In our ongoing survey of World Series of Poker Main Event winners, and whether their stories bear any similarities to those among the ranks of the lottery-jackpot winners who've notoriously crashed and burned, we pick up where we left off on Tuesday, with 1996 champ Huck Seed.
Notoriously private, gambling writer Michael Konik had difficulty in reaching the reclusive 27-year-old champ to discuss his victory for a chapter in his best-selling 1999 collection of real-life gambling stories for Huntington Press, The Man With the $100,000 Breasts. Seed even proved to be an enigma among the poker-playing fraternity, although a few of his fellow players had gotten a closer to the precocious Mr Seed and were able to shed some background light.
It turned out that the Cal Tech-dropout-turned-poker-pro had earned his stake money at first by beating Hollywood big shots in high stakes private games, and then investing the proceeds for a 40 percent stake in 1991 WSOP champ Brad Daugherty. (As we discussed in Parts I and II of this answer, with its $10,000 buy in, many players in the WSOP Main Event are sponsored by one or more backers, so outside onlookers shouldn't assume that the winner gets to take home all the prize money.)
"At age twenty-two, he won a million-two in ten days playing no-limit with two of the biggest gamblers in the world," revealed Phil Hellmuth, who described Huck Seed as his best friend. "That kind of score will give you confidence." The former self-styled "Poker Brat," who'd himself already bagged his first championship bracelet back in '89, went on to note how "Huck's never been flat broke. He's been close. But it's never really happened to him. He's never been completely down and out. So he knows no fear. That's his big advantage."
Evidently, it's that fearlessness that also helped Seed evolve into one of the most notorious proposition gamblers of all time. Well-known winning wagers include the time Huck Seed bet fellow poker pro Howard Lederer that he could execute a standing back flip. As Seed is six foot seven, that's no mean feat, but what Lederer may not have been aware of was the fact that Seed happened to have an acrobat uncle who taught him the ropes. Hence, when he finally took the challenge, after the allowed six months of practice (and, so the story goes, while drunk at a party), Seed easily executed the move for a $10K payday. Then there was the crazy golf bet, when he accepted a six-figure wager that he couldn't break 100 on a Vegas golf course, four times in one day, using only a five iron, sand wedge, and putter -- and at the height of summer. Seed -- an unlikely looking but accomplished athlete -- made his scores after six rounds.
However, as his wise friend Hellmuth observed, again to Michael Konik, "he's a very tough, very dangerous player. But he's got to realize, his train hasn't run into any walls yet. I'm one of the people who's wondering what's going to happen when he does."
While no history that we've read relates the details, we did come across an interesting feature about the roller coaster career of fellow player and back-to-back "November Niner" Mark Newhouse, on the Gamboool.com blog, in which he references his friend.
The title of the post -- 'Mark Newhouse: From Poker Champ to Broke to WSOP History' -- doesn't leave much to the imagination and the article itself holds nothing back, either, when it describes its subject as the "poker player we wish to become, and the degenerate we hope to avoid becoming." While Newhouse has yet to win a WSOP Main Event, his $1.5 million first-place score in the inaugural WPT Borgata Open, which took place in Atlantic City in 2006, puts him in the same league as other subjects in this answer, while his fall was among the more spectacular.
At the time of his Borgata victory, Newhouse already had amassed a $500K bankroll from other winnings, meaning that at the tender age of 21, he had $2 million in the bank. It lasted less than two years. After the big win, he returned to California and moved into a room literally upstairs from the Commerce Casino card room. There, according to Gamboool!, "Mark took on all comers, and played the highest stakes available, including $1,500/$3,000 limit. Yet he would not always play well. This, combined with a cold streak and partying, took a toll on the bankroll. Mark says that at one point, he just stopped caring about the money. 'I wasn't conscious. I decided I wanted to set all my money on fire.'"
And effectively, that's exactly what he did: According to Newhouse, it took only a year for most of the $2 mil to evaporate, at which point he started borrowing, got into debt, and from there continued down a dark emotional spiral, exacerbated by a toxic relationship with a high-maintenance female poker player, who would later commit suicide.
