Athletes - Andrew Beal

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	Athletes - Andrew Beal

Andrew "Andy" Beal (born 1952) is a billionaire businessman living in Dallas, Texas. He made his fortune in banking and real estate, and is the founder and chairman of Beal Bank and Beal Aerospace Technologies. Beal is also known for his high-stakes gambling and mathematics activities.

Early life

Beal wanted to be a businessman since he was a teenager in Lansing, Michigan. During his years in high school, he would earn money by fixing televisions and installing apartment alarms, and with his friends he began to relocate dislodged houses. Beal linked hydraulic jacks and his friends would raise the homes at night, then move them.

Beal enrolled at Michigan State University, but he became bored with classes and dropped out. His mother was disappointed at first, but she would later cope with the fact that Beal had dropped out, because at age 19 Beal bought a house for 6,500 dollars and started renting it for 119 dollars a month, which eventually led to his first net gain as a businessman.

Business career

In 1981, Beal bought a project building in New Jersey, the Brick Towers. Beal became known for buying properties that no one else would want; he figured out that everything he bought could be turned into a profitable property.

His business strategy paid off, and in 1988, he was able to open his first bank in Dallas. This was the year that he moved to Texas. At first called Resolution Trust, the tiny building was the first bank of the company that would later be renamed to "Beal Financial," which now includes Beal Bank, Beal Savings Bank, and CSG Investments, Inc.

In 1989, Beal spent a weekend in San Antonio, buying houses that had been put on the market. The houses he bought, which were all on discount, made him a 15 percent profit. By the end of the year, his institution had opened six branches in Texas and undergone its name change.

During the 1990s, Beal tried to expand his bank's services to include international markets such as Russia and Mexico. These attempts failed, however, and Beal became uninterested in foreign expansion. In 2000, Andrew Beal bought over 1 billion commercial loans from the SBA. Sticking to his business strategy, Beal made sure that these loans belonged to small businesses that were in economic trouble or unlikely places. These included loans made to businesses in Palau, and the United States Virgin Islands, where some local businesses had borrowed money from American institutions after Hurricane Hugo. The loans deal paid off greatly, thanks in part to Beal Bank's pursuing strategies and debt collectors, which have been criticized by people like Donna Christian-Christensen, the Virgin Islands congressional delegate who once sent the bank a letter asking for the bank to be gentler towards customers who still had not met with the payments agreed upon.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Beal once again went against what some call "common business sense", and he actually began buying airline bonds. He figured the airlines would recover from the tragedy; airline bond prices were very low at the time preceding the attacks, and Beal bought them expecting to sell them once they raised in price again. Beal makes about 70 million dollars of profit a year from those bonds.

Poker playing

A blackjack player in his youth, in 2001 Beal began visiting the Bellagio in Las Vegas to participate in high stakes poker games, especially heads-up Texas hold 'em style. During several visits between 2001 and 2004, Beal played a syndicate of professional poker players known as "The Corporation," which included Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson, Todd "Darkhorse" Brunson, Ted Forrest, Jennifer Harman, Howard "The Professor" Lederer, Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen, Barry Greenstein, Chau Giang and others. Beal hoped to force the collective group of pros into such high stakes that their play would be influenced by the amount of money at risk. By the end of their encounters in 2004 they were playing $100,000/200,000 Limit Texas Hold 'Em heads up with more than $20,000,000 on the table. This story was chronicled in the book The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time by Michael Craig.

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