FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#709 – NBC Heads-Up Championship #30 – Super Man Versus Wonder Woman

Posted by Editor | Filed under Uncategorized

Update: It’s 7:55 PM, and the third level of play just began in the first match in the best-of-three. Vanessa Rousso has a small lead over Huckleberry Seed.

In a world where genetic engineering was much more advanced, Huck Seed and Vanessa Rousso would be wasting their time playing poker. Seed, 6’7″ has beaten an NBA player one-on-one, run a marathon on the 4th of July, played five rounds of competitive golf in one day, and is currently on permanent leave from CalTech. Vanessa Rousso graduated at the top of her high school class, graduated from Duke in 2 1/2 years, and is pretty enough to use her looks in modeling or acting. The $500,000 first prize is sitting in front of the table but it’s peanuts compared to what their offspring would fetch on an efficient market.

So I stand by that title. It’s not hyperbole.

Every year, I make a pitch to my friend Pierre at NBC that they should hire me to be part of the broadcast. And just about every year, he turns me down. As well he should; I don’t have network-TV broadcasting experience.

But one year, he partially took me up on it and hired me to do some consulting after the taping. (Thanks again, incidentally to Eric Drache, the world’s all-time greatest favor-helper. If I felt more comfortable asking for his help, I’d probably not only be part of the broadcast team but I’d be running the network.) I gave him information about the players who went deep that year – information I thought he might not otherwise have. It ended up being a bonanza for NBC, because they used a lot of the information, most of which I haven’t seen since.

I think NBC should have hired me this year (as I think every year), or at least given me royalties on the earlier consulting work I did by having me re-consult on it. Maybe some of this stuff will show up in the broadcast (especially if they read this Blog):

* The two losing semi-finalists, Bertrand Grospellier and Sam Farha, have something in common. Both were video game prodigies. Grospellier went to South Korea in 2001 to make a living as a professional video game player at Starcraft. Sammy Farha did about the same thing in the late Seventies with PacMan. In fact, he once won $5,000 playing the game. (By the way, quarterfinalist David Williams was a professional role-playing gamer at Magic the Gathering before making his name in poker.)

* There is no videotape of Huckleberry Seed’s 1996 World Championship victory. He was the last of 295 players to enter the tournament and missed the first ten minutes.

* Remarkable Huckleberry Seed bet No. 1: He performed a standing backflip to win bets totaling $100,000. (Ted Forrest has also done a standing backflip to win a bet.)

* Remarkable Huckleberry Seed bet No. 2: He won a bet that he could play eight hours of tennis per day for a month. (The bet arose from another bet that he couldn’t beat a friend who was a very good tennis player. Although he won the tennis-practice bet, he lost the tennis-match bet.)

* Remarkable Huckleberry Seed bet No. 3: He won what has been called the greatest golf bet in history. He won $25,000 by shooting under 100 for 4 rounds in 1 day, using just 3 clubs (5-iron, wedge, putter). He did this on one of the hottest days of the year in Las Vegas and without a golf cart. If he shot 100 or more in any round, he still had to complete the round. Because he shot 101 in the first round, he actually had to play 5 rounds that day, though his score improved with every round. (Two subsequent notes: (1) Erick Lindgren won a version of this bet during the 2007 World Series, for more money but I don’t think he was limited in his club selection, though he had to carry them. (2) Seed later told me the only physical effect from that day was “my throat was really sore for about a week, from swallowing all that water.”)

* Remarkable Huckleberry Seed bet No. 4: He is such a skilled basketball player that he has beaten at least one NBA player one-on-one. He played Portland Trailblazers forward Kenny Johnson in a match to 11 baskets. Seed was spotted 5 points, but he quickly took, even with the spot, a 10-4 lead. Johnson, outweighing Seed by 100 pounds, started backing him down low and scoring. Seed finally hit an outside shot to win the game and the bet.

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