American Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has announced his 13-man economic advisory panel, and there is a seat for Andy Beal, the star of the 2004 book The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time.
Donald Trump announced his economic advisory council on Friday and of the 13 men named one of them was the founder and Chairman of Beal Bank and Beal Bank America, Andy Beal.
Beal and Trump go way back. The potential President-elect once borrowed close to $600m from Beal’s banks to help deal with the fallout of numerous bankruptcies within his casino empire in 2011. Beal is also the biggest donator to the Trump campaign stumping up $449,400, the largest sum a single person can donate. He also gave $100,000 last summer to a pro-Trump super PAC.
One billionaire who has not pledged any cash to Donald Trump is Sheldon Adelson. The casino mogul doesn’t like poker very much. Andy Beal loves it. If Trump is given the green light to turn the world upside down at least Americans might be able to play online poker while the world burns outside.
Beal, who is worth an estimated $7.6 billion, achieved notoriety within the poker community in the early noughties when he took on a group of high stakes pros known as The Corporation.
Michael Craig was the fly on the wall in Bobby’s Room. His book The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time was his witness. The sums of money that exchanged hands was incredible. Beal was the beneficiary of an $11.7m pot in May 2004, and yet still finished the session with a small loss, in games playing with blinds as high as $50,000/$100,000.
In Feb 2006, he returned to the tables losing $3.3m; went on a heater earning $13.6m, and if you ever wondered where Phil Ivey gets his money from, Beal lost $16.6m to the greatest poker player in the world in a match that spanned three days.
Members of The Corporation included Chip Reese, Jennifer Harman, Hamid Dastmalchi, Todd Brunson, and Gus Hansen. Last year, it was widely circulated that Beal had returned to Bobby’s Room at The Bellagio for a game of Limit Hold’em with Todd Brunson and promptly lost $5m.
Beal, a self-declared libertarian, once told a Bloomberg reporter that he ‘hated big government’ and would continue to donate money to politicians who vow to dismantle it. It also seems he also gives money to people who would like to build Game of Thrones style walls to keep Mexicans out of the country.