Returning to our original subject, it was at this juncture, says Newhouse, that he turned to Huck Seed who "helped [him] re-learn the value of a dollar," explaining that Huck Seed in particular could relate to Mark's situation, since the former WSOP champ "was once $2 million dollars in debt after his WSOP win" -- just as his friend Phil had predicted. When they say poker's a game of skill, that skill set is not limited to a player's understanding of what hands to play and how to play them; in addition, there are a lot of general life skills, like self-discipline, money management, and humility, which are equally crucial to any player's long-term survival, both financially and mentally. But in poker, as in life in general, often that's a lesson that players only get to learn the hard way.
Such is the case, perhaps, with 1998 WSOP champ Scotty Nguyen, whose erratic career includes having gone broke on numerous occasions and suffering some personal tragedy, while simultaneously fighting a problem with alcohol and drug-abuse that's resulted in some unfortunate public -- sometimes televised -- incidents. While Nguyen's lifetime live-tournament winnings are in the region of $12 million, of which more than $5 million is down to various WSOP cashes, how his story will end is anyone's guess.
But enough of history repeating itself, because personal degeneracy is not the only issue to have plagued some recent WSOP winners. In the case of Jonathan Duhamel, for example, who took the 2010 title for a first-place prize of $8,944,310, it was the kind of old-school theft that had plagued the career of legendary predecessor Amarillo Slim (see Part I), when in the December following his 2010 victory he was badly beaten in a home-invasion robbery. Among the items stolen were Duhamel's Main Event gold bracelet, a Rolex watch, and $150,000 in cash.
It took less than a week for his ex-girlfriend (and three accessories) to be arrested; she was charged with and convicted for masterminding the crime and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. Duhamel, meanwhile, has since built his poker-tournament winnings up to a total that exceeds $17.5 million, so we have a feeling he's probably doing okay, at least financially.
In the case of the unorthodox 2006 winner Jamie Gold, on the other hand, things took a turn for the seedy. To cut a long saga short, prior to his win, Gold had entered into a business arrangement with online-gambling giant Bodog.com, by the terms of which he undertook to supply celebrities willing to play in the WSOP under the Bodog brand banner in exchange for paid entry into the 'Big One.' What wasn't immediately apparent, however, was that Jamie Gold also had a personal business partner, with whom he'd promised to split any WSOP winnings -- a fact he would later rue having letting slip during the exhilarated haze of a post-victory radio interview, no doubt. Prior to this somewhat condemning evidence rearing its head, however, Gold apparently suffered a case of amnesia -- unlike his business partner, who apparently had a crystal-clear recollection of the agreement and sued Jamie, accordingly, for half of his $12 million prize.
What exactly transpired behind the scenes, we couldn't say, but the net result was that on February 6, 2007, the pair released a joint statement in which they said they had settled the matter out of court. The sum involved was never disclosed. But the damage to Gold's reputation -- and, evidently, his karma -- was already done. Bodog wasted no time in severing its business ties with the Gold and when the reigning champ returned to the Rio in 2007 to defend his title, he didn't even make it past Day 1. A poker room named for him at the Tropicana didn't last long and, plagued by financial problems, in 2013 Jamie Gold was even obliged to auction off his WSOP gold bracelet, which sold to an anonymous bidder for $65,725. He still plays some poker, but the once bombastic Gold now keeps a very low profile.
Just as can be the case with lottery-jackpot winners, in the boom-and-bust world of poker, where stakes and prizes reached such stratospheric levels as to be almost too surreal to take seriously at face value, it takes a certain type of personality to handle the consequences of that Big Win -- which otherwise may turn out to be life-altering in all the wrong ways. Generosity, insecurity, hubris, greed, recklessness, immaturity, ego, naivety -- whether alone or in combination -- are among the litany of weak spots that have proven to be the ruination not just of (often) otherwise conservative, non-gambling, lottery ticket-buying members of the general public, but just as much -- if not even more so -- among the ranks of often genius-IQ'd professional gamblers who, by that very designation, could and should know better. Then again, perhaps it takes having that "gamble" in you to ever have a shot at actually being the World Series of Poker champion.
