Taking Chances by Clarence L. Cullen

Author:Clarence L. Cullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781634212731
Publisher: Duke Classics

Story of a Famous Pat Hand

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A Game in New Orleans That Makes Modern "Big" Poker Games Seem Tiny by Comparison.

"The shrinkage in the value of poker winnings that get talked about nowadays," said the New Orleans turfman at the beach dinner, "is mournful, that's what it is. A few days ago a man told me that So-and-so, a gilded youth from up the State somewhere, had recently swooped down upon a gentleman's poker club in New York, and had removed himself from the scene of play, after a five-hour séance, with $8500 in winnings. The man who told me this leaned back, after he had sprung the $8500 climax, and waited for my eyes to protrude. He looked a bit miffed and sulky when they didn't protrude.

"'Why, durn it all,' said he, 'I believe you affect your cold-blooded way of taking things. To see you twiddle your thumbs a man 'ud suppose that you had no more sense than to imagine that an $8500 winning at a short poker sitting was the most ordinary thing in the'—

"'Easy, easy,' I had to put in, for he was heating himself unduly. Then, to bring him around to good nature again and to convince him that I wasn't attitudinizing, I was compelled to spend a half hour or so in unwinding a bit of a reel of the days when there were poker giants in this country. He wasn't quite willing, at the finish, to acknowledge that the winner at draw of $8500 was a poker pigmy, but when I happened to mention the occasion when Phil Cuthbert of St. James's parish dropped, in a two-handed game at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, a little bundle of $400,000"—

"He told you, of course, that you were smoking," interrupted the New York man.

"No, he didn't. He asked me if it got into the New Orleans papers. I told him that in 1868 the New Orleans papers were too busy roasting the carpet-baggers to devote any space to such a minor matter as a $400,000 poker game at the St. Charles Hotel, where draw games approximating that in size were generally going on at any old hour of the day or night. There was some rhetoric, I admit, in that 'approximating' statement, but I wanted to set this New York man right. As a matter of fact, a $50,000 game of draw was not at all uncommon in the St. Charles's private poker parlors. After Phil Cuthbert had dropped that mound of $400,000 on one hand, the New Orleans papers did announce that Mr. Philip Cuthbert, the well-known planter of St. James's parish, was about to start on a gold-prospecting tour in the mountains of Honduras; but they were generous enough not to mention, if they knew it, that, with four aces in his hand, he had lost $400,000 to Mr. Joseph Lescolette, shipper, of Havre, Pernambuco, and New Orleans."

"Lost $400,000 on a hand consisting of four aces, am I to understand you said?" asked the New York man.

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