at age 14, a year after his father, who was a bookmaker and bar operator, had died.

Stu was an incredible gin rummy player. At age 10 in '63, he won his first gin rummy tournament in a Catskill Mountain Resort while vacationing with his parents. At age 14, he was regularly playing and beating the best players in New York. At 15 he dropped out of school when a well known bookie staked Stu to the $500 buy-in in a big gin rummy tournament. Stu won the $10,000 first prize without ever loosing a hand, a record still held in the poker rooms of New York City. A week later, after giving his parents $1,000, he lost the rest on horses at the Aqueduct racetrack. It was a sign of things to come.

Ungar moved to Miami where the juiciest Gin games were. He did well but his weakness for sports and track betting drained him of any success. In 1976 Stu reached Las Vegas, broke and just about beaten. Somehow he found the money to enter a $50,000 poker tournament. On the last two hands he forecast the losing player's cards - correctly. This bravado was another bad career move as it meant other players feared his skills. As a result, he could no longer find any games outside the poker tournaments.

It wasn't long before he decided to try his luck at blackjack. He'd cleaned up on poker tables from Nevada to New Jersey and the time was right to move on. One night at Caesars Palace he won $83,000 but the manager stopped the play. Stu retaliated by correctly forecasting the last 18 cards left in the single-deck shoe. That was the beginning of the end for single deck blackjack tables. They were removed from Caesars and later from other casinos, and Stu's picture was posted up in the security rooms of dozens of casinos. Result: Stu was banned for life.

His next feat was to bet any takers $10,000 that he could perform yet another memory miracle: he offered to count down the last two decks in a six-deck shoe! There were no takers. Then in January 1977 a former owner of Vegas World and designer of the Stratosphere Tower stepped into his life. Stu Ungar met Bob Stupak. The new taker offered Stu $100,000 to count down the last three decks, half-way through a six-deck shoe. If Stu lost he'd owe Bob $10,000.

Memories of this amazing feat still linger on today in Las Vegas. To the astonishment of onlookers, and Bob, Stu didn't miss a single call from a total of 156 cards. When Bob handed him a check for $100,000, it marked the beginning of a lasting friendship between them.

In 1980 at 24, Ungar entered his first world poker championship. He won and to silence the critics of his "fluke" he won the next year as well. He wasn't done with pure gambling though and he lost $900,000 in RAZZ game in an afternoon, $1m in a craps session and picked up $5m from Larry Flint (the porn king) over many heads-up sessions. Ultimately his fever for action took everything in the physical world and his drug addiction was close to taking his life.

By the 1997 WSOP tournament in Las Vegas, Ungar hadn't been in the frame for over 7 years. He was seen around the gambling Mecca playing in small games but was pretty much written off by the poker world. He didn't have the money to enter the Poker Championship event but an hour before play an anonymous benefactor produced the $10,000 entry. Four days later the greatest comeback in poker history had occurred and the record of three victories established. In all he won 10 major No limit Hold'em poker tournaments out of the 30 he entered!

Two months later he was broke again. Another year of oblivion and Stu was on the comeback trail again with his old friend Bob Stupak offering to cancel his debts and signing him up for commissioned card play. With $2000 of Stupak's money in his pocket (spending money) he checked into a cheap downtown hotel. Two days later he was dead. He left behind a 15 year old daughter.

He once said although he could conceive of a better poker player than himself, not in the next 50 years of the world would there be a better Gin player.

Nov 22nd, 1998 - Oasis Motel, 1731 S. Las Vegas Blvd - Stu Ungar found dead.

The Clark County Coroner's office on Monday ruled Ungar's death accidental based on the results of toxicology tests that came back from the lab Friday. A mixture of narcotics and pain killers triggered a heart condition that killed him. The drugs found in Ungar's system were cocaine, methadone and the pain-killer Percodan, Clark County Coroner Ron Flud said. No one drug by itself was enough to cause Ungar's death. "The cause is accidental death by coronary atherosclerosis". "The heart condition developed over a period of time. The attack was brought on by his life-style."

