An uneasy relationship between professional American poker players and the US taxman is just one factor that makes it difficult to gauge which player has earned the most money in a career, but it is probably an odds-on bet that David “Chip” Reese, who spent three decades playing for the highest stakes, won more money at the card table than any other poker player in history.

Reese won three World Series of Poker bracelets, but never became a household name in the way that several poker players have done recently. This is largely because he tended to eschew the tournaments that are now so in vogue in favour of higher-rolling cash games. He was, however, considered by most top players to be the world's best all-round poker player, an expert at every popular variant of the game.

David Edward Reese was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1951. His gaming life started early when, away from elementary school for nearly a year with rheumatic fever, he learnt various card and board games from his mother. Before long he was playing friends at cards with baseball cards as stakes — and generally winning.

Reese went to Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, where he read economics. The tale goes that he was given an easy ride by his professors because many of them owed him money lost in long poker sessions. Fellow students were also perpetually out of pocket to Reese and, after he graduated, the card room at his fraternity house was named the David E. Reese Memorial Card Room in his honour.

Reese was due to join Stanford Business School to study law. On his way to California in 1974, however, he stopped off at Las Vegas for the weekend, where in the course of a few days he won nearly $100,000 from an investment of just $400. He cancelled his course and remained in Vegas, not telling his parents for a year.

Reese played in — and beat — the largest games in town. His even demeanour enabled him to put aside his ego and to steer clear of bad games and rashly chasing the inevitable losses of an inherently volatile game. Preppily dressed and always affable, he had a talent for bringing out “the gamble” in other players — his irrepressible smile and pleasant manner were illustrative of how the most successful gambler must be hell-bent on parting others from their money while at the same time ensuring that victims continue to feel good about themselves.

From the mid-1970s until his death Reese was, along with fellow poker legend Doyle Brunson, the mainstay of “The Big Game” in the Bellagio casino, Las Vegas, a spread of mixed poker games in which the average hand is worth thousands of dollars and session swings of several million dollars are commonplace. There they were a daily sight along with others in the high-stakes poker pantheon such as Bobby “The Owl” Baldwin, Johnny “Orient Express” Chan and Johnny Moss.

Reese's forte was seven-card stud and he wrote the chapter on that game in Doyle Brunson's seminal 1978 poker manual Super/System. That year he won the bracelet for the World Series of Poker's seven-card stud split event and four years later he won another in the seven-card stud limit event.

Reese was inclined to avoid tournaments since, as well as being less lucrative, they offered spectators free lessons on his play. Nonetheless, in 2006 he entered the WSOP's first $50,000 buy-in H.O.R.S.E. event. With a buy-in five times that of the prestigious main event, it is arguably the best test of the rounded poker player, cycling through hands of (H)old-‘em, (O)maha, (R)azz, seven-card (S)tud and seven-card stud (E)ight or better. It took Reese three days to battle through a 143-runner field. The final table took some 12 hours to play out, culminating in a record-setting seven-hour, head-to-head battle with Andy Bloch. Emerging victorious but bleary-eyed at 9am after 286 hands of one-on-one play, Reese — $1.78 million richer — said that he would celebrate “by sleeping”.

“It's a very simple game; a five-year-old can learn it,” said Reese, who is conservatively reckoned to have made several million dollars a year from poker. “But it's also highly mathematical. If you never play someone on the next level, you don't even know that level exists. It's almost another dimension.”

He is survived by his ex-wife, a son and a daughter.

David “Chip” Reese, poker player,

was born on March 28, 1951. He died of pneumonia on December 4, 2007, aged 56