The Education of a Poker Player - Part I

Just imagine how little your understanding of the world on the eve of the events of 1914 would have helped you guess what was to happen next.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan



As more and better information became available at the turn of the century – mainly in tactical primers and advice about how to thwart cheaters – honest players with bluffing and reckoning skill began to outnumber the cold-deck artists and mirror men. Talented square players profited not by outsharping the sharps, but by steering well clear of them. Their fiercely competitive action welcomed as many suckers as possible, of course, but unlike the shark attacks still under way all around them, these were games in which today's barracudas and devilfish would be only too happy to play. Why? Because competence and luck were allowed to determine who left at dawn with the money, not violence or con jobs.



The most intriguing example of this new breed of player is Herbert O. Yardley, a well-traveled Hoosier who combined Quaker discipline, studiously acquired card sense, and high-level training as a cryptanalyst into the kind of skill set we still associate with poker mastery – or, if not mastery, what might be called Sklanskyesque rockhood. The tactics Yardley recommended in 1957 in The Education of a Poker Player – a book that connects Girolamo Cardano's 1564 work on primero to 21st-century editions by David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth, and other pokeraticians – could not have been much more conservative.



Like most philosophical bents, Yardley's emerged from the soil of its birthplace. He was born on April 13, 1889, in Worthington, a grain terminal 60 miles southwest of Indianapolis. Surrounded by endlessly flat corn and wheat fields, its 1,450 residents were at the demographic center of America: The same number of people lived north and east of them as lived south and west. Worthingtonians were earthy and plain folk who had settled along the Eel River in the heart of the heart of the country, with perhaps a bit more than their fair share of slipperyness. That all seven of their saloons hosted stud and draw games and allowed minors to play seemed to confirm this. It certainly demonstrated poker's mainstream appeal fourscore years after poque moved up from New Orleans.



Yardley's father was a railroad station agent and telegrapher who taught his son Samuel Morse's dot-and-dash signaling system, planting the seed of a lifelong fascination with codes. Herb also rounded into an impressive student-athlete. At 5 feet 5 inches tall and 120 pounds, he was captain of the football team, playing both safety and quarterback. When he was 13, however, his mother suddenly died of a heart attack. Angry and despondent, Herb's own health declined, and he became a troublemaker around town and in school. He spent most his time playing poker, a game he had learned from his grandfather, who had learned it while serving in the Union Army. Determined to improve his results against classmates, Herb became more disciplined at the table as well as in the rest of his life. Once football practice was over and his homework was done, he dealt out hands on his bedspread and calculated the best ways to play them.



With $200 his mother had left him, he began, at 16, to compete against local adults. Studying the games in each saloon, he decided that Monty's Place offered the most tempting action. "Big-league stuff," he called it, adding, "It is one thing to face eleven football opponents when you have ten men with you, but to face six hungry wolves alone is something else indeed." The better to avoid being eaten alive, he persuaded Monty to give him regular tutorials. "I figure the odds for every card I draw," began the first lesson, "and if the odds are not favorable, I fold. This doesn't sound very friendly, but what's friendly about poker? It's a cutthroat game at best." Yet if playing strictly by the odds didn't give opponents many chances to take your money, it was quite a bit friendlier than cheating them.



The chapters of The Education set in Monty's Place provide a well-lit diorama of where and how honest poker was played circa 1906. The cardroom in back was "about twenty feet square, with two barred windows high above the ground and an iron wood stove at the end. … The windows had dark drawn curtains. The walls were unplastered brick, the woodwork painted white, and the floor scrubbed. In the center was a large round table covered with a green billiard cloth and surrounded by seven cane chairs. Others, for loafers and kibitzers, were scattered here and there or were grouped around the stove when the weather was cold. The table was lighted by a single bulb, extended to the center by a cord from the ceiling and shaded against the eyes of the players. At the side of each chair was a spittoon. … When the game was in progress, the door was barred with the usual sliding window and guarded by Runt, the bouncer, so named because of his size. Strangers were welcome after being frisked for weapons by Runt."



Because too many players, like Captain Willie Massie in Hickok's last game, were still in the habit of peeking at discards, Monty posted a warning: "Please don't FRIG with the Discards, Penalty $20," with a sign underneath adding wittily, "Vulgar Language Forbidden." Monty was nonetheless "a man's man," good with his fists and attractive to women, though Herb understands "it might have been that they attached a certain glamour to him because he was a successful gambler who had killed a man." As it had been on steamboats and in the Wild West, so it was in civilized Worthington: Poker prowess just seemed to go hand in hand with an aptitude for ladies and gunplay. All three still provided ample opportunities to get yourself killed. Yardley reports that, after a disagreement a few years earlier, "My own uncle, a giant of a man with a Jesse James beard, was cut down by a consumptive half his size. Uncle Bill walked a block, sat down on the corner drugstore steps, and bled to death."



To help maintain order and peace, Monty sanctioned only three games: five-card stud, draw, and "deuces," in which the joker and all four deuces were wild. In stud, instead of seven players anteing a quarter each, the dealer anted $2, which must have been a huge disincentive to call stud in dealer's choice. In straight draw and deuces, each player anted 50 cents. Monty raked half a buck from each pot, and he played in the game when it suited him. The competition consisted of strong players, not-bad players, and the 75 percent Monty deemed to be either first- or second-degree "simpletons."



