Legendary gambler and poker player Archie Karas has passed away at the age of 73, after suffering from poor health for the past few years.
Karas made his name for an incredible gambling run in Las Vegas that saw him spin $50 up to $40 million in the space of a few years, beating the best poker players of the day and running hot at craps before giving it all back.
His last recorded cash at the poker tables was in 2013, when he finished 26th in a $2,500 Razz tournament at the WSOP. He made four WSOP final tables, but the closest he came to a bracelet was a third-place finish in the 2004 $1,500 Limit Ace to Five Draw event.
Playing for all the marbles
Karas was born Anargyros Karabourniotis on November 1, 1950, on the island of Keffalonia in Greece. His dad was a construction worker but struggled to make ends meet – "He worked for pennies," said Karas in an interview with Soft White Underbelly. "People didn't have any money. I grew up very poor, and I decided to look somewhere else for a better life."
By this point, gambling was already in his blood. Karas was quoted as saying, "I had to shoot marbles for money sometimes and needed to have a steady hand when I did. Back in those days, we would play for drachmas, which was the currency then. It took 30 drachmas to make one dollar, so to win two and a half drachmas, it meant I could win half a loaf of bread to avoid going hungry that day."
Karas ended up in the USA at the age of 17, where he worked as a waiter, but he started flexing his gambling muscles in a pool hall next to the restaurant. Then he discovered poker and started his first spin-up, building a $2 million bankroll despite being labelled a weak player by the legends of the day like Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese.
By December 1992, he had lost almost his entire bankroll and took his remaining $50 and drove to Las Vegas.
Over the next two-and-a-half years, he spun this $50 up to $40m. It’s a streak that's talked about in Vegas simply as The Run.
Archie Karas talking in the Soft White Underbelly interview in 2021
'I ended up winning every $5,000 chip at Binion's Horseshoe'
The Run started at Binion’s Horseshoe, where he found a friend willing to loan him $10,000, which he used to play $200/$400 Razz. He tripled his stake in three hours and paid his friend back his money.
Karas turned back to pool and started playing for $40,000 a game, which saw his bankroll grow to $1.2 million – enough to move into the serious poker games in Vegas. Specialising in heads-up, he took on and beat the superstars of the day, including Bobby Baldwin, Stu Ungar, Chip Reese, Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson. On one particular day he took Chip Reese for $700k playing Seven-card Stud and then took half a million off Stu Ungar at Razz.
By 1993, his bankroll was up to a cool $17 million. At this point, Karas moved over to the craps tables at the Horseshoe, where he played higher than the stated table limits and enjoyed an incredible sun run, building his bankroll way quicker than he could playing poker.
As Karas himself said, "Poker gives a person a better chance to win money, but it’s a lot more work. I might win $1 million to $4 million in 10 to 30 minutes at dice, as high as I like to play, while it might take me 24 hours to win $1 million to $2 million in poker, playing someone heads-up. It’s a lot of work that is exhausting."
It was also exhausting for the Horseshoe.
Karas said: "I ended up winning every $5,000 chip at Binion's Horseshoe, which was about $18,000,000 worth, that I kept in the boxes at the Horseshoe to gamble with. Each rack of chips had $500,000 in it, so I had accumulated about 36 racks of chips. Finally, one day, Jack Binion asked me to sell some of the $5,000 chips back to the Horseshoe, and I agreed to sell back about $10,000,000, leaving about $8,000,000 in chips to gamble with."
All streaks come to an end, unfortunately, and Karas started coming unstuck after two-and-a-half years. On one night he lost an incredible $11 million – a lot in today's money, let alone back in the mid-90s.
What goes up...
Karas didn't stop, though, and decided to switch to baccarat, where he carried on losing. In the space of a month, he lost $30 million.
At this point, he did take a break and headed back to Greece with his remaining $10 million. But Vegas was in his blood and his head, and he returned, dropping $1 million, before winning it back in a heads-up match against Johnny Chan. Unfortunately, he then lost everything in the pit.
From $50, Karas had run his roll up to $40 million inside three years before giving it all back. He estimated that he gambled over $1 billion in those crazy days. There's a lesson there somewhere, but not for Karas, who was quoted as saying, "You have to understand something. Money means nothing to me. I don't value it. I've had all the material things I could ever want. Everything. The things that I want, money can't buy: freedom, love, happiness, and health, especially health. I don't care about money, so I have no fear. I don't care if I lose it. That's what makes me a great gambler, I guess."
Karas was married twice but admitted that gambling and marriage don't mix. But gambling was one of Karas' only vices. He didn't drink, didn't smoke, and never touched drugs. But he claimed that spending his entire life in casinos hurt his health through second-hand smoking.
Las Vegas finally bit back when he was banned from all Nevada casinos in 2015 for cheating at blackjack in San Diego, a claim that Karas denied: "It was all lies... They made me look like a criminal. I never broke a law in my life."
In 2020, he was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, which he blamed on the pressures of gambling.
Asked if he was proud of anything in his life, he replied, "Not much, to tell you the truth. Because, in the end, the pressure got to me, my health went down, so I paid the price. Whatever you do, you pay the price. Nothing is for free. You win, you pay the price. You lose, you pay the price. Nothing is for free in this world."
Karas suffered from poor health for the past few years and passed away on September 29 at the age of 73.
You can hear Karas talk extensively about his life in the Soft White Underbelly interview below.
Images courtesy of X and Soft White Underbelly
