Chronicling the WSOP Main Event winners has been quite an educational experience, because the history of the tournament and the players who have made it great tell a story that continues on today. It’s really interesting to Google some player that I have never heard of, find interesting tidbits about who they are, what their total winnings are and where they are now. Sometimes you will find lots of resources with so much information that you can pick and choose what you want to talk about or pay closer attention to, and then you come across a poker player such as Hamid Dastmalchi, and all the information written appears as though it was copied and pasted from one article to another. Then I dug a little deeper.
Hamid Dastmalchi was born in Iran and moved to America to become a real estate developer. He started playing poker as a youth but didn’t venture out to Sin City until 1985 when he placed fifth and received a check for over $10,000 in the $1,000 buy-in Limit Event at the Stairway to the Stars event, one of the premier tournaments of Las Vegas at the time.
In May of 1986, Dastmalchi took first place in the $1,500 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event, winning $165,000, and his first of three bracelets. The biggest prize was yet to come when he won the 1992 WSOP Main Event, and took home a cool one million dollars, along with another gold bracelet. He also made the final table in 1995, finishing in fourth place.
The controversy surrounding Dastmalchi occurred in 1999 when the new management at the Binion would not let him cash in over $800,000 worth of chips that he had won when Jack Binion was running things. Predictably, the case went to court, and the judge also predictably ruled that Dastmalchi would be able to cash the chips. His second biggest cash of his life had come thanks to a judge.
Another story I ran across was taken from Bluff magazine:
One of the most famous stories from The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King was when Ted Forrest and Hamid Dastmalchi played at The Mirage for four days without a break and Hamid had to be taken off the property on a stretcher, the result of fifty chain-smoked packs of cigarettes and ten times that many bad beats delivered by Forrest.
Ted subsequently added two details he had overlooked when he initially told me the story. First, during the match, Dastmalchi was complaining about the Binion family, the World Series of Poker, and, in particular, how he thought the championship bracelet they gave him was cheap. (Dastmalchi also had a well-publicized gripe with the Horseshoe over its refusal to honor a large quantity of $5,000-denomination chips – “chocolate chip cookies,” they’ve been called – he possessed. He had to go to court to get them redeemed.)
Hamid told him, “They say it’s worth $5,000, but I’d take $1,500 for it.”
Ted said, “Sold,” and tossed three $500 chips across the table. Forrest later received a package from Dastmalchi with the bracelet, which he still has.
The second detail was how the game broke up. I just assumed that Hamid was unable to continue. In fact, Ted quit the game and Hamid was then taken to the hospital. A short time later, he left the hospital, returned to The Mirage, and got into another game. Forrest, who seems like he could take a shotgun blast standing and swallow a hammer, found this out after recovering and returning to the casino a few days later.”
Dastmalchi still plays poker, playing high cash games at Bellagio, and possibly making stops in other parts of the world along the way, but for the most part he remains out of the limelight and all the noise that poker has moved into in the last two decades.
Great Players in Poker History 