Andy Beal vs. The Corporation: Poker’s Biggest Game

In February 2006, a Texas banker flew to Las Vegas, lost about $3 million to a team of poker professionals in five days, and went home after a spokesman announced that he was finished with poker. Less than a week later he was back at the Wynn, and within days he had won roughly $10 million. Then a new opponent sat down across from him, and the money went the other way. The banker was Andy Beal, the team was known as The Corporation, and the heads-up limit hold’em games between them are among the most talked-about in poker history.

This is the documented story of those games: who Beal was, how the pros organized against him, what the biggest session looked like, why the biggest planned showdown never happened, and how the February 2006 matches ended. Reporters and players do not always agree on the numbers, so this article says so wherever the published accounts differ.

Who Is Andy Beal?

Andy Beal is a Texas banker with a taste for mathematics, according to D Magazine, which profiled him in December 2004. He moved to Dallas in 1979 after leaving Baylor University, worked in real estate and in 1988 launched Beal Bank with $3 million, buying defaulted loans from failing savings-and-loan institutions. D Magazine described the bank as the largest privately held lender in Dallas.

His math hobby produced Beal’s Conjecture, which he devised in 1993 while looking for a simpler proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem and for which he staked a $100,000 prize through the American Mathematical Society, D Magazine reports. In 1997 he put $200 million of his own money into Beal Aerospace, a private rocket company, and closed it in October 2000, saying he threw in the towel when Congress and NASA targeted $10 billion to fund competing launch systems.

Soon after the rocket company shut down, Beal went to Las Vegas to try poker, D Magazine reports. He started at the $80/$160 limit tables at the Bellagio, moved up to $400/$800, and then asked whether anyone would play for far more. His condition was that he would play only heads-up, meaning one opponent at a time.

How The Corporation Took Shape

No single professional could risk a personal bankroll against Beal, according to D Magazine, so the pros pooled their money, along with money from investors, and called the group The Corporation. Besides Doyle Brunson, the team included 16 of the best players in the world, D Magazine says, among them Johnny Chan, Chip Reese, Jennifer Harman, Howard Lederer, Chau Giang, Gus Hansen and Phil Ivey.

Beal traveled to Las Vegas more than a dozen times, according to Card Player’s James McManus, who wrote that by 2004 Beal had come to the pros’ home court that often. D Magazine reports that whenever Beal was in town, a crowd would gather around the Bellagio’s highest-stakes table to watch two players with towering stacks of chips, each chip worth $10,000. In most sessions the Corporation won a few million dollars, D Magazine says, though it adds that exactly who won how much is in dispute.

The matches were a string of separate sessions, not one tournament. McManus counts dozens of sessions over three and a half years, with players taking turns against Beal in shifts. Limit hold’em is the format in which every bet and raise has a fixed size, so a session’s result is usually measured in the number of bets won or lost, and one long run of cards can decide a day.

The Biggest Game: May 2004

The largest game came in May 2004 at $100,000/$200,000, according to D Magazine. It says Beal sat in a white suit and bulky black headphones for up to 14 hours a day over four days, took on the pros in shifts, and finally walked away because he had to return to Dallas for his twin daughters’ camping trip, finishing about $10 million ahead.

Beal later described the same game differently. In an open letter published in Card Player, he wrote that he had won more than $10 million in the largest game ever played, on May 12 and 13, 2004, which would make it a two-day game rather than four. The total is the same in both accounts, but the length is not, and neither source can settle it alone.

Beal explained his motive in his own letters. He wrote that his interest had always been the intellectual challenge of competing with the best, in games where the amount bet mattered to the people involved. He also conceded that he was an overall net loser in the Bellagio games, while arguing that stories about the size of his losses had been exaggerated like fishermen’s tales.

Open Letters, a $40 Million Offer and No Game

After June 2004, negotiating the next match became a game of its own, McManus writes. Beal said he had retired from serious poker but invited the pros to one final session in Dallas, and the pros declined. McManus says they had already added millions to their bankrolls, and he describes the reasoning as an eight-figure swing against only a marginal skill edge.

In September 2004 Beal published an open letter in Card Player asking the pros to “put up or shut up” about their professional play. He proposed that they come to Dallas and play him four hours a day until one side ran out of money, with him choosing his opponents from a slate of at least six of their players, according to McManus.

Doyle Brunson answered in the next issue with a counteroffer: each side would post a $40 million bankroll, they would play $30,000-$60,000 limits that could rise to $50,000-$100,000 if either side lost half its money, the pros would choose who played and when, and they preferred Las Vegas. Gabe Kaplan joked that a $100 million showdown had become “an essay-writing contest,” McManus reports.

The giant freezeout never took place. Beal answered with a modified acceptance, but McManus says that after all the haggling over an $80 million freezeout, the parties agreed to play straight heads-up poker at $50,000-$100,000. The next sessions were the February 2006 matches at the Wynn.

