“Are you a gambling man?” he’d ask. “Because I am.” Prologue.

A non-fiction biography that reads like fiction, this is the life story of Titanic Thompson. According to author Kevin Cook, Titanic’s life was the model for the gambler Sky Masterson in the musical “Guys and Dolls.” This poker and golf-playing phenomenon bet and propositioned his way across the country. In addition to all of the fun anecdotes about bets he made, Titanic was a star witness in the trial for the murder of the man accused of “fixing” the World Series.

Seriously folks, history doesn’t get much more interesting than this.

As Alvin collected his winnings, someone asked Snow Clark the stranger’s name. “I don’t rightly know but it ought to be ‘Titanic,'” Clark said. “He sinks everybody.” pg 3

Alvin Clarence Thomas was born in 1893 in rural Missouri near the small town of Monett. The last name, Thompson, that he would adopt for most of his adult life, came from a later newspaper misprint that he embraced as his own.

Later in life, Thompson said he couldn’t read, but numbers and odds always made sense to him. He spent hours sitting alone in his room, teaching himself to adeptly shuffle cards, practicing dealing from the bottom of the deck more quickly than the eye could follow. Thompson developed a method of marking cards that some still use today, like putting dots on the back or notching the edges to be able to tell a face cards from the lower ones.

He was quite popular with the ladies and married 5 times to women significantly younger than him. Scandalous!

“He was fun,” said a woman who knew him. “He took his hat off when he spoke to you. Alvin was slim like a willow, and he didn’t walk, he sauntered.” pg 21

When he was drafted into the army, he was made a sergeant and taught the men under him how to gamble.

“Sergeant Thomas spent hours dealing demonstration stud hands, providing a running commentary on each hand, training his men to calculate the odds of an opponent’s having an ace or king or deuce in the hole, telling them when to bet harder and when to fold their tents, so they could beat all the poor dumb soldiers who trusted to luck.” pg 53

There are so many interesting stories in this book. My favorite was when he swindled Al Capone. Yes, THE Al Capone.

Highly recommended for fans of history or historical fiction. As I said, this guy’s life reads like a story.

Thanks for reading!

Here’s the History Guy episode I wrote about Titanic Thompson:

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• Psychic Dreamwalking: Explorations at the Edge of Self by Michelle Belanger
• Archetypes on the Tree of Life: The Tarot as Pathwork by Madonna Compton
• The Goddess and the Shaman: The Art & Science of Magical Healing by J.A. Kent