Titanic Thompson: The Hustler Who Rigged Reality and Sank Everybody

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Alvin Clarence Thomas ran away from an Ozarks farm at 16, unable to read or write and carrying less than a dollar. He became Titanic Thompson, widely considered the greatest hustler and proposition bettor in American history. With no schooling to lean on, he dealt cards to himself for hours until the odds became instinct, mastered the false shuffles and bottom deals of a card mechanic, and practiced shooting until relatives said he could hit a bird between the eyes at 50 yards. A stateside posting as a sergeant in 1918 let him fleece draftees every payday, and he left the army with roughly $50,000.

This episode examines how his cons actually worked and why they worked. Thompson understood that people bet on their assumptions, so he rigged the environment that produced them: a walnut filled with lead, a highway mileage sign moved in the night, a golf match played left-handed by a man who was secretly a natural lefty. The same life produced five killings, a rigged poker game against Arnold Rothstein that preceded the mob boss's 1928 murder, five marriages, and millions lost at the one thing he could not fix, the racetrack.

• The nickname came from a Joplin, Missouri pool hall in 1912, after he won $500 from Snow Clark and then bet $200 he could leap over the table. Clark said it must be Titanic, because he sinks everybody.
• He bet expert golfers he could drive a ball 500 yards, then waited for winter and hit it onto a frozen lake. Ben Hogan, who traveled with him in the early 1930s, called him the greatest shot maker he ever saw.
• Asked why he never turned professional when top touring pros might earn $30,000 in a great season, Thompson said he could not afford the cut in pay.
• In Texas in 1932 he shot a masked gunman after a lucrative golf match and found he had killed Jimmy Frederick, his own 16-year-old caddy from earlier that day.
• He attended the first World Series of Poker in 1970 and died in a Texas nursing home in 1974 at 80. His eldest son Tommy gave up gambling, became an ordained minister, and counseled prisoners.