The February 2006 Matches at the Wynn

Beal arrived at the newly opened Wynn Las Vegas on February 1, 2006, and Card Player’s Lisa Wheeler reported that the high-limit area was roped off for the match. Over five days he faced Todd Brunson, Jennifer Harman, David Grey and Ted Forrest and ended about $3 million down by Wheeler’s count, or $3.2 million by McManus’s, with Forrest’s win on February 3 accounting for most of it.

Then a spokesman announced that Beal was finished with poker. Craig Singer, who represents Beal, said he was done with poker for good, Wheeler reports, and Todd Brunson answered on a poker forum that Beal had made such claims before. Beal flew back to Las Vegas on Saturday, February 11. According to McManus, he won $4.9 million from Harman on February 12, $1.2 million from Todd Brunson on the 13th and $3.9 million from Forrest over the next two days, a profit of about $10 million.

The Corporation answered with Phil Ivey. After the pros’ bankroll for the match was exhausted, Beal returned to the Wynn on Monday, February 20, and met Ivey from Tuesday to Thursday, according to Wheeler. They began at $30,000-$60,000 and agreed on the last day to raise the limits to $50,000-$100,000. McManus’s account has Ivey raising almost every time he held the button, and Beal fighting back with check-raises when he held decent cards.

Ivey’s lead grew over the three days. McManus writes that Ivey was up about $1.96 million after the first night and $3.125 million partway through the second day, and finished $9.8 million ahead. McManus says Beal ended his 12-day visit down $8.1 million and that Beal blamed himself, saying that he had stayed too long and that his biggest mistake was coming to Las Vegas at all when he could have made the pros come to Dallas.

Why the Beal Games Still Matter

The games showed how professionals handle variance. The Corporation pooled bankrolls and investor money so that no single member faced a ruinous swing, which is why McManus describes the team as the most talented group of poker players ever assembled. The same logic explains why they would not travel to Dallas for a single giant freezeout.

They also produced a rare public record of private poker. Michael Craig, the author of The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King, sat in on the 2006 sessions, according to Card Player, and Beal wrote in an open letter that he had read a draft of the book. Card Player’s own coverage, with open letters from both sides, gave readers a day-by-day view of games that normally happen out of sight.

Many of the pros involved remain familiar names to poker fans, and the games also revealed Beal’s own character. McManus quotes Beal, asked whether he had really retired, as saying “You just don’t keep climbing Mount Everest,” a line that sums up how unpredictable his plans were.

The Other Side: Disputed Numbers and Real Risk

The published numbers do not line up. McManus wrote that the pros were between $20 million and $26 million ahead after three and a half years, while D Magazine quoted Todd Brunson telling the New York Daily News that he alone had beaten Beal for $20.5 million. Beal replied that his losses were exaggerated and that he had won the biggest game. The February 2006 figures differ too: McManus gives Ivey $9.8 million, while Card Player’s news report put the figure at $16.6 million.

Regulators and friends worried. McManus reports that the head of the Texas Savings and Loan Department raised concerns with a Beal Bank official about public perceptions of the boss’s poker habit, and that some of Beal’s friends hoped he would stay retired.

These were not typical stakes. The games involved a banker whom D Magazine said in 2004 was worth more than a billion dollars, and a team backed by pooled bankrolls. Nothing in the record suggests that poker is a dependable income, and big wins and losses at this level are the exception. The legality of real-money poker varies by state and venue, and D Magazine said private games without a house cut were legal in Texas, while McManus quotes Todd Brunson calling poker illegal there, so none of it is a general rule.

Myths About the Beal Games

Myth: Beal simply lost his money to the pros. The record shows swings both ways. D Magazine reports a $10 million win for Beal in May 2004, and McManus reports a $10 million run in February 2006 before Ivey beat him.

Myth: The $40 million freezeout settled it. It was proposed and negotiated but never played in that form, according to McManus. The February 2006 sessions were straight heads-up games at $50,000-$100,000.

Myth: Everyone agrees how much Ivey won. They do not. McManus gives $9.8 million and Card Player’s news report gives $16.6 million, so any single figure should be treated as a reported number.

Keep Reading

To meet the player who ended the 2006 series, read Phil Ivey: Career, Bracelets and Legacy. For the Corporation’s elder statesman, see Doyle Brunson: Career, Titles and Legacy of Texas Dolly.

Sources & References

• Card Player — Andy Beal vs. The Corporation (Lisa Wheeler, February 18, 2006)
• Card Player — Phil Ivey vs. Andy Beal: Out $16.6 Million, Beal Heads Home (February 23, 2006)
• Card Player — History of Poker: The Andy Game, Part II (James McManus, December 2008)
• D Magazine — RISK: The Biggest Game Ever (Dan Michalski, December 2004)