I used to know a few full time gamblers. It was damned rare that they were gambling!
After awhile we became friendly if not friends. They couldn't beat me at pool even when they tried jarring me, I wouldn't play anything else. I was a one trick pony and knew it.
Ti Thompson cultivated the knack of getting in with the money crowd. One of his few failures, he chased Howard Hughes for six months. Hughes became aware of it and even baited Ti spreading word that he would be at such and such a golf course at the ungodly hour of six AM, with no intention of showing!
While there was a tiny window open usually, most of Ti's prop bets he was about 10:1 his way.
One of his better friends was Hubert Cokes. They met when Cokes was fourteen and Ti had him hid in a motel room dropping cards in a hat! Ti had a large bet he could flip the cards under a door and into the hat.
That was the usual deal, Ti never hesitated to shave the dice in his favor. Aside from that, he was a world class athlete and obsessive when practicing. He might spend fourteen hours a day on a gaff for weeks. The things he really could do were freakish.
The real thing that killed Ti as a hustler at all things was the end of an era. When he started, if you did what you said you would do even if you did it by trickery, you got paid. He bet he could throw a watermelon on the roof of a hotel. Got plenty of action. The watermelon was tossed, into the elevator of a taller building next door. The elevator man tossed the melon on the roof, Ti collected serious duckies for the time. Today, people would just laugh and walk away. Ti's suckers changing might have been the biggest reason he crapped out.
Another thing, he marked paper cards. Plastic was much harder to deal with. Plastic didn't end his card mechanics but definitely handicapped him to the point that when he was told about a card game the first thing he asked was paper or plastic?
Another thing about that era, poor communications. You could pull the same hustle in town after town within a hundred miles or so of each other. I knew adults who had never been thirty miles from where they were born.
I have seen some pretty impressive hustlers but there will never be another Titanic, never be a time like that again.
Hu
After awhile we became friendly if not friends. They couldn't beat me at pool even when they tried jarring me, I wouldn't play anything else. I was a one trick pony and knew it.
Ti Thompson cultivated the knack of getting in with the money crowd. One of his few failures, he chased Howard Hughes for six months. Hughes became aware of it and even baited Ti spreading word that he would be at such and such a golf course at the ungodly hour of six AM, with no intention of showing!
While there was a tiny window open usually, most of Ti's prop bets he was about 10:1 his way.
One of his better friends was Hubert Cokes. They met when Cokes was fourteen and Ti had him hid in a motel room dropping cards in a hat! Ti had a large bet he could flip the cards under a door and into the hat.
That was the usual deal, Ti never hesitated to shave the dice in his favor. Aside from that, he was a world class athlete and obsessive when practicing. He might spend fourteen hours a day on a gaff for weeks. The things he really could do were freakish.
The real thing that killed Ti as a hustler at all things was the end of an era. When he started, if you did what you said you would do even if you did it by trickery, you got paid. He bet he could throw a watermelon on the roof of a hotel. Got plenty of action. The watermelon was tossed, into the elevator of a taller building next door. The elevator man tossed the melon on the roof, Ti collected serious duckies for the time. Today, people would just laugh and walk away. Ti's suckers changing might have been the biggest reason he crapped out.
Another thing, he marked paper cards. Plastic was much harder to deal with. Plastic didn't end his card mechanics but definitely handicapped him to the point that when he was told about a card game the first thing he asked was paper or plastic?
Another thing about that era, poor communications. You could pull the same hustle in town after town within a hundred miles or so of each other. I knew adults who had never been thirty miles from where they were born.
I have seen some pretty impressive hustlers but there will never be another Titanic, never be a time like that again.
Hu
