One of a Kind

By the time he had turned 16, Herbert O. Yardley had a head start down the road to juvenile delinquency. His mother died and left him $200, and his father left him to fend for himself. Furthermore, he had a taste for high life in the local saloons, and at the turn of the century, Worthington, Ind. was loaded with them. But Herbert was saved by sport. Monty, the boss of his favorite barroom, was a gambler who taught his young customer the finer points of that great indoor game--poker.

Yardley has never forgotten the man who dealt out that helping hand. "I have consistently won at poker all my life," says he in The Education of a Poker Player (Simon & Schuster: $3.95). "I do not believe in luck--only in the immutable law of averages." So skilled did Yardley become in the mathematics of that immutable law that he was able to make his prowess pay off in other fields. He organized a U.S. cryptographic bureau during World War I, won a Distinguished Service Medal for breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, and told about it after the war in the bestselling The American Black Chamber.* Between wars he served in China as a cryptanalyst for Chiang Kaishek. But whatever he did, wherever he went, his greatest pleasure always came from poker.

Sharps & Suckers. One key to a successful game, Yardley learned early, is to be observant, to study the others at the table until you know all their idiosyncrasies. "When players check, call or bet," says Yardley, "a man with a sensitive ear can detect a slight inflection of voice and read what it means." The earnest student scrutinized card sharps and suckers from Indiana to Chungking--and while he parted them from their cash, some of them came apart themselves. He was at Monty's Place in Worthington the morning a traveling salesman named Jake Moses sat in a "friendly" game and was bluffed out of ten trunks full of shoes. He watched Bones Alverson, a slow-witted farmer, bet his heavily mortgaged land against a traveling tent show, and die of a heart attack when he drew a winning four aces.

When he got to the Orient, Yardley happily found nothing inscrutable about the old China poker hands. Around the table in the Chungking Hostel, he recalls, there were such worldly adversaries as Herr Neilson, the Generalissimo's antiaircraft adviser, "a good-natured writer from TIME Magazine" named Teddy White, and Mickey, a plump, cigar-smoking woman who turned out to be Writer Emily Hahn, in China to do the history of the three Soong sisters. The place was full of poker patsies, and Yardley put to profitable use the carefully calculated rules that make his book a primer for all serious players. A sampling:

P: Don't drink while playing. You may bet that black is white.

P: Don't stay in a game unless there are at least three suckers. If possible, sit to their left and let them do your betting for you.

P: Don't overvalue or undervalue your opponent's intellect. Identify yourself with his cunning.

P: Don't forget that 75% of all cardplayers are simpletons.

P: Don't try to bluff a winner.

P: Don't ever play unless you think you have the best hand or the makings of one. Don't become interested in second-best hands.

P: Don't ever stay for the third card in stud with less than jack-10. The secret of stud is to stay on higher cards than your opponents do.

P: Don't ever stay on a short pair in draw. You need at least two kings.

P: Don't think you can win at table stakes if you cannot win at limit poker. A sound player can win in any poker game.

Today at 68, Yardley still plays tight, winning poker. He is so tough a competitor that even before he published his book, friends at the National Press Club in Washington would desert his table and jump to another game the minute they saw a chance. Now that his warning to suckers is in circulation, he is finding it hard to get anybody to take a hand in a friendly little game.

*At the 1921 disarmament conference in Washington, where the U.S. and Britain demanded a 10-10-6 naval ratio with Japan, the Japanese insisted that they would settle for no less than 10-10-7. But because Yardley was reading the Japanese secret cables from Tokyo, the U.S. confidently stood pat in the knowledge that the Japanese delegate would throw in his hand.

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