The professional gambler Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas in December 1992 with $50 to his name. He borrowed $10,000 from a friend and, over roughly the next three years—after a freewheeling and volatile saga of ups and downs, but predominantly ups—reportedly turned that money into $40 million.

It was a run of good luck so unfathomable that it’s known in poker circles simply as “The Run.” And it made Karas the sphinx-like protagonist of one of Las Vegas’s strangest epics.