Seed, the champ, ‘really has this down’

By Jeff Haney

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Mori Eskandani, a producer with the TV broadcast team of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, was reflecting on how much the poker landscape in Las Vegas has changed in recent years.

Eskandani was on hand when Huck Seed, then a baby-faced poker wunderkind, won the 1996 World Series of Poker main event on Fremont Street at the venue then known as Binion’s Horseshoe.

Over copious amounts of golf and hands of poker at the Mirage, the two became friendly. So even though Eskandani was glad for Seed after his victory Sunday night in the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, he had some bittersweet emotions as well.

Seed, at age 40, is no longer a young up-and-comer but instead a throwback to an earlier era of poker, practically an elder statesman of the game.

In fact, the almost comically tough field of 64 players in the heads-up tournament contained a smattering of today’s young poker hotshots, players in their early 20s known by their online handles who are willing and able to take on the game’s most established stars.

“This tournament is about giving the right people from the past as well as the right people who are hot in poker right now an opportunity to show what they can do,” Eskandani said after Seed clinched the championship Sunday at the Caesars Palace poker room. “Some players are going to sit there and freeze. Other players are going to play too fast. Huck really has this down. He knows the sweet spot.”

Seed, the only player to have cashed in each of the five years the National Heads-Up Poker Championship has been conducted, defeated Vanessa Rousso in consecutive matches in the best-of-three final match.

Rousso, one of six women in the tournament, had advanced to the final by outlasting a brutal lineup of opponents in the bracket-style event, which is single-elimination except for the championship match. Rousso defeated Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, 2007 heads-up champ Paul Wasicka, Daniel Negreanu and Bertrand Grospellier before facing Seed.

Seed, who made the final four of the heads-up tournament in 2006 and 2008, improved his lifetime record in the event to 18-4.

“And he’s beating some of the best poker players in the world,” said Eric Drache, a consultant with the tournament. “It’s not like UNLV (basketball) in the old days, when they were beating almost everybody but they were 18-point favorites in every game. Huck’s beating the toughest players out there. His record has a lot of credibility.”

Seed, famous in poker for his laconic demeanor and Doonesbury eyelids, also won a big heads-up tournament at the Canadian Open Poker Championships in Calgary last year.

Any poker tournament includes an element of luck, but Seed believes the structure of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship allows plenty of room for the competitors to showcase their skills. The caveat is that live tournaments are different animals from online marathons like the one proposed by Tom Dwan (known as “durrrr”), who has vowed to take on all comers — and offer odds, too! — in a high-stakes challenge involving 50,000 hands of heads-up poker.

“I think there’s a lot of skill,” in the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, Seed said. “Not as much if you were playing somebody heads-up for a week, or the durrrr challenge. Obviously, that’s an insane amount of skill. But this is live poker. You can see the other person. You play a lot of hands, and there’s a lot of skill in each hand.”

Seed ousted Sam Farha in a grueling semifinal match after beating David Oppenheim, Glen Chorny, Gus Hansen and Jonathan Little in the previous rounds of the tournament, which began Friday at Caesars.

“I had low energy in my match with Sam,” Seed said. “I was getting a little frustrated, a little stiff in the chair. He had me all-in, so I got really lucky at one point. After I got even, there were a couple of times I felt he was weak and I went in with nothing and he folded. Farha was the toughest match. He was the only guy I felt was a little on top of me at times.

“In my (quarterfinal) match with Oppenheim, he brought a strong presence to the table, but our match was so short. We played a coin flip (a tossup hand either player could win) early. I felt that was going to be a tough match if it went longer.”

The quarterfinals were also the end of the line for Negreanu, who lost to Rousso, and 2005 heads-up champ Phil Hellmuth, who lost to Grospellier.

Negreanu elicited the biggest laughs of the tournament when he showed up for his match with Scotty Nguyen outfitted in a Nguyen get-up — complete with wig, sunglasses, white satin and bling. Unfazed, Nguyen said: “I guarantee Scotty will win this match ... one Scotty or the other.”

Seed provided a more poignant moment after his victory, when he told the crowd he had turned his life around by overcoming a substance-abuse problem several years ago.

“I’m happy he’s back,” Eskandani said. “He had a problem and he beat it, just like he said. When Huck is sober he is a great poker player and an amazing human being.”