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 that.
This is no Cincinnati Kid, with dark yellowish circles under his eyes that rested on his cheekbones where the skin was drawn tight, as if he might have liver trouble from too much drinking. Maybe poker is changing in America? Maybe the old romance is dying, and there’s going to be a new spirit of living right, sleeping well, eating carefully, taking exercise, thinking about ‘strength and focus’ at the table? Or maybe it’s just Huck.
Hell, he doesn’t care about The Cincinnati Kid anyway. ‘People have made the connection, but I haven’t read it,’ says Huck. ‘I like books about chess.’
♠
I don’t know if Huck Seed wins his $10,000 upside-down bet, but he doesn’t win the 1997 World Series. The title goes instead to a screwed-up, debt-riddled drug addict.
It is a miracle. Stuey ‘The Kid’ Ungar won the World Series in 1980 and 1981 (back to back, just like Johnny Chan), then dissolved into a swamp of cocaine and hookers. In his first victories, he was a beautiful Jewish boy with rock star looks and a blazing poker talent. By 1997 he is broke, skeletal, mashed up with jaundiced skin and a disintegrating nose. His old friend Billy Baxter buys him into the World Series main event – one of 312 runners – and, incredibly, Stuey tears through the field to win it for a third time and collect $1,000,000. This is like a film. The old racehorse, the old athlete, washed up and crippled in early middle age, giving it one last shot and making it first past the post as the fireworks explode in the sky.
By Christmas, Stuey’s done his share of the money on drugs and sports betting. A year later, he refuses to let Billy Baxter put him in the 1998 World Series, because he can’t bear to show up in his state of collapse. He spends a few months wandering around the card rooms, begging for money from anyone running good. If he gets any, he spends it on crack. In November ’98, he’s found dead in a cheap motel room, aged 45.
I buy an old picture of Stuey, from the glory days of 1980, and put it on my bedroom wall.
A PAIR OF SIXES
So, with jacks, you are more likely to see an overcard on the flop than not to see one. With nines and below, it’s pretty much a certainty. Your opponents might not necessarily have hit these overcards, but your own hand becomes much trickier to play.
The main reason to play small pocket pairs in a cash game is the chance of hitting a set: the economics of cash-game play mean that you can afford to see a lot of flops with the occasional big pay-off in mind.
In tournament poker, you can rarely afford to leave chips behind. You can’t just throw a pair away because the flop brings nothing but overcards. If you’ve raised pre-flop, you can bet out when anything comes – but, if the flop is unsuitable, you are now bluffing. You may be bluffing with the best hand, but it’s still a bluff: pretending you like the flop, or that it’s no threat because you started with a huge hand anyway.
Six-handed at a tournament table, a pair of sixes pretty much IS a huge hand. Before the flop, you’re certainly entitled to believe that your hand is winning against the other five hands out there, at least until an opponent tries to tell you different.
So, what to do with these two sixes under the gun? It’s annoying to be out of position. If I get a caller behind me, I’ll have to act first on the flop.
Let’s make a small raise, try to make my hand seem bigger than it is. If I’m forced to bet out later on a king-high flop, I don’t want to have made this cripplingly expensive for myself.
Blinds still 8,000–16,000; I make it 35,000 to go. Just a little over the minimum. Emad Tahtouh calls in the cut-off, and the others pass.
Flop comes: 9♠ Q♣ Q♥.
Short of seeing an actual six, or some cute little 3 4 5 draw, this is as good a flop as I can hope for. There are only two cards for Emad to have hit – I’m going to assume that he’d have re-raised before the flop if he had a pair himself. The problem is, he could easily have called with something like TJ, KJ, KT, and decide to get busy with a straight draw. A clever little check-raise will keep him in line, if he has that in mind. I check.
Emad bets 50,000.
I make it 200,000.
He calls.
Hmm. I would have preferred him to fold there. His total chip stack is about 900,000 to my 750,000: he could afford to flat call with a straight draw to knock me out on a later street, but he might also flat call with a queen in his hand.
Turn card brings 10♦.
Now I hate it. With KJ, this card makes Emad a straight. With TJ or KT, he’s made a bigger pair than sixes. Or he could have had a queen all along, or 9T, or K9, and has had me since the flop.
If I check now, that’s giving up the pot without a fight. Aggressive Emad will bet with anything if I show weakness, and I’d have to pass.
If I make a small bet, he’ll come over the top for the exact same reason.
If I move all-in, he can’t call with only a nine or a ten in his hand. But he can call immediately with a queen, or a straight, so it could