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Remembering Rod Pardey, family man and unsung seven-card stud poker champ
O BY C. MOON REED
nce, in the middle of a game, seven-card stud player Rod Pardey realized that the dealer was skimming money from the top. This was back around 1980, before poker was as honest as it is now. “Dad caught him red-handed, grabbed his wrist … flipped his hand, made his hand open up and found a $100 chip in there,” his son Rod Pardey Jr. says. “That was the environment that Dad was dealing with, where you not only had to be a good poker player, but you also had to be aware of who was cheating you.” On August 1, the elder Pardey died at age 75 following a stroke. The twotime World Series of Poker bracelet winner was one of the best seven-card stud poker players of all time. While other competitors came and went, Pardey sustained a 50-year career, living off poker until COVID-19 shut down the casinos in March. Pardey amassed $725,834 in total live earnings, which put him inside poker’s top 100 all-time money list, according to the Hendon Mob database.
how the Dunes hosted daily high-limit seven-card stud games where players would win or lose $50,000 in an evening. “Dad dominated those games in the early ’80s,” Pardey Jr. says. “He was playing with the very best poker players in the world and winning [against] people like Stu Ungar, Chip Reese and Doyle Brunson.” But as poker went mainstream, the easier-to-televise Texas Hold ’em took over the popular imagination. Once only played at Binion’s Horseshoe (now called Binion’s) on Fremont Street, Texas Hold ’em soon became
ubiquitous. Pardey Jr. says his dad never liked Hold ’em, sticking instead to seven-card stud, even as it lost popularity. In his later years, the elder Pardey followed his game to California, often playing at the Commerce Casino in LA. “Being able to play seven-card stud is like being able to speak a lost language. The game isn’t played anymore,” Pardey Jr. says. “I’m very happy that learning how to play brought me so close to my dad, because that was such a big part of who he was.” Pardey didn’t chase the spotlight,
preferring cash games to tournaments. “He was a great player who didn’t have a lot of flash,” says Poker Hall of Famer Eric Drache. The two players were friends and competitors for almost 50 years. “He’s relatively unknown outside of the seven-card stud circle. But if you played with him, you’d know how good he was.” What made Pardey so talented at poker? His friends and family chalk it up to a combination of innate intelligence, preternatural card sense and a sense of determination and sportsmanship.
Under the radar Despite decades of poker success, the longtime Las Vegan was never a household name. How did such a great player fly under the radar? Call it a quirk of history. During Pardey’s heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, seven-card stud was the predominant game. “If you had moved to Las Vegas in 1980 and you wanted to play poker professionally but you could only master one poker game, it’s very likely that you would choose seven-card stud,” says Pardey Jr., who learned how to play the game professionally from his dad. Although he wasn’t old enough to play at the time, Pardey Jr. remembers
Rod Pardey, fourth from left, with other poker greats, as portrayed in a painting by Steve Venet (Painting published Courtesy Steve and Pearl Venet /Venet Art Enterprises)
