Soundings From Titanic

Of all the hustlers that lived in my time, I was the best. I don't mean hustlers like the guys who work their propositions in fancy executive layouts, but like the guys who will play you any game you can name for any amount you can count and will look straight into your heart while they're scheming how to beat you. I never was any kind of world champion gin-rummy player because there's too much luck to gin, and for the same reason I lost about $2 million fooling with the horses and drilled myself a few empty holes in the ground where there should have been oil. But I was smart, which is better than lucky in some ways, and I was very cool and steady and a fine athlete, so I usually had the edge in most games. To be a winner a man has to feel good about himself and know he has some kind of skillful advantage going in. It's like what I told a judge one time when I was charged with operating a game of chance. "Your Honor," I said, "this charge couldn't be right. There wasn't nobody in that room had a chance but me."

Everybody of any maturity connected with the hustling trade has heard of Titanic Thompson, despite my efforts to keep my face and name and especially my abilities pretty much of a secret. Even though some gamblers believe a big reputation is like a honeypot that draws the flies—suckers wanting to try their hand against the best just one time, don't you know—I always looked at it the other way around and avoided publicity so as not to scare folks away. That's why I was happy the New York newspapers called me by the wrong name when I was hauled in as a witness in the famous Arnold Rothstein murder case. Later on I'll tell you some things about that murder, which took place 44 years ago, things I've never said before. Anyway, the New York papers believed my name was Thompson when I told them it was. I have never registered in a hotel under that name in my life. My real name is Alvin Clarence Thomas.

But word got around about me eventually. I guess it had to, considering some of the feats I have pulled off in my years of hustling. How could I keep it quiet when I won nearly $1 million as my share in a long-running San Francisco poker game with Nick the Greek as my partner? Or when I shot a 29 on the back nine to beat Byron Nelson and win myself a nice bet. I was about the best golfer in the world in those days, and people are going to talk about things like that. I used to have a nickel-blue limousine and a yellow polo coat and a pile of diamond rings. I've had to shoot and kill five people and cause another to drown himself, all of them crooks trying to rob me or hurt somebody. I won the Arizona State trapshooting championship four years in a row, and I got married four times to pretty young girls, which is all true. I've had a lot of lies told about me, which is true, too. So this is a good chance to get some straight stories laid out. I'll be 80 this fall and can't raise a game at the par-3 course near my house in Grapevine, Texas because they know I can still shoot it in three under par. But when they say I never could lose at anything, that isn't true. I've been broke too many times to count. That's how come I never did like a bet that was dead even. You've got to be lucky to win that kind of bet, and I had everything but luck.

My daddy was off gambling somewhere the night I was born in a three-room log house in the hill country of Rogers, Ark. They say he came home for a while, but he took off again when I was three or four months old. I hunted for many years before I finally found him and I set out to bust him in a poker game in Oil City, La., but I'll come to that later. My stepdaddy, granddaddy and six uncles played penny-ante games and checkers and dominoes, and I grew up learning how. I didn't have much education, but I had a natural head for mathematics. I have worked out odds on just about everything you could put money on. It's amazing how many gamblers don't know what the real odds on a proposition are.

What do you think the odds are that if you throw up four coins at once, you can call them all? Most people think it's 5 or 6 to 1, but if you call two heads and two tails it's only 5 to 3. If six coins are tossed at once, you call three tails and three heads. That's a true 11-to-5 proposition, but people will give you all kinds of bigger odds than that. I like to bet on throwing 12 with the dice. It takes 24� rolls to throw 12. That's dead even. A lot of people think if you can throw 12 once in 24 rolls, you can throw it twice in 48. The fact is it takes 60 rolls to throw 12 twice, and I have won a bundle on that proposition.

Some books say it's 8 to 5 you don't hold a pair with five cards. The real odds are nearly dead even. So if anybody would lay you 11 to 10 or 6 to 5, you can bet they're holding a pair and have the best of it. Playing poker with five cards you can bet you hold as big a spade as the eight and have a little the best of it. Betting on a seven would give you a lot the best of it. There are thousands of these little propositions. Once I bet a gambler that two of the first 30 people we met would have the same birthday. Knowing me pretty well, he thought I was tricking him and made sure we found strangers. I won on the 28th person. The truth is that on each of the last five the odds were better than even money in my favor.

One of the smoothest propositions I ever worked was as an 11-year-old boy back in Arkansas. We raised cows and pigs, cut ties for the railroad tracks, hunted and fished in the hills. I had my own shotgun by the time I was 10, but I could kill a quail almost as easy with a rock. I had a powerful throwing arm. I could throw a rock 75 feet farther than any major league outfielder could throw a baseball. I won money throwing oranges on top of buildings and loaded pecans clean over buildings. But this time that I worked this smooth proposition as a boy, it was with my good water spaniel.

I used to watch these dudes come to fish with their elegant casting outfits, and I wanted one of those things. I had trained my spaniel to dive to the bottom of the fishing hole and bring back a rock I tossed in. So one day I told a dude my dog could do that and offered to bet the dog against his casting outfit. The dude said, "Mark it so I know it's the same rock you throw in." I did, and the spaniel leaped into the water, swam down out of sight and came up in a minute with the marked rock. What that dude didn't know, of course, was the bottom of that pond was covered with marked rocks.

When I was 16 I was 6'1" and strong as a wild razorback hog. The notion had come to me that it was time to see what the world held for a boy of my talents. I told my mama I was leaving. She said she'd been expecting it and asked me to promise her two things—that I would never drink or smoke. I made that promise, and I have kept it.

I rode the train to Monett, Mo. and got a job selling maps door to door, trading on my pitch of being a poor homeless boy. I traveled through Missouri for six months, stopping at all kinds of towns and looking in gambling halls for my daddy, meanwhile picking up a great education from the gamblers. I could already handle a deck of cards pretty well, and now I learned how to hustle pool and roll the dice.