great story...

stu ungar was the man. saw a big feature on him last year on espn, but here's something from this weekend's times:



IN Las Vegas terms, it's almost a rite of spring: a talented newcomer plants his elbows on the cash-green felt of a big-money table at the World Series of Poker. He gets on a roll, starts talking some trash, and inevitably, the murmurs start. "He's the next Stuey," somebody will say. "He's another Kid."

But anyone who has actually played against Stu Ungar will disagree.

"He'd kill these guys," said Bobby Baldwin, a champion of the late 70's, referring to the new generation of players who are expected to swell this year's World Series of Poker to more than 6,000 contestants for its main events, more than twice the number of contestants as last year's series, which drew about three times the number of the year before. "It wouldn't even be close."

Stu, or Stuey the Kid, Ungar was the swashbuckling enfant terrible of poker before it blew up into a mainstream obsession in the 1990's. The diminutive son of a Lower East Side bookmaker, he won his back-to-back World Series of Poker titles by the unheard of age of 27 and went on to win, and lose, $30 million by one estimate before his epic taste for excess left him dead, in a cheap Las Vegas motel on Nov. 22, 1998, at 45.