David "Chip" Reese

David "Chip" Reese biography

David Edward "Chip" Reese, born March 28, 1951, in Centerville, Ohio, is remembered as one of the greatest poker players in history, particularly celebrated as the finest cash game player of his generation.

After contracting rheumatic fever in elementary school and spending a year recovering at home, Reese was taught card and board games by his mother, and by age six was already defeating older students at poker; he later excelled at gin rummy and backgammon, and in high school played football while winning an Ohio State Championship on the debate team.

He attended Dartmouth College, declining an offer from Harvard, majoring in economics while dominating poker games against fellow students and professors, a legacy later honored by his fraternity Beta Theta Pi through the "David E. Reese Memorial Card Room." Rather than attending Stanford Business School as planned, Reese chose professional poker after winning $60,000 in Las Vegas.

He went on to earn three WSOP bracelets across 23 money finishes, including the 1978 $1,000 Seven-Card Stud Split for $19,200, the 1982 $5,000 Limit Seven-Card Stud for $92,500, and a legendary 2006 victory in the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship for $1,784,640, capped by a seven-hour, 286-hand heads-up battle against Andy Bloch; his best WSOP Main Event finish came in 1979, placing 6th.

Total live tournament winnings exceeded $3.9 million over his career, though his enduring legacy rests on his reputation as the greatest cash game player of his era: he collaborated on the seven-card stud section of Doyle Brunson's influential book "Super/System," where Brunson called him one of the two finest young poker players in the world, and became a fixture of The Big Game, Las Vegas's highest-stakes mixed cash game at the Bellagio, alongside Brunson, Lyle Berman, Bobby Baldwin, and Johnny Chan.

He also worked as card room manager at the Dunes casino. In 1991, Reese became the youngest living player ever inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. He died on December 4, 2007, in Las Vegas at age 56.

Following his death, the World Series of Poker created the "David 'Chip' Reese Memorial Trophy" in 2008, awarded to winners of the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event and later The Poker Player's Championship, and Doyle Brunson called him "certainly the best poker player that ever lived," while WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack called him "the greatest cash game player who ever lived."

David "Chip" Reese playing style

A dominant, versatile mixed-game specialist whose cash game mastery, honed from childhood and refined in The Big Game at Bellagio, remains the gold standard by which other players are measured.