The Education of a Poker Player - Part IV

He learned to dance and to play poker and when laborday came he hadn't saved any money but he felt he'd had a wonderful summer.

- John Dos Passos, U.S.A.



In early 1941, Gen. Joseph Mauborgne, chief signal officer of the U.S. Army, recommended to the Canadians that they hire [Herbert O.] Yardley to run their code-breaking unit, describing him as "an expert cryptographer and fine organizer." They did. Relieved to be working for the Allies again, Yardley and Edna moved to Ottawa. Between June and November, Yardley built Canada's cryptographic bureau pretty much from scratch, training its fledgling staff to decode messages intercepted on their way to and from Germany and Japan. A few days before the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor, however, the Canadians submitted to pressure to fire him from American and British counterparts still angry about The American Black Chamber. Some columnists wrote that if Yardley had still been working for the code bureau, "the attack might never have occurred."



George Bye interceded on Yardley's behalf with Eleanor Roosevelt, who was also Bye's client, but nothing came of it. Yardley was out once again, and this time for good. Edna compared their retreat from Ottawa to Napoleon's from Moscow, "with both parties leaving in snow and defeat." Herb later found work building houses and hawking real estate in New York and Florida, but his heart wasn't in it. David Kahn's opinion is, "Canada recovered. Yardley didn't."



At least not right away. It wasn't until his retirement in the mid-1950s, when he and Edna were living in Silver Spring, Maryland, that he decided to write – by himself this time – what would be his final and most famous book. On Nov. 9, 1957, when an excerpt called "Winning at Poker" was featured on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, the issue broke the newsstand record by selling 5.6 million copies. Fed up with card sharks, the Post's vast middle-class readership was apparently hungry for lessons in tough, honest poker.



A week later the complete book, The Education of a Poker Player, was brought out by Simon and Schuster. Yardley's editor told him that sales immediately took off "like one big-assed bird." A writer for the New York Times Book Review declared, "What Goren and Vanderbilt have done for the bridge player, Herbert O. Yardley has now done for the poker player. He has given us dignity, wisdom and philosophy." Three-fingered HOY had come a long way since being "gagged" by Public Law 37.



That the critical and commercial success of The Education occurred during the administration of another bald Midwestern draw player and a Quaker vice president who'd built his political bankroll in stud games on Navy bases in the Pacific was probably not a coincidence. Veterans had played the game throughout World War II, as Roosevelt did to unwind after long days directing their efforts. On decks issued by Allied pursers and quartermasters, Churchill was depicted as the king of spades, FDR the king of diamonds, Stalin the king of hearts, de Gaulle the king of clubs; Hitler, as the joker, had a bomb dropping onto his head. Decks smuggled in to POWs concealed escape routes out of Germany, revealed when certain pasteboards were dipped in water. As Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower outfoxed the Nazis on D-Day with a variety of bluffing maneuvers before taking Normandy Beach. As President Truman returned from Potsdam in August 1945, he relaxed in a weeklong stud game with journalists aboard the U.S.S. Augusta while finalizing his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Knowing that Secretary of State James Byrnes vigorously disagreed with him, Truman used the marathon session to reduce Byrnes' face time. Merriman Smith, a UPI reporter playing in the game, wrote that Truman "was running a straight stud filibuster against his own Secretary of State." By 1957, the public was primed for a serious book about poker.



Books before Yardley's were either tales of high-stakes action, usually ending with a sucker holding four kings losing everything, or straightforward primers about how to play squarely dealt hands. Part of what makes The Education so original is that it braids racy factual memoir with rock-solid poker advice. The first half takes place in Worthington around 1906, the second half in China in the late '30s. Each chapter focuses on a particular variant: five-card draw, stud, deuces-wild, lowball, and both straight and high-low seven-card stud, with an afterword explaining less popular variants. Most of the conversation involves the teenage Yardley receiving sage advice from Monty or, in the later chapters, the worldly spy master repeating that advice to Ling Fan, his Chinese translator. Ling wants to improve his game without getting fired or executed by his dim-witted boss, who is known as "the Donkey." A big pot always develops in which the psychology of the players is thrown into high relief as the hand tensely plays out. Each chapter concludes with odds tables, a dozen or so sample hands, and a summary of tactical pointers.



Yardley reports that the only "clean" game in Worthington was run by his old mentor, James Montgomery. In 1905, Monty and 14-year-old Herb watch a hand of deuces-wild in which an elderly Swedish corn farmer, Bones Alverson, bets the last quarter of his farm against an itinerant theater producer, who wagers a tent show. Bones wins the hand but, because of the excitement, dies of a heart attack while clutching his cards Hickok-style. Unlike farmer Meredith's chest pains, Bones' are only too real. He bet the farm and won a traveling theater, just before buying the farm. Monty delivers the proceeds to Bones' widow. "She'll probably grieve for a couple of days," he says, "then be relieved that he's dead. At least he can't gamble the farm away now." Perhaps A-A-A-2-J, or any quad aces for that matter, should henceforth be called Bones' Hand.



Yardley also writes of Jake Moses, a traveling salesman who lost 10 trunks of shoes, and of players who lost and won horses, cattle, wagons, grain, sawmills, and farming implements. A banker is caught buying in with marked money he had stolen from the bank. The new owners of sawmills and grocery stores show up the next morning and explain to employees what happened. Poker and its open-stakes risks are sufficiently ingrained in the national mindset by 1907 that such explanations make sense.



