And just like that, the art of hustling, and Freddy the Beard’s entire way of life for the past 35 years, was over.įreddy the Beard is 73. Freddy never collected his $800,000.Ī few years later, Internet message boards made it possible to identify any stranger who wandered into a pool room. His associates identified the eccentric billionaire as Freddy the Beard. Back in Vegas, he started asking around about a guy with glasses and a bad leg who played one pocket. The hustlers who arranged the games were tentative about collecting. His leg is gonna give out any minute.'”īy the time Karas caught on, Freddy had already cashed $200,000 in chips. And he goes, ‘A“He wouldn’t quit! ‘No, no, no,’ he says, ‘I can beat this guy. I’m patting myself down for $21, you know, to really make it look like I’m a cheap guy. So the counter guy says, ‘That’ll be $21, sir.’ Now I really want to dig it in and make sure this guy believes this. But the best part of the evening was, now we’ve got to go pay the time. I beat him out of $100,000 that night, right? He pays me off in four $25,000 chips. I’m all shaky, you know, I mean my nerves are a little . . . anyway, I went ahead, and we switched the game to one pocket.
“I’ve got to pay him the eight chips back. “There’s no way he can win anyway, but still . . . you know, if he had somehow miraculously won, we had exits.”įreddy won the first game, eight $5,000 chips. Karas proposed a game of eight ball, $40,000 a game. I was Audie Weiss.” At the time, Freddy had a bad leg. “I had the whole town gaffed up,” Freddy says, “the bartender, the waiter.
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“This guy broke champion poker players,” Freddy says, “executed them.” But Freddy was a pro at pool-and at being a lemon man, or looking like an easy mark. The Horseshoe Casino in Vegas made a special $25,000 chip that only he could use. He was one of the biggest gamblers of all time. It goes like this:Ībout 20 years ago, a group of hustlers decided to lure Karas to a small town in Pennsylvania to play pool against an eccentric, high-rolling degenerate billionaire, played by Freddy the Beard. He’s told it so many times he’s got all the timing and details down cold. But maybe the best place to start is where Freddy himself usually starts, with the story about the time he hustled Archie Karas out of a million dollars. Or the time he took up meditation and his sister found him levitating in the bathtub. Or the time a crew of pool-loving FBI agents recruited him to infiltrate Chicago’s “head houses” to find Bernadine Dohrn. Like the time he married a Playboy bunny. There are many improbable stories about the pool hustler Freddy “the Beard” Bentivegna. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.
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