Poker And Literature: Mark Twain (1835-1910)

It is impossible for the writer who wrote extensively about the steamboats of the Mississippi and the Mississippi River itself not be influenced by poker. It was the Mississippi steamboats that were mostly responsible for bringing poker into the Northern states.

In Mark Twain's outstanding work Life On The Mississippi, he tells the story of four robbers/cardsharpers prospecting to cheat a backwoods farmer out of his possessions by engaging him in a poker match. The plan was to develop the pot by betting everything that everyone had, then weave their cheat, take the bets, and split it among themselves. It turned out that luck can never leave the farmer because he was a better player than any of them. He draws out a gun, wipes them out, and takes the bet for himself instead.

Twain grew up by the time poker was being discouraged in the Southwest. As many forms of gambling were beginning to pale, it was through the riverboats of the Mississippi that the games were ferried to the North to find new patrons. In the middle of all this flow, Twain grew up intercepting the details, including poker.

Twain was a man of many activities. Aside from writing, he was also a venture capitalist - a probable by-product of his poker-playing. But unlike in poker, his being a venture capitalist contributed heavily to his bankruptcy. On a wide range of inventions, he lost around half a million dollars. His biggest miscalculation was to turn down an invitation to invest $5,000 in a company of a man whose invention would later change the course of human destiny: the telephone. Being a printer by trade - a journeyman printer at the beginning of his career, then an expert printer between 1853 and 1857 - his investments gravitated toward the Paige typesetting machine. In 1894, he was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Because of the failed investments and failing finances, he experienced relocating his family to Europe in 1891 to economize. As an effect, they experienced a decade without a permanent home. But his occasional visits to New York in hopes of salvaging some fortune from his former investments soon paid off. American financier Henry Huttleston Rogers (1840-1909) took a healthy fondness of Twain, befriended him, and agreed to handle negotiations with his creditors.

Twain's writings showed how much he hated the professional gamblers that proliferated and created notoriety around the Mississippi. He championed instead the player: the gentleman who practiced control and moderation in the games and observed propriety at all times. This ideal was actually displayed on how Twain conducted himself. When Rogers invited Twain to a poker match on his yacht, Twain graciously reported that it was the U.S. Congressman T.B. Reed who dominated the matches, gathering to himself over twenty consecutive pots. Twain's "gentleman" conduct did not indicate a diminished enthusiasm for the game. Nor did it mean that a gentleman was an expert. It only meant that win or lose, the dignity remained intact.