Coronary atherosclerosis occurs when not enough blood can be pumped through the heart muscle. It is not uncommon to find a mixture of cocaine, Percodan and methadone in an autopsy of a drug user. Percodan is often used to bring a person down from his cocaine high so he can sleep. Methadone is given to heroine addicts to get them off the drug. It is not known when Ungar, a three-time world poker champion, took the drugs that contributed to his death. Police investigating the scene said they found no drug paraphernalia at that location.

Kerry Packer (B. 1938)

A the beginning of the 21st Century Kerry Packer claimed position as the richest man in Australia and the worlds biggest casino gambler. He's the owner of the Channel Nine television network and has interests in Pay TV. He also owns 60 percent of all magazines sold in Australia including Belle, She, Wheels, HQ, Bulletin, Woman's Day and the Womens' Weekly.

It was the Women's Weekly which really started the Packer media empire. Set up by Kerry's father, Sir Frank Packer in 1933, the magazine was hugely successful and it allowed Sir Frank to expand his business beginning with newspapers like Sydney's Daily Telegraph. By most accounts Sir Frank was a hard worker and a hard father.

Kerry and his brother Clyde saw little of their father and when they did it was often to get a taste of Sir Frank's strict discipline. In a rare interview on radio in 1979 Kerry talked about his upbringing. "I mean I got a lot of hidings because that's the sort of person I was and the sort of person he was."

Kerry's young life was lonely and disrupted. He was sent to boarding school at the age of five, and just a year later caught a serious illness called polio myelitis or infantile paralysis. Today children are immunized against the virus but in the 1940s severe cases could kill or leave a child crippled. Young Kerry's case was severe and he spent nine months immobilized in an iron lung, an early version of a respirator, which helped him to breathe.

By the time he got back to boarding school, at the age of nine, he was way behind his class mates. Luckily his recovery from polio had been complete because it was his size and strength that helped him achieve in one area , sport. "My life was sport. I was academically stupid. My method of surviving through school and those sorts of things was sport."

Kerry finished school when he was 19 and went to work for his father's newspapers. He took over the business when Sir Frank died in 1974.

In 1977 when he couldn't get exclusive television rights to Sheffield and Test cricket he made up his own teams with the best players in the world and started World Series Cricket. If the Australian Cricket Board wanted the services of these players it would have to give Kerry the TV rights and , in 1979, after a long battle, he got his way.

In 1987 he sold his two Channel Nine TV stations to businessman Alan Bond for one billion dollars. It was a lot more than they were worth and the deal made Kerry Packer his first billion. Three years later, Bond was in financial trouble and Kerry bought the stations back for just 250 million dollars.

His greatest love is polo and he spends three months of every year in England playing the game and millions of dollars on horses, stables and players for his own team. In 1990 a heart attack while playing polo left him literally dead for six minutes until he was revived by ambulance officers. But once again his return to form has been spectacular.

Legendary Status

Mr Packer's legendary status as a high stakes gambler came to the fore when he took Las Vegas' MGM Grand for $26 million playing blackjack for $200,000 a hand, six hands at a time. It was this big hit and run style that actually got him barred from stuffy Vegas joints because they just couldn't take the action.

Mr Packer was also reported to have suffered the biggest losses ever sustained in the UK in September 1999, dropping ?11m ($16.5m) at Crockfords casino in London. However at that time such sums were only a tiny fraction of the wealth of the owner of Australia's Nine television network, estimated to be around $8bn.

More $20 million losses have been reported but there are also tales of incredible generosity, including a $100,000 tip to dealers and waitresses and loans to fellow gamblers whose repayment he refuses to accept.

Legend also has it that Mr Packer's grandfather put the family on the road to riches by buying a passage from Tasmania to the mainland on the proceeds of a bet on a horse.