A Winning Hand

Over twenty years ago, I started a regular weekly poker game with a group of friends who had all recently gravitated to London. We had been inspired to do this by Anthony Holden’s beguiling description of the ‘Tuesday Night Game’ in his excellent book Big Deal. Holden – then probably better known for his biographies of Laurence Olivier, the Prince of Wales and the Queen Mother – describes the year he spent trying to make his way as an amateur in the world of professional poker, taking in a range of exotic locations from Morocco to Las Vegas and culminating in a creditable but ultimately failed attempt at the 1988 World Series of Poker. To men in their early twenties, with the responsibilities of family and the joys of a mortgage still ahead of them, it appeared an impossibly romantic lifestyle, and in our small way we were determined to capture some of it.

At first all went well and the game became a regular fixture which broke up the monotony of the working week. However, although the stakes were not high (a ‘big’ bet was signalled by the pushing of a pile of coins into the middle of the table rather than tossing in a wad of notes) I found my losses beginning to mount week on week. Clearly something had to be done. Ducking out of one of the week’s social highlights was simply not an option so I had to improve my game – but how? This was before the days when the game – through online gaming, coverage on Channel 4 and weekly tournaments in the local pub – became ubiquitous and before the Internet made information on even the most abstruse subject available at the click of a mouse. At that time there was relatively little information published in the UK on a comparatively obscure card game that you were most likely to have seen played in a smoky saloon in a Western and which was not common outside America – factors which, to be honest, represented a significant part of its allure. I consulted Holden’s inspirational tome for guidance and sure enough he did not disappoint. In Chapter 4, he describes how his friend and fellow poker player Al Alvarez recommends that he read the poker ‘Bible’ – Herbert O. Yardley’s The Education of a Poker Player – before embarking upon his foray into the professional game. This text began to assume a grail-like status in my mind and I resolved that I simply had to own it. I obsessively scoured the shelves of every bookshop I happened across for several weeks before eventually tracking it down in the games and pastimes section of Foyles. Upon reading it I found the book to be a curious and compelling amalgam of autobiography and poker manual. It divides into two sections, the first of which deals with Yardley’s early life and his introduction to poker. He was born in Worthington, Indiana, in 1889 and, after inheriting $200 following the death of his mother in 1905, thereafter ‘did pretty much as he pleased’. While still at school he began frequenting ‘Monty’s Place’, one of the local card halls, and his experiences there form the basis of the first section of the book. Monty’s is the scene of some wild gambling and stark human drama. As Yardley recounts in the Preface, ‘I saw the big Swede, Bones Alverson, a poor weather-beaten corn farmer, bet the last of his farm against a tent show, only to die three minutes later, his cards clutched in his hands – a winner. I saw Jake Moses, a travelling shoe salesman, lose ten trunks of shoes. I saw a bank teller trapped with marked money he had stolen from the bank: a postmaster go to jail for shortages at the post office.’ Following some initial losses, Yardley’s fortunes turn when he notices that the left-handed Monty has a habit of betting with his right hand when bluffing – a trait that is known in poker parlance as a ‘tell’. Using this knowledge, Yardley wins a large pot and is taken under Monty’s wing where his game develops to a more sophisticated level. Although his early career is not described in this book, rather than earning a living from playing cards Yardley went on to be a renowned expert on intelligence and code-breaking, becoming the founder and first head of the US cryptographic organization MI-8. One of his unit’s chief successes was in breaking the Japanese diplomatic codes and thereby providing American negotiators with significant information for the Washington Naval Conference on disarmament of 1921–2. However, when MI-8 closed in 1929 Yardley took to writing about his code-breaking experiences to support his family, and his indiscreet memoir The American Black Chamber was published in 1931. It became a bestseller and a source of much embarrassment to the US government of the time. In the second half of The Education of a Poker Player the action moves forward thirty years to China, where Yardley has been hired by Chiang Kai-shek to monitor messages intercepted from the invading Japanese army. Yardley now assumes the role of teacher to improve the card play of his Chinese interpreter Ling Fan. In a country where it is crucial to maintain face, Yardley realizes the importance of quickly establishing his position as the infallible Honourable Adviser. In this respect one of his first tasks – which tests his resourcefulness – is to satisfy Ling Fan’s curiosity as to what a naked white woman looks like. In another particularly intriguing episode Yardley deduces the existence of a Nazi spy through studying the serial numbers on a series of banknotes he has won in a poker game. Both sections of the book contain a wealth of intriguing anecdote and Yardley, clearly a keen observer of human nature, excels when describing the many colourful characters he encounters. The Education of a Poker Player was originally published in the United States in 1957, the year before Yardley’s death. Initially English publishers were sceptical that the book would find much of an audience here but Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, had been given a copy on a visit to America and was an enthusiastic champion. Eventually his publisher, Jonathan Cape, gave in to pressure from its bestselling author and the English edition appeared in 1959. The first edition contains an introduction by Fleming in which he rails against the fact that poker was then illegal in English card clubs since it was not considered to be a game of skill. This situation was remedied in 1960 with the introduction of a new Betting and Gaming Act. Today gambling has been liberalized to an extent that would have been unthinkable in Fleming’s day, but Yardley’s advice on card play still holds good for the modern player. Perversely though, for a man who lived such a colourful life, his attitude to poker was innately conservative. He seldom bluffed and relied upon a detailed knowledge of the odds of obtaining each hand in order to win, only betting heavily when he was almost certain of holding the winning hand. He sums up his philosophy thus: ‘I do not believe in luck – only the immutable law of averages.’ Certainly Yardley’s guidance helped me control my losses – and even come out ahead occasionally – in the weekly game, and in my view his philosophy that success generally depends upon taking a calculated risk rather than a reckless gamble holds true in life as well as in cards.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Stephen Honey 2011