And, finally, I start playing casino poker. Just once or twice a month, to supplement the weekly Tuesday game. For a while, I pop into the Stakis in the afternoons and play roulette there. But eventually it gets bad, and it really does have to stop, and it does stop, and it hurts, and I swear off roulette for ever.
But I get to know people in the Stakis card room. There are usually about thirty players in there, just enough for a tournament. I say hello to some of them, ask how they’re getting on. And I call Hugo and Kira sometimes, to find out if they are going to the Vic, and I go when they’re going. Turns out The Sweep was usually in there all along, tucked away behind a pillar or a Greek. I become one of a handful of semi-regular younger players, who are looked on by the old men with indulgent amusement. I recognize their faces now, know some of their names, but I never speak to them.
The Vic games are very tough. I’m a Stakis player, an amateur, an occasional and recreational visitor. Maybe I’ll graduate to the Vic properly one day, but not yet. That’s how it works: you play your home games, and you play for fun sometimes in the Stakis, and one day – if you don’t give up or go broke – you graduate to the Vic.
♠
Flying back into McCarran airport, this time ‘of age’ with a genuine driving licence and an adult’s right to play poker, I am determined to win more money and meet Huckleberry Seed. My friends have crushes on Robbie Williams. I have a crush on a poker player I’ve never even seen. But I have a good excuse to look for him: I can sell an interview with him to the newspaper back home.
I’m not a proper journalist. I have never whipped late copy from a typewriter and cried, ‘Hold the front page!’ I’ve never shouted information down a sat-phone over the roar of gunfire. I have once bruised my fist by thumping it angrily on a coffee table while trying to explain a joke to a bored copy-taker on a crackly mobile, but that doesn’t count. I write the light stuff, features and columns, more closely related to the crossword and horoscope family than hardline news. Certainly, I can sell an interview with a 27-year-old millionaire gambler. Poker is a tiny secret world that nobody on the outside knows about. It’s an investigative piece, like infiltrating the Bilderberg Group. Most people barely know that poker exists. If I ever mention that it’s my hobby, in a social situation, people are amazed and fascinated. Poker! Who knew that anybody plays that old game, any more?
♠
Being a rambling-gambling man, Huck Seed isn’t easy to track down. I launch my quest from a cheap room at the Las Vegas Hilton. A list of defunct telephone numbers leads eventually to an old flatmate, who is less than encouraging. ‘You know the movie Forrest Gump? You know the leaf that floats through the movie, never settling in one place? Well, that’s Huck. Last I heard, he was playing at the Crystal Park Casino in LA.’
More phone research reveals that the leaf is indeed tossing around in the Crystal Park air, obstinately refusing to settle. I could drive to Los Angeles from here in about five hours, but what if he has moved on when I get there? Everybody knows him, everybody has just that minute seen him, nobody 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