Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson

b. August 10, 1933 and still alive! Crazy!

Born in Longworth, Texas, Doyle Brunson is arguably the most influential poker player ever to have played the game—BLUFF magazine even said so in their January 2006 issue.

Brunson’s hometown of Longworth boasted a population of 100 when he was born. The town was so small and far removed from other communities that Brunson often ran long distances to get to the nearest town. This steered Brunson toward a promising life in athletics.

Although a terrific runner, his real passion was basketball. Brunson played for the Texas All-State basketball team and kept in shape by practicing the one-mile run. In 1950, Brunson entered the Texas Interscholastic Track Meet and won the one-mile event by posting an incredible 4-minute and 43-second mile.

In college, attending Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, Brunson continued playing basketball, and he was scouted by the Lakers when they were still based in Minneapolis. However, Brunson’s life took a dramatic change while working a summer job in college.

Brunson worked construction for a summer and one day was unloading stacks of sheetrock. The weight of the stack shifted and began to fall toward Brunson. Instinctively, he tried to stop the slide, but the sheets fell on his leg, breaking it in two places.

Brunson was in a cast for two years and the accident ended his dreams of becoming a professional basketball player. Instead, he became a professional of another sort. Brunson already knew how to play poker before his injury, but now he had time to pursue it more diligently.

The game he knew best was Five-Card Draw. Brunson even thought of draw poker as “easy,” so he began traveling around the state of Texas playing the game illegally. In these smoke-filled backroom games, Brunson met other future poker “greats,” like Amarillo Slim and Sailor Roberts. He also came face to face with knives, guns and thugs’ fists, since most of these games were run by members of organized crime groups.

Brunson eventually traveled to Las Vegas with his newfound poker buddies. Together they lost over six-figures in Vegas poker games, which was the lump sum of all the players’ winnings up to that point. The loss broke up the group, but they all agreed to remain friends.

Brunson decided not to let the loss affect him too much and stayed in Vegas to become a professional poker player. In 1978, he self-published his seminal work, Super/System. It was a book that Brunson later claimed lost him a lot of money because it changed the way people played poker in a way that made it harder to win against those players.

Many people know Brunson as “Texas Dolly,” or even just “Dolly.” His nickname came from Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, a former sports commenter and Vegas bookie, who mispronounced “Texas Doyle” while commentating during a poker game. The name instantly stuck.

Brunson is also known for not one but two different poker hands. The first is “10-2” of any suit because Brunson used that hand to win the 1976 and 1977 World Series of Poker Championships by making a full house.

The other hand often called the “Doyle Brunson” is “A-Q” of any suit because Brunson stated in Super/System that he “never plays this hand.”

However, in Super/System 2 Brunson amended the statement to read he “tries to never play this hand,” likely because he has been caught playing that hand in several televised poker tournaments.

As far as professional poker players go, Brunson is at the top of the pack. He’s been around the game for over fifty years and still gets his chips in with the best of it, so he may well be the most influential player in the world.

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