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The game of poker is a challenging game that many people enjoy playing with their friends. Playing in a poker with your friends is a lot different than playing poker professionally. In a game with your friends you may only bet a few bucks but in a game with professional poker sometimes millions of dollars are at stake on just one game.

Stuart Errol "Stu" Ungar was a professional poker player and professional gin rummy player. Stuart was considered by many to be the best gin rummy and No Limit Texas hold'em player ever. Stewart Errol was a really good poker player who start out playing gin rummy at a young age. He entered in a gin rummy tournament at the age of 10 years old.

He actually dropped out of school sometime in the 1960s to help support his mother and sister because their father had died. He started to win tournaments worth $10,000 quite often because he was really good at what he did.

He had to leave New York where he grew up because of gambling debts he got at local racetracks. He moved to Miami Florida to keep on gambling. A few years later he moved again and this time he went to Las Vegas Nevada. He met up with a old girlfriend which he married in 1982.

Stu Ungar was so good at gin rummy that some casinos in Las Vegas asked him not to play in their casinos because people did not want to enter into a game of gin rummy if they knew he was playing against them.

In Stuey's biography he talked about how he liked to watch his opponents slowly break down during a game and get a look of desperation on their face because they could not beat him.

When Ungar first made it into Las Vegas he immediately beat the professional gambler Billy Baxter and won $40,000. Billy Baxter talked about how he was not sure when he first walked into the room if Stewart Ungar was even his opponent because of how small and young he looked, something that at that time in the poker world was NOT normal (whereas today, some of the game's greats including Tom Dwan and Dario Minieri are almost minors).

Stuart Ungars personal life was not as good as his poker skills. His mother died in 1979 and he started to use cocaine because some of his poker buddies said it would help keep him awake and alert. This soon led to a cocaine addiction which would end up ruining his life.

Stu was married and 1982 and had a child, a daughter the same year. He also legally adopted his wife's son from her first marriage and the boy liked Stewart so much that he took his last name. In 1986 Stewart and his wife Madeleine divorced. Matalines son Richie committed suicide shortly after his high school prom in 1989.

Stuey's drug addiction got really bad to the point where his friends tried to get him to go to rehab. Stewart refused to go into rehab saying that it was easier to get drugs in rehab than it was in the streets because drug dealers targeted rehab places.

On November 22, 1998 Stu Ungar was found dead on his bed laying facedown. A autopsy was done and drugs were found in his system but the doctor said that the drugs were not the cause of death at least not directly.

He did not overdose on drugs but the doctor said that over the years the drugs put a strain on his heart. This last time when he used drugs he had a heart attack and that is what killed him.