David ‘Chip’ Reese
1951-2007″>David ‘Chip’ Reese
1951-2007
David “Chip” Reese was, born in Dayton Ohio in 1951 and died in his sleep December 4, 2007. Widely regarded as one of the best poker players in the world and the youngest player inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, this profile was done by Phil Hevener a few years ago. Poker Player Newspaper is presenting it again, in honor of Reese’s memory. -Lou Krieger, Editor
Thirty years in Las Vegas has not altered David “Chip” Reese’s approach to the poker business. He still prefers the biggest cash games he can find, thank you very much. He’ll leave the book and Internet deals, the movie and TV possibilities to others. They’re just not his cup of tea.
Just point him toward the big games.
Reese has never won one of the major bracelets at the World Series of Poker (Editor’s Note: Since this interview was first published, Reese subsequently HAS won his tournament bracelet, in the 2006 H.O.R.S.E. tournament)- he once finished sixth in the WSOP’s main event-but he was one of the youngest people ever voted into the Poker Hall of Fame and he was invited to participate in both of the major made-for-TV poker events filmed this year: the “All-Stars of Poker” now running on FSN and ESPN’s “Tournament of hampions.”
The offers have been lobbed his way, but Reese likes to keep things simple and profitable . . . very profitable.
“What I am is a poker player,” he says. And few people do it better. Even the visitors to online websites, people who usually find it easy to trash some of the most respect names in poker, have trouble taking shots at Reese.
“Looks like the best cash money player in the world,” gushes one on-line visitor. “Chip Reese is a worldclass poker player as well as an incredibly nice human being,” says another.
The 53-year-old Dartmouth grad who stopped through Las Vegas in the summer of 1974, thinking he’d visit a friend, spend a few days here, hasn’t adjusted his focus since he discovering he had a certain winning instinct for this game called poker. He did collaborate on Doyle Brunson’s “Super System,” the how-to book for a generation of wannabe poker champs. But aside from such very occasional distractions, Reese would rather stick to playing poker.
He’ll leave his Las Vegas home for an occasional tournament, but his view says that cash games represent a far more efficient means of making money.
His cell phone rang one night recently and the nearly always upbeat Reese answered it with a tone that suggested he had nothing on his mind except that call. The caller explained his purpose and Reese, lapsing into an apologetic voice, says, “You suppose this could wait until maybe tomorrow morning? I’m playing four- and eightthousand right now.”
“Then you’d better get back to the game,” the caller said.
But are there any significant new ventures in his life these days?
“Nothing that I am really actively doing,” Reese says.
“I am working on a project but I can’t talk about it yet. You know, I’ve been offered some consulting things for TV, but, I’m really more of a poker player than I am someone who wants to get involved in a lot of other stuff . . . A lot of people are really taking advantage of the opportunities that have come their way as the consequence of personal success and the public’s appetite for poker-Internet sites, books, CDs and whatever else there is.”
Reese has given some thought to possible Internet deals, but he does not like the risks. “I still think there is some risk involved. And at this stage of my life . . .”
His voice trails off and he shrugs, as though he’s saying, I just don’t need it. “It’s still a bit of a gray area and I really don’t want to do anything that would be deemed illegal.”
As one of the best known and most respected of the high stakes pros does he still have people coming to town wanting to take him on at the poker table?
“There’s always going to be people like that. Those circumstances have always existed. I mean I’ve always been in the big game. The size of the big game has certainlygrown. Back in the 1970s, playing at limits of a thousand and two-thousand, that was a huge, huge game. Compare that with someone like Andy . . .”
A reference to Dallas banker and billionaire Andy Beal whose passion for heads-up Texas hold’em has led him to play hold’em in Las Vegas for ultra-high limits of a $100,000 and $200,000.
“What Andy’s done,” Reese says, “that’s a very rare thing, a really unusual situation, but certainly there are always going to be guys, smart guys who have a lot of money and they want to play. They want to learn a game and be good at it.”
