The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. -"To A Mouse," Robert Burns
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
The French card game Poque arrived in New Orleans in the early 1800's and soon spread up and down the length of the Mississippi River. By Mark Twain's time, the great steam-driven paddle wheeled riverboats that plied the Mississippi were nothing less than floating palaces. Nowhere was this more evident than in their opulent card rooms. The poker room of the 1,500-passenger Mississippi Queen was said to have been modeled after Marie Antoinette's boudoir royale at the Versailles Palace, while the poker room of the 2,000-passenger riverboat Mississippi King was said to have resembled Kubla Khan's pleasure palace Xanadu. These two, and all others, were dwarfed by the greatest of all Mississippi Riverboats, the ill-fated 3,000-passenger Mississippi Sultan, whose card room Mark Twain described as a cross between The Sublime Sultan's Palace at Zanzibar and a Bourbon Street cat House.
While nineteenth-century Mississippi Riverboat Casinos are to Mississippi Riverboats as Go Fish is to no-limit Texas hold 'em, the fates of the Mississippi Sultan and the doomed Calamity Jane are now so closely linked by what happened in their poker room, that to tell the story of one is to tell both.
The Mississippi Sultan left New Orleans on the night of April 21, 1865, bound for St. Louis, carrying over 3,000 passengers. At 2 a.m. on the 27th, close to Memphis, Tennessee, many of those passengers were crowded into the Sultan's Card Room when a massive explosion in the boiler room blew the steamboat to pieces, killing an estimated 2,400 (more in fact than would die forty-seven years later in the sinking of the Titanic). In the subsequent inquiry the very few card room survivors testified that a "mysterious poker player," busting out of a game just before the explosion, had sworn to send those at the table who had taken his money to a watery grave. That mysterious poker player was never found and the cause of the Sultan Disaster was never determined.
The Anti-Poker Patrol's Jack Boots, growing up near the Memphis Cemetery where many of the Sultan's dead were buried, was well aware of this mysterious poker player story and, having decided to attack the poker room of the Riverboat Casino Calamity Jane, modeled his plan after the Sultan Disaster.
The planned attack on the Calamity Jane's poker room was, so thought Boots, totally foolproof. He and his two accomplices, The Sisters Queen, armed with homemade pipe bombs wrapped in newspapers, would pose as poker room railbirds. At a predetermined signal they would, one by one, light the fuses from their cigarettes, drop their disguised bombs under their seats and calmly walk away. By the time of the explosion they would be driving away in their getaway car. The Sisters Queen agreed Boots had come up with the perfect plan.
Jack Boots' "perfect plan" never had a chance. While he never would have believed a Scottish poet that no matter how carefully someone plans, something may still go wrong, he should have believes the Prussian General who warned that, "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy."
In this case Boots' enemy was Winston Smith, who, unaware of what was going on around him, was about to save the lives of half the players in the poker room.
(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)
