ED HILL (1954-2022)
I just learned Ed Hill died. If you’re expecting a sympathetic and syrupy tribute from me, please look elsewhere.
Instead, I’ll share a few hysterical Ed Hill gambling stories because I think those unique experiences best reveal who he really was, and he sure as hell was a character. If life is a card game, Ed Hill always dealt from an eight-deck shoe laced with jokers and loaded with wild cards. I sat in his game and knew Ed Hill all too well. We even collaborated together on multiple projects relating to gambling and poker.
The first thing to know about Ed Hill is that “Ed Hill” wasn’t his real name. He took his pseudonym, in part, from A.P. Hill, a Confederate War general. Let’s just say that Ed Hill was never one for political correctness. If you were offended easily, it was probably best not to know him.
Ed Hill was born in Florida and grew up in Virginia. Or, he might have been born in Virginia and grew up mostly in Florida. I forgot which. Ed Hill might have even conflated the story of his upbringing more than a few times. He also lived in Missouri for a few years as a kid. What I do know as a fact was that Ed Hill witnessed firsthand one of the most amazing seasons in Major League Baseball history when he was only 10 years old.
It’s been called the worst collapse in sports history. Most of us won’t recall late August 1964, when baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals were 11 games behind the first-place Philadelphia Phillies in the standings. Even as late as mid-September, the Cardinals were still 6.5 games back with only 12 games left to play — almost an insurmountable obstacle for any team to overcome. Incredibly, the Cardinals not only won the National League pennant by a single game when the Phillies collapsed in one of the worst meltdowns ever, they also ended the New York Yankees’ 40-year dynasty by beating them in the World Series of baseball.
The batboy for that championship team–the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals–was none other than Ed Hill. He had the best front-row seat in the house for most of the Cardinals’ home games that memorable season. This was one of the most epic teams in baseball history, and Ed Hill was in the dugout and out on the field taking in all in like a sponge. The players Ed picked up bats for included Lou Brock, Tim McCarver, Bob Gibson, Bob Uecker, and Curt Flood (who later became the catalyst for sports free agency).
I didn’t know much about Ed Hill’s early adulthood, nor his formal education. What I do know was that he was stupendously smart. Ed Hill wasn’t just well-read. He retained information like no one I’d ever met. As in — he had an instant recall on any subject. He was a walking and talking Google long before Google was invented, which sort of made him a know-it-all, and turned lots of people off. He could remember the most minuscule details of American history, sporting events, movies, music, and especially games of chance — a talent that would later serve him well and largely shape his life. He also made lots of enemies by being so outspoken and willing to correct any “error” he came across on the spot. A “conversation” at the poker table with Ed Hill might be him lecturing for 15 minutes on the pros and cons of the Messerschmitt-109.
1996 was the year I first met Ed Hill. To my knowledge, he never held a job in his life. Seriously, he was never employed so long as I knew him, unless you consider blackjack card-counting a “job.” He certainly never worked for anybody else, probably because nobody would be crazy enough to hire him. But, he always had plenty of money, and gambled for high stakes, at least until later in life when the lifestyle eventually burned him out. Ed Hill even married a school teacher. When I met Ed Hill, he was living in a 5-bedroom house in Desert Shores. As I said, he had no job.
At the time, I was thinking about moving to Las Vegas from the East Coast. Ed Hill conveyed to me that he’d sell his 2-storey, 5-bedroom house for $150,000 (it’s probably worth $700,000 now). When I told him that I didn’t have that kind of money and couldn’t possibly get financed, Ed Hill snapped: “Don’t worry about that! I know a guy!”
Oh yeah. Ed Hill knew lots of guys. This was the hidden world you read about in books and only saw in the movies. We spent countless hours together — him educating me on some common cheating methods in gambling. It was like getting a graduate degree straight from a gambler and guru. He was especially adept at recognizing collusion, marked cards, and daubing cards, which were sometimes used in blackjack but could also be a devastating advantage when used at any poker table. Ed Hill knew all the ins and outs of gambling, including its darkest side. He was so focused on cheating that he came close once to starting a casino surveillance company to rival the Griffin Agency
I can’t say for sure how many boundaries Ed Hill pushed, or what rules he personally broke, or how many times he took intense heat as a longtime professional gambler. Many of his biggest scores happened in the 1990s when new casinos were popping up everywhere. But the staffs were mostly naive and inexperienced, so they were vulnerable to skilled card counters. It was an opportunity and Ed Hill pounced like a silver-haired lynx. He, and his associates, who changed over the years, won hundreds of thousands. Ed Hill traveled all over the country, focusing mostly on new casinos that had just opened up on Indian reservations. A couple of times he was caught and detained, and a few times he escaped by running to his car and speeding away leading to car chases. Ed Hill’s blackjack card counting days were right out of “Smokey and the Bandit.”