Any sign that Beal is ready to accept the challenge of poker legend Doyle Brunson, who speaks for a group of Las Vegas gamblers that would combine resources to put up $40 million if Beal will agree to do the same?
The result would be what poker pro Howard Lederer terms, “The biggest poker game ever.”
Reese says, “I think there has been some talk. I think he (Beal) wants to play, and I think there is some negotiating going on, beginning to go on, what the structure would be and where they’d play.”
Reese hesitates for a moment, adding, “They’re gonna play. There will be a game somewhere in the near future. You can rest assured of that.”
Perhaps two casinos have at least briefly toyed with the possibility of turning such a game into a television event.
Not a bad idea, depending on the willingness of all involved to take TV poker to a new level.
Would this big game be in Las Vegas or perhaps somewhere in Texas?
“I’m not sure,” Reese says. “It just depends on how the negotiations turn out.”
How often does Reese play now?
“Ooooh, have to think about that for a moment; maybe a couple days a week, usually at the Bellagio or over at the Hustler club, you know with Larry (Flynt) and then every once in a while I’ll get on a plane and go to a tournament.”
Why not spend more time with tournaments?
“You know I’ve got a lot of other things going on in my life . . . To go on the tournament circuit it is really a high fluctuation. You know, good players do well in the tournaments, eventually, if they play in enough of them. It’s kind of like being a salesman knocking on doors. If you’re a good salesman you’re gonna do better than others, but if you’re not out there knocking on doors regularly nothing is going to happen.” He thinks about that, adding, “I only have so many hours in the day and I do a lot of other things now besides play poker.
My family takes up a lot of time. The fact is there’s a lot more money playing in the big games than there is running around chasing the tournament circuit.”
Reese is a long, long way down the winding road from that moment in 1974 when he hit Las Vegas for the first time with $400 in his pocket “just to visit a friend” and sat down to play $3-$6 hold’em. He won and he won. A $500 tournament at the Sahara got his attention, he entered that and won it as well, earning $60,000 in prize money.
It was enough to have Reese rethinking his priorities. “Instead of going to graduate school (at Stanford, where he would have studied law or business), I decided to hang out here and never left.
Life was just too much fun.”
Did he ever play another session of $3-$6 after those first few days?
“No,” he grins, “I pretty quickly moved up to $10-$20, played that for awhile and then graduated to $30-$60.”
He and his buddy worked as partners, splitting their bankroll and playing in shifts.
Which is about the time he had an epiphany . . . a head-on collision with opportunity, is what it was.
“I was playing $30-$60 one day at the Flamingo and looked over and saw this game with all black chips. It was Doyle (Brunson) and Johnny Moss and Puggy (Pearson) and some others . . . I was watching, they wouldn’t let me very near the table but they were playing fourand eight-hundred highlow split.”
Chuckling at this memory, he continued, “I kept watching. I thought they were playing horribly. I felt sure of myself because this was a game I had spent a lot of time playing in college.”
So Reese calls his friend and partner who was home sleeping after playing his shift of thirty-sixty.
“We had a bankroll then of maybe $50,000 andI talked him into taking $30,000 of that- more than half of all our money and putting it into this game-because it was clear these guys did not know what they were doing when it came to high-low split. I was a waaaaay better player. I had played it at Dartmouth every day because it is kind of an East Coast game and these guys there at the Flamingo were a bunch of Texans playing a game they didn’t really know.”
In that first day, the brash, young college kid won $66,000 playing against Brunson, Moss and the others who even then were Vegas icons. This was on a Thursday and before the weekend was over he had won more than $300,000.
There was no looking back after that. Reese remembers those early months in Las Vegas as a time when he was taking on a cast of poker players that included “… a lot of Damon Runyon characters. They had a lot of skills that people today do not have. A lot of today’s poker players are much more mathematical.
They don’t have as much of the gambling savvy that you saw with a lot of the old timers who didn’t have any of the dozens of books that are around now telling you how to play.”
Filed under: Poker News