Adam Stormwind: Desert treasure gives away a poker face
The NYC math wiz knows casinos but a soft side for pets keeps him in check. Like numbers? You got a shot in Vegas.
A tap-tap-tap on the driver-side window jerked up the Brooklyn native.
Endless rows of shadowy cornfields had hypnotized Adam Stormwind when at last he succumbed to a call for shut-eye, pulling into a siding off Interstate I-80 at 5 a.m., no motel in sight.
A bucket-seat stir later, the silhouette of a state trooper cut through the crack of dawn, flashlight probing. Stormwind’s own tap on a power-window button permitted the hatted figure to be heard.
“What’cha doin’ out here in Nebraska all the way from New York?”
Adept at game face, a card player’s kind, Stormwind delivered an excuse to charm before reaching for a printed line-up list.
“I’m on my way to Las Vegas,” said Stormwind during the 2006 encounter. “I won a $10,000 seat to the World Series of Poker.”
“Oh, really?” said the trooper whose jacket read Buffalo Creek County, scrutinizing Stormwind’s driver’s license before turning his attention to the Poker Stars bracket, which named the New Yorker seated inside the 2001 Honda.
“Well now,” changed the officer’s tune. “That sounds interesting. I’m going to keep an eye out for you.”
Several days later and 2,540 road-trip miles from New York, the diminutive Stormwind, now 53, was seated across from defending champion Joe Hachem on the fifth day of the World Series of Poker’s main event. Dark wrap-around sunglasses and a tight-hugging ball cap weren’t enough to stem a losing hand’s destiny, but a $26,000 check soothed any agony, convincing him to stay on in Las Vegas.
From professional poker player and card dealer to desert trinket collector to tender-hearted animal lover, and backward, from Metropolitan Museum of Art guard to master’s degree holder (urban planning, SUNY Albany), these are a few of the milestones that define a New Yorker who skipped ahead two school grades in Far Rockaway, Queens, close to the Atlantic Ocean.
Stormwind is a tale of reinvention.
Finding out exactly what makes him tick is a little like figuring out how a figurine of Yoda wound up buried halfway under desert dirt. A bit of anthropological excavation is in order. The Jedi Master obviously isn’t native to Joshua-tree terrain, might have seen big-city streets, and would talk differently from Wild-West Americans. Yoda, too, might be in need of earthly resurrection.
That’s what happened this Thursday, when Stormwind did the cereal-box miniature a favor, rescuing it from 103-degree heat south of Las Vegas.
“I found Yoda,” Stormwind shrilly rejoices, bending down to scoop up the thumb-sized warrior. “I don’t how many times I passed him.”
It turns out Stormwind lost Yoda when the Star Wars icon fell off the hood of his remote-controlled toy jeep months back, as part of a quest to gather sun-cooked goodies. After reviewing GoPro footage recorded earlier on the model SUV, Stormwind was sure of the general location but left with hands empty on subsequent search-and-rescue missions.
“This was the square (foot) I was looking at in the video,” says Stormwind, dressed in camouflaged cargo pants. “I don’t know how many times I passed him.”
After digging out a metal lipstick casing, one of a slew of objects cast astray to no-man’s land decades ago, Stormwind’s mood remains upbeat but is tempered by the recent death of his dog, Newty, a shepherd mix who lived to be 14.
“I used to take Newty down here all the time,” says Stormwind, peering toward an abandoned railroad bed. “I found most of these things with Newty.”
With pale skin suitable for a casino’s soft glare, he looks back to the Honda, full of bottled water and Gatorade, with its air conditioner halfway on the fritz.
“I gotta get back into the car. It’s too hot out for me, man,” says Stormwind, a bachelor whose mannerisms vaguely echo actor Adrien Brody’s, including a sage eye for sizing a person up.
On the drive back to Las Vegas, where he lives five miles west of the Strip, Stormwind recounts the day he had to put Newty down, when a short-haired feral cat jumped into his life on the trip back from the vet. The snow-white tomcat is named Charlie, and he’s been a fixture ever since.
