Gambling Anecdotes - Short and Sweet
“Shot in the Dark?” |
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"One night I’m playing in some small town--I don’t remember where, maybe in Oklahoma--and I see they got the room set up as a peep joint [with a confederate spying on players’ cards through a peep hole in the ceiling]. So I pull out my gun--always carried a gun back in those days--and said, ’Now, fellas, do I have to go and shoot a bullet in the ceiling? Or you going to send your boy down without any harm?’ Hell, they thought I was bluffing," Moss says, laughing. "Ended up shooting the guy in his ass."
“Abuse of Pewter?”
President Warren Harding often invited his cronies to visit the White House for evenings of drinking, gambling, carousing, and general debauchery. On one such occasion, down on his luck in a game of poker, Harding appealed to executive privilege. Did he welsh on his bet? Not at all. He simply gambled away some White House china!“Bad Company?”
One day a biographer submitted his manuscript to Cordell Hull for approval. Some time later it was returned with a single handwritten correction. In a passage detailing an incident during the Spanish American War in which Hull was said to have won "all of his company’s money at poker," the word "company" had been replaced with another word: "regiment"!“12:05”
Chico Marx once wrote the writer Heywood Broun a check for gambling debts, warning him not to cash it before noon the next day. Broun later complained that the check had bounced."What time did you try to cash it?" Chico asked. "Twelve-o-five," Broun said. Replied Chico: "Too late!"
“Wilson Mizner: Daily Lottery”
The daily lottery was once a favorite form of amusement aboard ocean liners (whose passengers gambled on distance covered by the ship each day). During one voyage, the wit and writer Wilson Mizner (a member of the famous Algonquin Round Table) - having detected a hint of frailty in one of the officers with access to the ship’s log - hatched a plan. With an accomplice, he stood outside the officer’s cabin and loudly mentioned the number which he had drawn in the lottery. "You know what I’d do if I won?" he continued. "I’d stick a thousand bucks under the right officer’s pillow." Sure enough, when the winning lottery number was announced that day, it turned out to be Mizner’s. The following day Mizner and his accomplice repeated the routine and again Mizner’s number was drawn. The third day too, their ’luck’ held firm. On the fourth day, however, as they stationed themselves outside the cabin, they were interrupted by the growling voice of the right officer. "Clear off, you bastards," he warned. "I’m four hundred miles off course already!"These gambling stories courtesy of: Anecdotage.com
