It’ll take me awhile to fully get over and accept a poker world without David “Chip” Reese. I’ve only been around him twice, and never formally met him, but he embodied everything a poker player should be. He was unflappable by bad luck and life-changing stakes. He played every game brilliantly, especially 7-card Stud (his chapter in the original Super/System was so comprehensive and so good that Doyle Brunson didn’t feel the need to cover the game in Super/System 2), and was one of the driving forces making the “Big Game” at the Mirage, and later Bellagio, a mix of all games rather than high-limit Hold’em or Stud. Reese was also a model of a gentleman gambler, super-competitive but polite and charming with everyone after the game was done.

What people forget about Chip Reese is how difficult the trail he blazed into Las Vegas must have been. In the early 70s, Las Vegas was populated by hustlers, con artists and Texas road gamblers. High-stakes poker was the domain of a few men who had been on the inside of that “industry” for a decade or longer. So when Reese and Ohio friend Danny Robison tried to make their mark, I’m sure every attempt to fraud, cheat, swindle and shut them out was thrown their way. Reese not only survived, but thrived and propsered, raising a family and establishing himself as the best player anyone had ever seen.

If one considers poker a mountain, where good players from millions of home games across the world meet in local casinos, and those winners take their shots, and those winners take theirs, and so on and so on until you reach the stratosphere of super-high stakes and super-brilliant players…Chip Reese was the summit. The game is better off in every way that he chose to play it.