In Las Vegas, Huck Cheever is a poker player, brilliant but also prone to let emotion take over. It's the week of the poker world series, and Huck must come up with the $10,000 entry fee, which he wins, loses, borrows, and loses - and even steals part of from Billie Offer, an earnest young woman who's new in town and who catches Huck's eye. By the time the tournament starts, Huck owes everyone. Complicating things is the arrival of Huck's father, whom Huck detests for having left his mother, a champion player in town to win. Can Huck learn to play poker the way he lives and to live the way he plays poker? Or is his only flush the sound of his life going down the toilet?

A young writer goes to Wiesbaden to write about gambling and gamblers, only to ultimately become a compulsive gambler himself. Losing all his wealth, as well as his moral fibre, he commits the ultimate degradation of robbing a church poor box in order to feed his compulsion.

Beth, who lap dances to make ends meet, leaves Florida for Las Vegas hoping to be a cocktail waitress. She meets two women who introduce her to Dink, a gambler with a system. He hires her - she's good with numbers - and she promptly falls for him, even though he's married to a woman who seems to do nothing but spend his money. Beth tries to entice Dink whose wife, Tulip, tells him to choose; he does and promptly goes on a losing streak. The repercussions of his choice play out with a heavy gambler who has a parole officer, a cheesy bookmaker in Curaçao, Beth's desire to keep a friend out of prison, and help from an unlikely source.