He was the first player to ever win more than a million bucks playing poker tournaments. He’s survived cancer (multiple times) and being held at gunpoint (again, multiple times). Then add to it sixty years of unbelievable stories from the very top of the poker and gambling world.īrunson’s a ten-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner.

That story alone could be the plot of a film or documentary. I tell you all this because this is just one of the many incredible stories from a life synonymous with poker that doesn’t involve poker at all. Brunson was healthy, rejuvenated, and soon back on the road dominating the southern poker rooms as part of the legendary Texas Rounders. Six months later, Louise gave birth to their daughter Pamela. “They said sometimes they see one or two cases of spontaneous remission,” Brunson said. When doctors told him this incredible news, Brunson suggested that maybe the cancer was never there. Doctors operated on Brunson’s neck, removing the lymph nodes. They had drugs designed to keep people alive, and Louise insisted they go. In a bid to stay alive long enough to see his daughter born, Brunson was sent to MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston. Now he was being told to get his affairs in order. His brother had recently passed away from cancer. It had progressed upwards from the neck to Brunson’s brain, and downwards too. The cancer was advanced, frighteningly so. “He said melanoma is like a black corruption. “I can never forget the words,” Brunson said.

Eight hours of surgery later, they thought differently. Doctors told him it would need to come out and that it shouldn’t be a problem. He chose the life of a grinder over the life of a salesman. The two were married in August of that year and Brunson was already playing poker for a living around Texas, having left his job selling business machines behind when he cleaned out his colleagues for more than a month’s salary in a seven-card stud game in one night. It was 1962 and Brunson was living in Fort Worth, Texas with his wife, Louise, who was three months pregnant with the couple’s first child. Doyle Brunson was 29 years old when doctors told him he had three months to live.

Doyle Brunson poker hand