can find him. Surely, if he is any kind of gambler, he will be sucked back into Las Vegas sooner or later? I phone every day, until a sympathetic dealer advises that Huck has at last left LA and returned to the magical city where the hotels have theme parks inside them, restaurants do not offer ‘all you can eat’ but ‘all you can imagine’, and every gas station attendant would have been a millionaire if it weren’t for a bad out-draw in 1973.
From a sizzling phone booth opposite the Mirage, I finally reach Seed and gabble my journalistic credentials at him. In a deep voice, slower ’n molasses in January, he invites me to his rented house a few miles west of the Strip.
Through the cab windscreen, the desert landscape grows unexpectedly prettier. The giant neon lions, pyramids and pirate ships of the town centre are gradually replaced by cactuses and flowers. I’m slightly disappointed not to have found Huck chain-smoking and re-raising on the Strip itself, but still I’ve got it all worked out: he will be James Garner, he will be Steve McQueen, he will be a hard-drinking, loose-living card sharp with electric-blue eyes and a cruel mouth. He will be The Cincinnati Kid.
He is a man in Bermuda shorts and a baseball cap who has just been to the corner shop to buy a carton of milk for his girlfriend. He’s a boy who went to Caltech hoping to become a physicist, started playing poker with his friends, and dropped out of college when he started making money at it. He’s a kid whose competitive streak was at its highest ‘when I used to play Scrabble with my mom’. His family is respectable, educated; the kids’ names are all clever combinations of the rural and the literary. Huck’s sister’s name is Caraway Seed, which conjures images of a woman just as strapping and Aryan as he is, all cornfields and improving books. Meanwhile, having won a million dollars in a poker tournament, he doesn’t seem to have done anything with it. The apartment is sparse, spartan.
There are only two signs of Huck Seed’s card-earned windfall: his girlfriend’s son is cross-legged in front of a television eight times the size of himself, and the coffee table groans under a de luxe Scrabble set with gold-embossed tiles.
As we talk, Huck chews thoughtfully on a bowl of oatmeal and discusses his interest in exercise physiology and nutrition. His dad sends him books about it.
This is not quite the risky rebel I expected. He tells me about his love of running and mountain-biking. He explains that he wins at poker because he has a good understanding of game theory, probability and statistics. ‘Like if you were playing Scrabble, uh, you’ve just got to know which letters make more words, it’s kind of like a percentage thing.’
Game theory? Who is this guy? Poker is about intuition and sixth sense, bluff and bluster, psychology and gut. It is about dusty landscapes, saloon bars, riverboats, gunfights, saucy molls and crooked cowboys. Huck Seed seems to be treating it as some kind of soulless science project.
♠
In the autobiography of Amarillo Slim, 1972 world champion, Slim writes: ‘Women are meant to be loved and not to play poker. My wife Helen Elizabeth thinks that a king is the ruler of a country and a queen is his bedmate. A woman would have a better chance of putting a wild cat in a tobacco sack than she would of coming out to Vegas and beating me.’ Even in 1996, among the bullets and balls of high-stakes poker, this is very much the prevailing attitude.
I put it to Huck Seed, who is cagey but not impossible to read. ‘I guess I have my own ideas about that . . . I guess I won’t comment on that . . . I guess men run faster than women and . . . it’s an evolution thing.’
Evolution? Over the tree-swinging centuries, men somehow evolved a better ability to calculate their odds with the second nut flush draw and a gutshot? Take the maths away, and poker demands only an ability to know when you are being lied to; I say most women have plenty of experience. And what has running got to do with it? This is not a physical game. All you need is a fat butt and decent eyesight. I suppose men’s larger fingers would give them an edge in a game of ten-card Omaha, but we don’t play that even in the Tuesday game.
But I don’t say anything. I am a guest in this guy’s house. Besides, what have I ever won? Second place in a seven-card stud tournament, after a statistic-bucking deluge of wire-ups. Maybe he’s right. But I will be good one day, I swear to God. When Huck tells me that Las Vegas is a boom town for young couples, ‘where the guys play poker and the girls serve cocktails’, my resolve hardens like quick-dry cement.
Maybe Huck feels grudging about women because he thinks they look down on him? He doesn’t have a job. He plays an old-fashioned gambling game that offers no security and certainly no respect. He tells me, ‘Women want to know what you do for a living, and when I say I’m a poker player they think I’m some kind of bum.’
♠
It is only when we talk about his winning hand of the World Series, when Huck beat a doctor from New Orleans called Bruce Van Horn to the title, that the music of poker language begins to trickle from his lips. ‘He was on the button with king-eight suited. The flop comes nine-eight-four and I’ve got top two pair. I made a pretty good-size bet, he raised, I put him all-in and he doesn’t catch his king.’
Oh, that music. Whatever my friends feel when Robbie Williams sings Everything Changes But You, I feel when I hear that unique mixture of past and present tenses, the suspense of the turn card, the narrative of a hand.
Not that I can make head or tail of the hand Huck’s describing. Holdem isn’t really my game, and I’ve never played a Holdem tournament. And I’m a rock. What are these people doing in a pot with 89 and K8? These aren’t hands! But I am seduced by the hypnotic sound of the story. I want to talk like that myself, one day.
♠
When I have switched off my tape recorder, ordered a taxi and started daydreaming about Bruce Van Horn, the poker-playing New Orleans doctor, Huck Seed stands on his head. He explains that he has bet a couple of guys $10,000 that he can stand on his head for 52 minutes during the upcoming 1997 World Series and must keep practising.
A prop bet? I love prop bets. They always make the best stories. Amarillo Slim once won a lot of money claiming that he could beat a champion racehorse over 100 yards. People fell over themselves to take the bet, but cunning old Slim chose the course: it had a turn in it, 50 yards one way, 50 yards back. Of course, there was no way of explaining this to the horse, which was still running straight in the other direction while Slim was collecting his winnings.
People are always getting suckered by Amarillo Slim’s prop bets. Another time, he took on a professional golfer over the question of who could hit the ball furthest. Slim let the golfer go first. When he took his own turn, he explained that he would be choosing his own course here, too: a frozen lake. The ball kept bouncing and skittering for miles.
With that kind of history, you’d think a champion ping-pong player would know better than to accept Slim’s expensive challenge to a match, along with a generous offer to provide the bats. But no, the pigeon seized this opportunity, certain he could trash any amateur and make a small fortune. Going to his car for ‘the bats’, Slim whipped out two Coke bottles, with which he had been secretly practising for months.
But it turns out there is no twist in Huck Seed’s bet. He just thinks he can stand on his head for a long time. He explains, ‘I’m training to run a 4.5-minute mile anyway, and it’s good to let the lactic acid and blood drain into your head.’
I ask him about other prop bets he has made, and they are all very healthy. He has won money by floating in the sea for 24 hours, by halting a card game to run an immediate marathon, and (potentially) by staking $100,000 that his weight will not reach 250 pounds in the next 35 years. I expect he’ll win
