David Edward "Chip" Reese

March 28, 1951 - December 4, 2007

“Chip” Reese grew up in Centerville, Ohio. During his elementary school years, Reese came down with rheumatic fever and had to stay home for an entire year.

During that year, Reese’s mother taught him to play numerous board games and card games, including poker. At six, he could regularly beat fifth-graders at poker.

After playing football and joining the debate team in high school, Reese earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dartmouth. He had even turned down an offer to attend Harvard University.

In college, Reese became a member of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity, annually ranked as one of the top ten fraternities in the U.S. for number of chapters, members, and philanthropy. After graduating from Dartmouth, his brothers in Beta Theta Pi named the card room at their fraternity house the David E. Reese Memorial Card Room in his honor.

In 1974, Reese was due to travel to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, to interview for law school, and go see an ex-girlfriend who was living in Los Angeles. Reese took a vacation from his job as a manufacturer’s representative and started driving west.

He never made it any further than Las Vegas. In only a few days, Reese turned his $400 bankroll into over $100,000 playing games of Seven Card Stud and High-Low Split with the likes of Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, Puggy Pearson and Nick Vachiano.

After being in Vegas for four days, Reese called his job and quit, turned down Stanford, and hired someone to fly from Las Vegas back to his home, clean out his desk and house and drive his car back to him. Reese didn’t even tell his parents what he had done until a year later.

After four years of playing side by side with the poker pros of the day, Reese was asked by Doyle Brunson to write the chapter on Seven Card Stud for Super/System. Reese could not refuse. Although Reese excelled at stud and high-low games, he firmly believed that to be a good poker player you had to be a diverse player.

He was known to believe that no-limit poker tournaments were fun, but cash games were where the money was really made.

“Chip” Reese never left Las Vegas. He died in his home at age 56 of pneumonia. He was found by his 18-year-old son, Casey, the morning after he had died in his sleep. Players Barry Greenstein and Doyle Brunson have speculated that Reese’s real cause of death was linked to an earlier gastric bypass surgery that had caused a blood clot.

In any case, the poker world lost a legend and likely one of the best cash game players in the world, who also happened to have won three World Series of Poker bracelets. He won the WSOP $1,000 Seven Card Stud Split in 1978, $5,000 Limit Seven Card Stud in 1982, and the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E World Championship in 2006.

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