“Charlie just showed up on my roof one evening,” Stormwind says. “He just kept coming back. Right now, he’s probably sleeping under the air conditioner.
“He loves to be patted. He has his little bites.”
Charlie, too, is not without nocturnal nuisances. “At 3:25 a.m., he brought in a live rat.”
Further livening Stormwind’s cluttered home are stacks of keepsakes found on the sleuth, by way of sharp eyes and a metal detector. Keen on proper pricing, he sells some objects on EBay but other antique piles remain his, creating a veritable at-home flea market, from military buttons to bygone subway tokens to railroad spikes. Beside a collection of colored medicine bottles rests a pair of dentures, their chomp having long ago bitten the dust.
Below the fake teeth is a mound of rusted sardine tabs rolled up into a time warp.
“I collect these things,” he says. “I got, like, 2,000 of them. It’s a piece of time wrapped up.”
Gingerly stepping by a whirring fan missing its blade cover, he eases into a swivel chair, like a pilot within a cockpit. Inches away is a computer that contrasts a nostalgic minefield on the table it shares: Shotgun shell heads, marbles, coins, rounded stones and brass buttons hog keyboard space, leaving perilously little room for a wandering pinky finger.
Looking on is a weather-beaten leprechaun charm, symbolically tied to good luck. Stormwind, though, relies on mathematical wits to see him through to poker-room pay-dirt. “There’s math involved, which is nice.”
After 10 years in security at The Met, with several years as a supervisor, he had an exit interview with the department’s top manager, who wished him “good luck” at poker.
“I said, ‘Thanks, but luck’s got nothing to do with it.’ ”
As a kid, numbers came easily to Stormwind, who grew poker skills while playing at his father’s pharmacy as a 10-year-old.
“We would play high-low. You would put a penny in your hand.”
As a senior at Far Rockaway High School, he earned $8 an hour as a math tutor, captaining the bowling team and calling in football-game statistics to newspapers.
Stormwind parlayed his knack for calculation into online poker success before breaking away to Las Vegas, where one of his passions outside casinos is talking and acting on stocks.
Out of all his hobbies, though, Poker turns him on the most.
“I love poker,” he says. “It’s not that complicated of a game. It’s purely math.
“It’s like chess but with a lot more impartial information. With chess, everything is out there, right, five or six steps ahead? Poker’s almost the same thing. You have to have a plan. That’s what’s beautiful about the game.”
Stormwind dealt cards for seven years at The Venetian, with a stint at one other casino, before landing a job at a resort in northwest Las Vegas, where he deals and sometimes supervises the poker-room floor.
“The people are so nice here,” he says. “I don’t have to deal with the tourists. I don’t have to deal with the idiots.” The money’s not bad either, he adds.
There are times, though, when his native city surfaces to mind. Stormwind, after all, is a New Yorker and will always call Far Rockaway home.
“The land around my parents’ home is special to me,” he says. “It’s by Jamaica Bay. I grew up fishing. It’s 15 acres of wild land back there. There’s rabbits and snakes. I just had a great childhood. We used to play baseball.”
On the floor, Stormwind works his Gotham sports gab to near tilt, striking rapport with five-boroughs transplants through common language that rolls off only a true New Yorker’s tongue, when a David becomes a Davey and a Daniel a Danny.
“I got Danny,” Stormwind relates of a poker player loyal to the casino. “I told him, ‘I’m gonna call you Mr. Met.’ I got two big Mets. There’s Anthony, straight out of Brooklyn.”
When Stormwind folds his poker-gig days, his dream is to explore lakes and sea for sunken surprises.
“I’d love to be retired in five years,” he says. “I’d love to start diving for treasure. You can find so much stuff in swimming holes.”
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In memory of Adam Stormwind, who enchanted so many:
Following up. Not sure if it posted. David, I am not sure.
Dear David: Not sure.