Description

FOR DOWNLOADING THIS BOOK – REQUEST TO MY EMAIL pokertrue1@gmail.com

Herbert Osborne Yardley was born in the small frontier town of Worthington, Indiana, in 1889. Following the death of his mother in 1905 he inherited $200 and, by his own admission, 'thereafter I did pretty much as I pleased'. He began frequenting a poker saloon in Washington even though he was still in high school. Class president, editor of the school paper and football captain, he was nevertheless academically average but had a flair for mathematics. He had ambitions to become a criminal lawyer but the year 1912 found him
working instead as a code clerk in the State Department, a job which made full use of his mathematical skills and shrewd poker-player's mind. In 1917 America entered World War I and Yardley persuaded his bosses to let him set up a code-breaking section with a staff of 160. Officially this was called the Cipher Bureau, Military Intelligence 8; more familiarly it became known as the 'Black Chamber'. Some 200,000 messages were decoded, with Yardley himself breaking the Japanese diplomatic codes and finding himself a marked man in the Orient as a result, before the department was closed down in 1929 on the instructions of Secretary of State Henry Stimson, who remarked that 'Gentlemen do not read each other's mail'. Out of a job, Yardley set to work on The American Black Chamber, a no-holds-barred history of
the organization's activities which scandalized the political and diplomatic world but became an international best-seller when published in 1931. A later book by Yardley, Japanese Diplomatic Secrets, was banned by Act of Congress in 1933, by which time its author was hard at work developing secret inks. His venture, however, proved a commercial failure, and between 1933 and 1935 he turned his hand to novel writing with The Red Sun of Nippon and The Blonde Countess. The latter was filmed by MGM as Rendezvous, starring William Powell, Rosalind Russell and Cesar Romero, with Yardley as technical adviser; the New York Times called it a 'lively and amusing melodrama'. In 1938 he was hired by Chiang Kai-shek to monitor the coded messages of the Japanese armies invading China; he worked in Chungking under an alias with the cover of being an exporter of hides. In 1941, with Japan now at war with the United States, he was recalled and went back to working for the US Government, but not at code-breaking. Having had no career to speak of for the last thirty years of his life, by 1957, when The Education of a Poker Player was first published, he could often be found playing cards with gullible journalists in the National Press Club in Washington. Though the 'Black Chamber' scandal had earned him some official distrust at home as well as abroad, he was nevertheless buried with full
military honours in Arlington National Cemetery on his death in 1958. According to one commentator, 'he was basically an attractive personality who enjoyed simple masculine pleasures. He would rise at dawn to go duck-hunting, shot a good enough game of golf to have won the Greene County (Indiana) championship in 1932, and played poker with a compulsive intensity wherever and whenever he could. He regaled his companions with a flood of amusing stories, told with the wit and gusto of a natural raconteur. He was the very opposite of stuffy, and did not hesitate to admit that he knew his way around a Chinese whorehouse. He kept a Chinese and a German mistress and once organized a virtual Oriental orgy for a young correspondent, later nationally famous, on the ground that it was necessary for him to be blooded as a man.'