Chick-Tac-Toe: A prized fight in Las Vegas.

Most people go to Las Vegas for the gambling. Dazzled by neon, crazed by greed and Wayne Newton, they challenge the odds, trying to outwit the trickster goddess, Lady Luck herself. But I was there for a different, wilier adversary. I was in town for the chicken. It was payback time, a chance for the revenge I'd been waiting for since that shameful, sultry night in Manhattan's Chinatown all those years ago. You know the sort of evening -- too much Tsingtao, not enough sense. Next thing, you're in a seedy airless room doing something you shouldn't: in my case, playing a chicken at tic-tac-toe -- and losing. Years later I tried to track the bird down for a rematch, but it had flown the coop: dead in a heat wave, said some, off hustling in another hutch, said others.

And then the rumors began -- whispers about tic-tac-toe-playing poultry spotted in Atlantic City, claims of sightings in Indiana and Las Vegas, reports of the theft of three uncannily smart birds from a county fair in Bensalem, Pa. And always there in the background, a muttered, mysterious name: Bunky Boger.

The stories are true. A slick chicken is back on the scene, but this time it's not alone. Chickens skilled in tic-tac-toe have come home to roost in no fewer than three locales -- all of them casinos (and two of them called Tropicana) -- while others, avian carny folk, work the county-fair circuit, usually without being stolen. The source of this scourge? Bunky Boger. Turns out he runs a Springdale, Ark., farm known for training animals to perform the feats some call remarkable and others just plain peculiar. Bunky's brainy brood does not stop at the O's and the X's. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, these chickens dance and play basketball too.

National Review's budget for investigating strange tales from Arkansas has shrunk over the last couple of years, so I can't claim to have checked Boger's methods. There's talk, however, of "positive reinforcement" (basically the use of food as a reward) and other behaviorist techniques of the sort developed by the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Broadly speaking, Skinner saw personality as a blank slate, pliant and ripe for conditioning. This is an idea that played no small part in the disasters of 20th-century collectivism, but it seems to work well when applied to chickens. Far mightier than the Mighty Ducks, Boger's chickens are tricky to lick. Recorded defeats are few and far between: just a handful this year, so rare that the two Tropicanas (Atlantic City and Las Vegas) are prepared to offer $10,000 to any customer able to take on the chicken, mano a claw, and win.

Ten thousand dollars? That's not chickenfeed. Maybe I was counting chickens before they were dispatched, but revenge, it seemed, was going to be profitable as well as sweet.

Outside the Las Vegas Tropicana, all is anticipation. Large signs proclaim the "Chicken Challenge -- Play Tic-Tac-Toe With a Live Chicken." A poster shows a chicken contemplating a tic-tac-toe Gotterdammerung. The creature's blue eyes (contacts?) are bulging with tension. It's sweating pullets. Good.

Once you're inside, there is a brief detour for paperwork (tackling the chicken is free, but prospective foes of the fowl have to sign up beforehand for the casino's optimistically named "Winner's Club") and then it's on to the main event, first heralded by a glimpse of white feathers fluttering in a large, glass-fronted booth and an amazed Italian muttering, "Pollo? Un pollo?"