One night, everything went badly wrong. Ed Hill had a new “partner-associate,” who had some kind of advanced card-counting device strapped to the side of a wheelchair. The man wasn’t even disabled. He just used the wheelchair for cover. The man in the wheelchair was the scout who signaled when the decks were favorable. Then, he kept the count on the device and signaled Ed Hill by nodding in some pre-arranged sequence. They were hitting a new casino in Arizona with lax rules and virtually no security. Thing was, a live band was playing that night inside the casino. The man in the wheelchair started getting into the music and began bobbing his head up and down, giving off false signals in the count to Ed Hill. So, the wrong size bets were placed quite a few times and he busted. Confused and angered by all this, Ed Hill had enough and finally screamed at his accomplice, “You’re an idiot! Meet me out in the parking lot!” and stormed out. Their cover now blown, the man wheeled outside and the two began arguing fiercely. Finally, the wheeled accomplice has enough berating from Ed Hill and stood up from the wheelchair and lunged forward as the two men began wrestling out in the parking area. Trouble was, casino security guards had been alerted about the threats made back at the table and watched the whole brawl unfold. The two were detained, threatened with arrest, and later released.
Whatever Ed Hill attempted in life, he was determined to not just good at it, but exceptionally great at it, or at the very least be far better than everyone else. I learned this lesson the hard way the very first time I played golf with Ed Hill. About 20 years ago, writer Roy Cooke, the late poker strategist Barry Tanenbaum, Ed Hill and I went out to one of the Las Vegas golf courses. We’d played 2-3 holes already, and Ed Hill was horrible. No surprise really, since he always looked out of shape, plus he chain-smoked. Even when Ed Hill was 45, he looked 65. When he was 55, he looked 75. You get the picture. Roy was the only good player in our foursome that day, but Ed Hill’s shots were all over the course. We were standing on the fourth hole tee box waiting to drive and Ed Hill suddenly decided he was bored. “Fuck it! Let’s play for money,” he insisted. I know — huge red flag. Ed Hill was so bad those first few holes that he somehow talked me into giving him a full stroke on each hole going forward, which was really saying something because my game sucked. Once we agreed on the stakes and his -1 as the handicap, Ed Hill proceeded to step up to the tee box and then “crack!’ — he blasted a 260-yard drive down the middle of the fairway that rose steadily into the air like a jet airliner. We were all in total awe. Speechless. With the lit cigarette still dangling from his lips, Ed Hill glanced over his shoulder at me with the biggest shit-eating grin I’d ever seen. I’d been hustled.
You never knew what was truth or how much was an exaggeration with Ed Hill. To this day, I don’t know which stories to believe, though there’s likely a ring of truth to them all and I’ve never caught him being deceptive when it came to working together. Back in the 1990s, Limit Hold’em was king in cardrooms everywhere, no doubt, its popularity ushered in by one of the best poker strategy books ever written, Holdem Poker for Advanced Players. Ed Hill insisted that *he* was really the brains behind that seminal book on strategy that was read and then re-read and then memorized by every serious and aspiring player of the day. One time, when I challenged Ed Hill on this, he claimed that he and David Sklansky recorded their intense strategy conversations over several hours leading to days in someone’s living room, and those conversational notes later became 2+2’s Holdem Poker for Advanced Players, authored by (not Ed Hill, but) — Mason Malmuth and David Sklansky. I found it odd that Mason Malmuth would be given credit in his place while Ed Hill claimed to be the “true authority.” Unfiltered as he always was, Ed Hill insisted Mason Malmuth was nothing more than a recording clerk of the conversations. When Mason tried to interject something into the discussion, Ed Hill rudely barked back, “Shut up! You’re nothing but a secretary!”
