Poker's most revered figure celebrates a milestone of a birthday today as Doyle Brunson turns 80. While his presence and participation in poker's explosive growth over the last decade has helped make him an internationally known figure, Brunson's career as both a player and ambassador of the game extends back a half-century, thus inspiring the entire poker community to celebrate the day along with him. As Brunson tells in his 2009 memoir The Godfather of Poker (reviewed here), he was born in Roby, Texas and raised in nearby Longworth, a small town of 100 residents a couple of hundred miles west of Fort Worth-Dallas. During his youth Brunson became an accomplished athlete, excelling in both track and basketball and earning a scholarship to play the latter at Hardin-Simmons University. Brunson continued to impress as a college basketball star and by his junior year had helped lead Hardin-Simmons to an NCAA tournament berth while also winning MVP of the Border Conference. He'd even begun to attract the attention of a scout from the NBA's Minneapolis Lakers who were eyeing him as a possible shooting guard. Alas for Brunson, a career-ending injury while working a summer job at a sheetrock manufacturing company spelled the end of his basketball career, and his life took a different path as he finished out his bachelor's degree then earned a master's in administrative education and business administration at Hardin-Simmons. Brunson had already begun playing poker and during graduate school had discovered a both a talent for the game and a significant supplement to his income. "Those weekend poker games were my financial aid package, my scholarship for getting through graduate school" explains Brunson. From there he'd take a job selling adding machines for the Burroughs Corporation in Fort Worth, though soon realized he was earning money at a much higher rate in underground poker games. "I didn't need one of Burroughs' machines to tell me those numbers didn't add up," writes Brunson, who'd soon quit his job to embark on what has now become a half-century long career in poker. After spending time amid the sometimes dangerous games of Exchange Street in Fort Worth, Brunson soon took to the road, "fading the white line" with Amarillo Slim Preston and Sailor Roberts with whom he pooled resources and traveled for the next several years playing games throughout the American South. That partnership would eventually end following an unsuccessful trip to Las Vegas, although the trio would remain friends and forever be linked as early World Series of Poker Main Event winners and future Poker Hall of Famers. Brunson married in 1962 to Louise with the pair still together today, their 51st anniversary coming later this month. Shortly after their marriage, Doyle suffered a major health scare after a malignant tumor was discovered in his neck and in surgery the cancer had spread throughout his body. Given months to live and with Louise newly pregnant, it appeared certain that he'd not live to see the birth of his first child. Brunson recovered, however, with baffled doctors' only explanation being the rare occurrence of "spontaneous remission." Later in Super/System (originally published in 1978 under the title How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker), Brunson wrote of his leaving the hospital and returning to poker "with a zest and appreciation for life I'd never had before," going on to leave a winner after his next 54 straight sessions. "Before the surgery I would have classified myself as a slightly better-than-average player," Brunson writes in Super/System. "However, after that ordeal something happened. Everything seemed to click.... My playing became almost instinctive. I was reading my competitors more accurately and I felt a self-assurance I had never experienced. My brush with death had apparently triggered innate abilities that had never surfaced before." Such aspects of Brunson's story help provide underpinnings for his almost mythic stature in the poker world, with the many accomplishments he'd go on to to achieve at the tables over the next several decades further establishing his position as one of poker's elite. Brunson would be back in Las Vegas in 1970 to participate in the first ever World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe Casino, with Louise and their three children Doyla, Pam, and Todd eventually moving out a few years later. Sadly Doyla would die of a heart condition at age 18, while both Pam and Todd would become poker players themselves with Todd earning a WSOP bracelet in 2005. Since the 1970s, Brunson would accumulate more than $6 million in career tournament winnings including two WSOP Main Event titles and 10 WSOP bracelets altogether, although the tourney winnings only scratch the surface of his earnings as a cash game player over the years. Brunson participated in the WSOP again this past summer, playing in both the $50K Poker Players Championship and the Main Event, cashing in the latter for $28,063 after finishing 409th. That finish marked Brunson's fifth decade of cashing in the WSOP Main Event following his two victories in 1976 and 1977; cashes in 1980 (2nd), 1982 (4th), and 1983 (3rd); one in 1997 (16th); and one in 2004 (53rd). Brunson was honored at this summer's WSOP with a bronze bust capturing the cowboy-hat wearing poker icon (pictured above), the moment reminding everyone there not only of Brunson's significant contributions to the tremendous growth of poker over the last decade, but of the way he helps connect the contemporary scene to poker's storied past. Near the end of The Godfather of Poker Brunson writes about his longevity as a player. "It may sound strange," he says, "but to some degree I attribute my overall good health to poker, and my poker longevity to my health," adding that his competitive spirit -- first nurtured long ago as an athlete -- "keeps me going physically as well as mentally." Happy birthday, Tex Dolly! Join Betfair Poker Now.

Brunson was honored at this summer's WSOP with a bronze bust capturing the cowboy-hat wearing poker icon, the moment reminding everyone there not only of Brunson's significant contributions to the tremendous growth of poker over the last decade, but of the way he helps connect the contemporary scene to poker's storied past.