Gavin somehow knew this life was all an illusion and he was just going to frolic through it.
My first close up encounter with him was in the Seven Card Stud event at the WSOP maybe seven or eight years ago. I had never played with anyone quite like him at the WSOP. He chattered away hand after hand, talking about anything that crossed his mind, most of it not having anything to do with the task at hand. I found him irritating at first and amusing after that. No question that he lightened the mood for everyone at the table.
At some point he lost a big pot and rather than lament his loss, he proclaimed himself to be the best stud player in the world. He looked around the room and said, "There's not one of these champions who will play me heads up for $20,000!" Toto Leonidas was sitting to my right and took offense at this remark and offered to play him himself. He told Gavin to put his money up if he was serious. With that Gavin reached in his pocket and pulled out a huge wad of bills all wrapped neatly with a rubber band, and plunked it down on the table. That seemed to stifle the conversation and Toto toned down a little and the game continued.
On the very next hand, Gavin stopped the dealer and said he had only one down card. He looked under the edge of the table, on the floor and even picked up his stack of bills and looked under it. Sure enough he had only one down card. Right or wrong, the dealer now delivered a second down card to Gavin and the game continued. No one thought anything more about it, until maybe twenty minutes later when Gavin busted out of the tournament and got up to leave. As he picked up his stack of bills he felt something funny and lo and behold he pulled the nine of clubs out of the stack. It had lodged perfectly in the wad of bills. We had been playing with a short deck all this time!
Of course, Gavin just laughed and flipped the card to the dealer and walked away. The rest of us sat there stunned, not sure what to do. Someone called a floor man over and asked him what we should do. He just shook his head and said there was nothing we could do now except keep playing, and we did.
A couple of years later I ran into Gavin and reminded him about the incident. He looked at me with a quizzical look on his face. He had no idea what I was talking about.