Personal Note: I have a hard time believing this happened as Ed Hill told it and have no doubt Malmuth was the true co-author, but it reveals the twisted ways how Ed Hill often viewed things, even among his most respected contemporaries. SEE FOOTNOTE BELOW
By the time I moved to Las Vegas, which happened in 2002, Ed Hill announced he wanted to “go straight” and be a legitimate businessman. He asked to meet at a local restaurant called Blueberry Hill, which is kinda’ like a Denny’s or diner for breakfast food, only the youngest person in there is probably in their 70s. Ed Hill’s business plan to was launch a bakery. I’ll never forget that conversation.
ME: What do you know about being a baker?
ED HILL: How hard can it be? All they do is make cupcakes and cookies, and shit.
ME: But there are a dozen bakeries in Las Vegas already.
ED HILL: Yeah. but not an X-Rated bakery.
ME: Whaaaaaaaaat?
Ed Hill went on to tell me the sordid details I didn’t really want to hear — that he had a retail space picked out and was about to sign a lease to open up an X-Rated bakery. Mind you, Ed Hill was never discrete in how loud he talked in public or what he said. You could hear Ed Hill’s leathery voice from a mile away. “This town would love that! An X-Rated bakery!” he explained. I”m going to make cakes shaped like breasts and cocks!” He went on and on, in great detail about the bakery items, he’d apparently contemplated in great detail.
The busy crowd inside the Blueberry Hill restaurant didn’t seem amused by the unavoidable echoes of Ed Hill’s unusual business plan ringing through the dining room. I wanted to crawl under the table. Ed Hill had absolutely no filter. He didn’t care. In fact, I think he liked to shock people.
Eventually, Ed Hill got fed up with Las Vegas. “The poker here sucks!” “It’s too fucking hot!” were two of the many reasons Ed Hill relocated to San Diego for a time. But the city he’d come to adopt as his home eventually lured him back. then again, maybe it was the legalization of cannabis. Ed Hill loved his escapes.
In his later years, Ed Hill disappeared from poker and gambling tables and might as well have been forgotten by the Las Vegas social scene. He surfaced a few times, showing no apparent changes at all from the first day I met him with his long and flowing silver hair, his chain-smoking of brown cigarettes, his wicked sense of humor, his gruff crackly voice, and his genuine love and devotion to animals. Ed Hill loved his cats, like children.
Ed Hill may have stayed the same for 68 years of his life. However, the fairytale place and the eccentric lifestyle he’d not only joined but invented for himself weren’t the same anymore. One by one, Las Vegas expanded and enveloped and effectively exterminated all the Runyinesque figures like Ed Hill. Beatable blackjack games died up. Casinos got wiser. And Ed Hill’s wiseguy associates faded and passed away.
On May 15, 2022, Ed Hill made his final Facebook post. It was a heartwarming and funny video of animals. I presume that amidst all the chaos, Ed Hill found comfort and joy in nature. A day later, he was with nature, leaving us only with memories — fond memories that still make me smile.
FOOTNOTE: A few days after this article appeared, Mason Malmuth contacted me. He takes strong exception to the story told by Ed about the background of the book. Here’s Malmuth response, printed here in full:
Nolan:
You need to take this down. Much of this is not true. You and I need to sit down and have a conversation. For example, when I first met Ed Hill back in the late 1980s he told me that he used the name Hill which came from a former good friend (of his) who was a top pool player. The supposed A.P. Hill connection didn\’t come until many years later when he seemed to pick up an interest in the American Civil War (and that probably came from me since I had a long interest in this history).
I also find the stuff about Hold \’em Poker for Advanced Players (whose title you don\’t have right) highly insulting, and all of it is false. The first edition, 1988, of the book was put together from written notes I developed based on conversations with David Sklansky two years earlier, and I also got a little help from Ray Zee, and I didn\’t know Ed Hill when the original notes for the book were done.
I\’m also the author or co-author on 20 books as well as a publisher of 46 books. Ed Hill had nothing to do with any of this.
I believe that some of Hill\’s commentary to you may have been colored by his large financial loss in Poker World Magazine, money of which he inherited after the death of his mother. Poker World Magazine published from December 1995 through June 1996. I was involved in that project but could see a disaster coming and sold out before the first issue was published. I also rarely spoke to Ed Hill again after his failed lawsuit the next year against Annie Duke relative to Poker World Magazine.
When I first met Hill back in the late 1980s, I twice lent him money which he paid back each time. Also, this is the first I ever heard that he spent time in Virginia. This may have also been picked up from me since I spent six years at Virginia Tech earning two degrees in mathematics.
Mason Malmuth