Poker pro Huck Seed, who is best known for winning the 1996 World Series of Poker Main Event and for taking on some of the world’s toughest games at Bovada Poker, won big last night. This time, Huck’s big win wasn’t at the poker table at all. After reading a few books about video poker, Huck Seed risked $50,000 playing video poker against the house video poker machine and won a staggering $670,665!
It all started when Huck Seed saw this video poker machine at the Aria with a massive progressive jackpot. After consulting a few friends and reading several books about how to play perfect video poker, the always game Huckleberry did some research about how profitable it would be to take on the machine. Huck came to the conclusion that with the massive progressive jackpot, and if he played perfectly, he would have an edge against the machine of roughly +.65%.
That percentage, .65%, doesn’t seem a whole lot, but when you factor in $500 per bet, that’s roughly a $3 profit per hand of video poker played. A top video poker player could play roughly 600-800 hands of video poker per hour, which would be an average win of $2,500/$3,000 hour, this all assuming Huck was able to play perfectly. The swings in high stakes video poker are massive however, and it’s estimated that to be properly rolled to take on the machine Huck would need a video poker bankroll of roughly $800,000-$1 Million!
After taking on this machine several times in the past, with mixed results, Huck decided to pony up $50,000 out of his pocket and take a shot. It was a long 10 hour video poker session, which had Huck down $10,000, but despite being tired, Huck remained intent on playing as well as possible against the machine.
Then Huck got dealt K spades J spades, he drew 3 cards, and got back the Ace Queen and Ten of spades to hit the royal flush! Hitting the royal flush on that hand was 1 in 16,215! Ecstatic, Huck went onto his Twitter with a screen shot of the good news and a picture of the machine saying, “Jackpot $670,665, call the attendant.” Seed tweeted, “Internet poker is down in the US, but I’m still pressing buttons!”
Congrats to Huck Seed on making one of the biggest poker scores of the year off of video poker! His lifetime live tournament poker winnings are over $5.8 Million, and now he can add “video poker pro” to his resume. This $670,665 win is his second biggest win ever, behind his 1996 Main Event prize of $1 Million!