The usual take-out (buy-in) was $20, but as in antebellum Minnesota, a man was allowed to play "open; that is, he could play with the twenty dollars in chips plus whatever he had in his pocket. Aside from cash in the pockets, many played open by backing their hand with real property – cattle, farms, grain and the like." A bill of sale was written up and placed in the pot. Making it even harder to evaluate a hand, a player "was never asked how much he played open, but if he had bet more than the chips he had in front of him, he was required to put up the difference in acceptable IOUs." Unlike farmer Meredith in Laredo, a player at Monty's couldn't be raised out of his equity in the main pot. Once he ran out of cash and collateral, a side pot was established for subsequent bets. There were no Little Lady scenarios. Pots averaged about $15, but when someone flicked on the Gamblin' Agrarians light, they sometimes approached $20,000.



Most important of all, the games at Monty's were "on the level." Cheaters were identified and dealt with firmly though without violence, presumably to keep the police from becoming involved. When One-Eye Jones, a stud player from Indy, rang in a marked deck, Monty quickly spotted it. He held the cards under the light, "bent half of the deck toward him, and released the cards one at a time. When he did this fast you could see the marks. They stood out like a motion picture film turned slowly." Caught red-handed, One-Eye grinned sheepishly. Monty glared at him. "How did you switch decks?"



"I dropped a chip on the floor and made the switch when I picked it up."



"I put a sign on the wall only last week warning crooks I'd throw them out on their ass and they'd forfeit their take-out and all winnings if caught. Got anything to say for yourself?"



"No," said One-Eye, "except if I have to be thrown out I'd rather Runt did it than you." He apparently suspected that flattering Monty's tough-guy reputation would soften him up. And it worked. "All right, Runt," Monty said. "Throw him out the back way but don't be too rough."



We also should note that, like Johnston at the Americus Club, One-Eye dealt short stud, in which the marked back of only one card was enough to know each opponent's entire hand. Another cheat, caught dealing seconds, had the nerve to challenge Monty's tight but honest principles. "My method is painless," the mechanic rationalized. "I give them the ax. You bleed them to death slowly." Monty, that is, won "on superior experience and finesse; I win because I am a card manipulator." Like a magnesium flare illuminating the No Man's Land between sharp and square trenches, the cheater sincerely believed, "Essentially we are no different. In the end we both bleed the sucker."



Herb rejected this moral equivalence and chose to play as a wolf, not a shark. But instead of quitting school to do it full time, he treated it as a lucrative hobby. Even as a teenager, he understood that the natural swings of honest poker ruled out the kind of steady income a man would need to support his family. He buckled down again, became editor of the school paper, and generally impressed folks as being "the smartest boy in the county," with a mind "on a different level than anyone in town." Even more to his credit, Worthingtonians said they'd never known him to lie or cheat. He was always a wolf in wolf's clothing.



After graduating in 1907 and learning more telegraphy, he took a job for the Indianapolis & Vincennes Railroad. He spent most of his salary on tuition for correspondence courses offered by the University of Chicago, which he hoped to attend as an English major before entering law school. But in 1912 his plans veered dramatically when he made the highest score on a civil service exam and was hired as a clerk at the State Department. The annual salary of $900 was enough for him to propose to Hazel Milam, a librarian. The couple moved to Washington and were married there on May 20, 1914. Five weeks later, the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, setting the stage for "the war to end all wars."



According to Yardley's biographer, David Kahn, a respected historian of cryptology, American intelligence gathering was fairly primitive when the newlywed began work at the State Department. In part because the Union had won the Civil War with a few tethered balloons and haphazardly trained spies, the post-bellum army failed to develop much of an intelligence capability; it simply "went back to subduing the Indians." Meanwhile, European technology advanced exponentially. Yet even in the era of dumdum bullets, machine guns, aeroplanes, and tanks, it was radio that triggered the longest leaps forward in military strategy.



Radio signals helped Germany overcome the Royal Navy's ability to cut its overseas cables. Because transmissions could be heard just as easily by the enemy, every message had to be encrypted. Yet Kahn reminds us that once such encryptions were decoded, they would consist "of the very words of the enemy," as opposed to the often garbled or misleading data spies produced. It would be as if a draw player, instead of relying on body language while contemplating a bluff, could hear his opponent thinking, "With aces full, I will reraise." Suddenly it was possible for a single cryptographer – Oswald T. Hitchings, for example, a music teacher from Pembrokeshire who was also an expert on the organs in the Chartres Cathedral, now under threat from the Huns – to be "worth four divisions to the British Army."



Decoded messages led to stunning intelligence coups. The most decisive was the discovery by British cryptographers that in January 1917, German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann offered to help Mexico "reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona" if Mexico would ally herself with Germany. Though Mexico rejected the offer, when the Brits made it public, writes Kahn, it "helped push the United States into war and into world power."



As Woodrow Wilson prepared to send the doughboys Over There, Yardley was startled to learn the president was relying on a decade-old cipher system, in which one letter of the alphabet stood for another. Having easily solved it, Yardley persuaded senior officers that the United States needed more complex codes as well as two new code-breaking services – at home to intercept diplomatic messages and along the western front for military communiques. After drafting a hundred-page "Solution of American Diplomatic Codes," he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps. The newly formed eighth section of military intelligence, MI-8, came to be known as the American Black Chamber. At 28, Yardley was running it.



Next: Yardley parties in Paris and becomes a hero in Washington.