In one of the more intriguing asides, Monty claims that his favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe, "was disinherited because of his poker debts." The fact is that Poe did lose $2,500 playing ecarte – a 32-card French game for two players who bid and took tricks – as a freshman at the University of Virginia in 1826. Sharps were almost certainly involved, with Poe being one of the victims. The incident was the catalyst for one of his best tales of Gothic horror, "William Wilson," which concerns cheating at ecarte. Yet none of Poe's numerous biographers mention him playing poker, and his poems and tales contain not a shred of evidence that he was familiar with the newer American pastime. Monty's cautionary point is well taken, but a Poe tale Herb might have found even more instructive is "The Gold-Bug," which depends on the solution of a cryptogram.



Late in the China section, Yardley provides a suspenseful account of his time under threat of assassination. Moving around incognito, he tracks down a Nazi spy while coaching Ling on seven-card stud tactics. In a big pot in Hong Kong, he confidently outplays a snobbish British "plunger" by counting how many diamonds are out. "Most persons successful in cryptology have what is known as a photographic mind; otherwise they could not retain . . . the long sequences of code words and letters which must be remembered if the cipher is to be unraveled. This is not memory," he adds, "it is mental photography. Without effort I could name every diamond that had been dealt."



With a board of four diamonds, the plunger raises Yardley $5,000. "Too much?" he asks. "Not too much if you didn't make the fifth diamond," Yardley tells him coolly. "And I don't think you did. There's only one diamond left, and unless you have a horseshoe concealed somewhere, you didn't catch it." Holding a straight, Yardley calls. "Because of his insolence I dragged the money in even before he turned his hole cards." The plunger then blows Yardley's cover. The scene is also instructive to hold'em players who may have forgetten, if they ever knew to begin with, how important memory is while playing stud. If they hope to succeed at H.O.R.S.E., the new gold-standard of poker excellence, Part II of The Education is a good place to start.



Yardley's general strategy is to minimize risk at all costs. "I do not believe in luck," he writes, "only in the immutable law of averages." As for tactics: "Assume the worst, believe no one, and make your move only when you are certain that you are unbeatable or have, at worst, exceptionally good odds in your favor." He also declines to sit in any game "unless there are at least three suckers" playing.



Not surprisingly, he came to be known as Old Adhesive, and throughout his life more than a few players changed tables when he sat down because he refused to give action without a huge starting hand. As David Sklansky put it in The Theory of Poker in 1994, "A good player develops the patience to wait for the right situations to play a pot and the discipline to release a hand he judges to be second-best." Yardley, if anything, had even less gamble in him than Sklansky does. His squeaky-tight approach would often be outplayed by today's pros, of course. They'd steal his antes, fold when he bet, attack whenever low cards appeared on his board. If he learned to play hold'em, he probably wouldn't take enough risks to make money in no-limit tournaments. But in pot-limit ring games against undisciplined amateurs in the first half of the previous century, his rocky ABC approach seems to have served Yardley well. Millions of his readers have felt well served by it, too.



The Education is also read for its do-or-die showdowns and worldly philosophy. One British edition included a foreword by Ian Fleming, who wrote of its "smoke-filled pages" containing "a hatful of some of the finest gambling stories I had ever read." He accurately predicted it "would certainly become a classic." An introduction by Al Alvarez emphasized its personal or existential qualities. Alvarez said it helped him grow up, and not just as a poker player. "I had a marriage I could not handle," he writes, "a childish desire to be loved by the whole world, and an equally childish conviction that everything would turn out all right in the end. When it didn't I was – simply and profoundly – outraged. I had lived my life as I had played poker, recklessly and optimistically, all my cards open on the table and nothing in reserve. I had also assumed that everybody else was doing the same. I was wrong, of course, and it was about the time I began to realize this that I first read Yardley. … What applied so cogently to money in a poker pot applied equally to the feelings I had invested in my disastrous personal affairs: 'Do the odds favor my playing regardless of what I have already contributed?' I knew the answer. The only puzzle was why I should have discovered it not in Shakespeare or Donne or Eliot or Lawrence or any of my other literary heroes, but in a funny, vivid, utterly unliterary book by an American cryptographer and intelligence agent. [I]t was the beginning of my real education and I sometimes wonder if that was what Yardley, too, was implying with his title. In the end, what he is describing is not so much a game of cards as a style of life."



The Education also broke ground for the anecdotal advice of some Super/System authors, Barry Greenstein's Ace on the River, Tom McEvoy and T.J. Cloutier (especially the latter's often violent "Tales"), Dan Harrington's wittily quantitative breakdowns of no-limit hold'em tournament strategy, and Phil Gordon's debonair primers, as well as for the narratives of Alvarez, Holden, Michael Konik, Aaron Brown, Michael Craig, Peter Alson, the Lederer sisters, and others.



Yardley is a representative man of the first half of the 20th century. He drank, smoked, played poker, chased skirts, and was honored and shunned while serving in three major wars. He sold invisible ink but chose to play poker on the level, and encouraged his readers to do the same. Like John von Neumann's game theory during the Cold War, Yardley's pokeraticious logic informed what he did for the military. In his code-breaking work and his books, he unpacked the subtly expedient ways in which poker players and cryptanalysts think. As America struggles to decode Al Qaeda videotapes, jihadi websites, and billions of Internet messages, we could clearly use several thousand more "cipher brains" to recognize and translate Arabic word patterns and separate orders from bluffs.



Unlike The American Black Chamber, Yardley's poker bestseller cost him no job opportunities; it brought him nothing but royalty checks and prestige. The trouble was that he had only a year to enjoy them. He died on Aug. 7, 1958, a few days after suffering a stroke. Buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery, he was later inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. Though his reputation and influence far surpasses several members of the Poker Hall of Fame, he has yet to even be nominated, in spite of the fact that, more than anyone else, Herb Yardley helped usher in the age of square poker.