Chad Brown (1961-2014)

It’s been a tough week. The death of German poker pro Johannes Strassmann at age 29 hit many hard, with stories of his generous personality and friendship signifying how much he’ll be missed. Then overnight came the news that Chad Brown, another much beloved figure in the poker community, had passed away at 52 after battling gamely against a rare form of cancer.

While I didn’t ever get a chance to meet Strassmann, I did have the opportunity on many occasions to interact with Chad, especially over the last couple of years. I feel very fortunate to have done so.

Before meeting him, I had always been kind of fascinated by Chad, primarily because of all the things he’d done before emerging about a decade ago as a “notable” in the poker world thanks to his deep runs in WSOP events. His introduction to most of us came when finishing runner-up in a seven-card stud event in 2004 that was part of ESPN’s comprehensive coverage of that year’s Series.

But Chad had already been notable before that. He might have pursued a professional baseball career, in fact, but as a young man he took a different path to become a model and actor. During his 20s he landed various roles including a couple in low-grade horror flicks, neither of which I saw back then -- when as a teen my interest in low-grade horror flicks was at its zenith -- but did get to catch later on.

He always played cards, too, though, and as he moved further into adulthood he became a serious poker player -- and seriously successful. At the WSOP alone he’d pick up nearly 40 cashes and over $1.2 million in winnings, including two more second-place finishes in 2005 and 2007. He’d become a Team PokerStars Pro, too, and in that role served as an able ambassador for the game.

As I say, I got a chance to know Chad over the last couple of years, talking to him about a wide variety of subjects, including those horror movies, other stories from his acting and modeling days, baseball, and, of course, poker. We’d exchange emails occasionally, too, just to touch base.

Last November I went down to Florida to help cover the WPT bestbet Jacksonville Fall Poker Scramble, and I remember him telling me to deliver well wishes to the folks at bestbet who had hosted a “Chad Brown event” there in the past. “We love Chad,” was the response I got, which as you’ve been reading over Twitter and elsewhere over the last several days is a common theme coming from just about anyone who ever interacted with him.

Things took a troubling turn for Chad earlier this year, and he updated everyone about his health in a brave post for the PokerStars blog. There he spoke of viewing his situation as being like a poker hand and being content with the knowledge that he was playing the hand the best he way he knew how, not worrying too greatly about the results. It sounded very much like how I’d heard him talk about those three runner-ups in WSOP events, where in each case he’d done his best and played well, but in the end the cards just didn’t fall his way.

My favorite part of that post comes when Chad explains how he was able to face a life-threatening illness without letting it get him down. “We all have a choice when it comes to how we want to feel about what's going on in our lives,” he explained. “If you want to feel like a victim, that’s your choice. I choose not to. I don’t feel like a victim. I feel very blessed with the life that I’ve had, regardless of what happens. I've never been depressed about this at all.”

A little over a week ago after a flurry of Twitter messages indicating that things had become more grave for Chad, I sent him a note just to let him know I was thinking about him, and he wrote back right away to thank me and give a quick update.

“I am doing fine spiritually,” he said. I already knew he was, but I was glad to hear it again.

Then this week came the honorary bracelet from the WSOP and all of those premature announcements of his passing, all of which kind of helped steel a lot of us against the news we woke up to this morning that indeed he’d left us. As had his own resolve.

Chad was definitely dealt some rough hands, but he was always quick to point out he’d had his share of “run good” as well, and in the end he was well prepared to accept the role chance plays in our lives. More than most.

As I say -- speaking of luck -- I’m glad I had the good fortune to have known him.

Hope That Helps

Maybe once or twice a month I’ll take a peek at the stats and ponder over what searches led folks to stop by Hard-Boiled Poker.

Some keywords turn up pretty regularly. I’ll often have people who are looking for “169 hands” or “169 starting hands” (the number of different starters in hold’em) arrive at a post I wrote over two years ago in which I discussed what my first 50,000-plus hold’em hands looked like in PokerTracker (“169 Ways to Showdown”).

I am noticing that here lately seekers of information about Clonie Gowen keep finding a post from last year titled “Learn, Cheat, and Play Poker With the Pros.” That is the one where I talk a bit about an episode of Poker After Dark in which Gowen admits to having once scooped a pot even after she knew the deck had been fouled.

The recent 60 Minutes segment on the Absolute Poker/UltimateBet insider cheating scandals also drew a number of folks searching for further information, almost all of whom were focused on the UB part of the story. The most popular searches along those lines presently are “ultimate bet cheating,” “cheating on ultimate bet,” “ultimate bet poker cheating,” and “ultimate bet scandal.”

Oh, and there was one person apparently looking for information on “how to cheat on ultimate bet,” too. Clearly some are wantin’ to get in on that super-sounding super-user action!

Over the last few days, I’m seeing a number of folks looking for information about Stephan Kalhamer, co-author of that not-so-hot book with Chad Brown, Act to Win in Texas Hold’em Poker. I reviewed that book here back in August 2007, and I think my review may be one of the very few on the web as that post comes up first in searches of Kalhamer’s name. From what I can tell, Kalhamer continues to wield some influence in Germany as a well-known poker author, getting interviewed not too long ago in the German poker magazine Royal Flush. Indeed, appearances indicate that Act to Win was originally Kalhamer’s book (published in German), and when it was translated into English the publishers brought Chad Brown in to add a couple of brief passages and pose for the cover as “co-author.”

Have had a few hits for “sartre gambler” lately, from which search readers land on one of three posts I wrote back in May that were devoted to Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher -- most specifically looking at a short passage from Being and Nothingness in which Sartre uses the example of a gambler to make a point about existentialism. Here are those posts, if yr curious: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

There was one search from a day or two ago, though, that inspired me to share all of this today, a search which reminded me of what it was like when I first started to play online poker. Someone, somewhere, typed the following into a search box and as a result clicked on through to Hard-Boiled Poker:

“what does donk mean online poker talk”

Landed on a post titled “‘Nice catch, donk’” from early this year in which I related the story of a hand that ended with my opponent sending that message to me.

Do you remember the first time you were called a donk? Did you know what it meant? One of many, many poker-related terms, I suppose, that many of us learn the hard way.

I still remember the first time an opponent genuinely berated me in the chat box over a poor play-turned-lucky pot for me. It was at the penny PLO tables, and I’d only been playing for a week or two. Guy completely lost his mind when I’d chased my flopped two pair and backdoored a flush to pilfer a couple of dollars off of him (at most). (Now that I’ve gotten all of my old hand histories from PokerStars, I may have to go back and find that hand.)

As a brand new player, I was sincerely bothered by the unexpected dressing down, thinking perhaps I’d crossed some line of accepted behavior by my play. He didn’t use any terms that were unrecognizable to me. (I recall it was his typing “jesus christ” that signaled to me the dude was genuinely upset.) So I didn’t have to look online to see what I was being called.

In any event, I do hope my post was successful in demonstrating to the reader what the term actually means. I also hope that perhaps that reader might find his or her way back to the blog again someday.

Despite the fact that it appears the author might possibly be a donk.