Sakllad, whom I've never heard of, makes a good point about research. The bright young folks on this can do google search now and find things that may be true or not. This is a blog. No one else cites their sources. I have a Ph.D., have studied research methods, and know the rules for academic journals. Researching outlaws and poker often comes down to reading conflicting reports and deciding which sounds most accurate. I am striving for accuracy.
When I research someone, say Poker Alice, Will Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Lottie Deno, I know that dime novels and their own credibility are a huge factor. My latest articles are sometimes based on interviews and email exchanges. Very credible are Doyle Brunson, Jack Binion, and Crandell Addington. Very credible, when talking about Titanic is his son, Tommy Thomas. Very credible, but exaggerated, somewhat embellished is Johnny Moss. You have to understand Texas and gambling slang to get it.
Some people I have written about are known for exaggeration, falsehoods, Minnesota Fats, Calamity Jane, Amarillo Slim. In magazine writing, I use the quick term, "Accounts vary." For example, Arnold Rothstein owed around half a million after the big poker game that led to his death, but "Accounts vary."
Titanic Thompson made up stories about meeting his own father, and then later admitted to his son they were false. My research is to write the son directly. In a future article, Tommy speaks for himself and wrote a couple of pages. Later, I'll ask his permission to put it here. It is great! Ty and Tommy played against each other a lot and both cheated when Ty was older. A new book on Ty is great to read, but I am more accurate.
Sak,ASK ABOUT WHAT YOU SEE AS INACCURACY, AND I WILL ANSWER AND TELL MY SOURCE. I'd bet, and lay 8 to 5, he cannot do that. I consider myself the best, most accurate, best educated, person researching and writing about poker history. The brilliant young people on here often provide me links or facts that inform my writing. I consider TwoPlusTwo BETTER than any magazine or radio show because of the collected wisdom and the youth, a big advantage. If I make a mistake, and I do, these brilliant young readers will catch it.
I do a literature review on each name, including google books, and Amazon search inside. Great ways to reaserch now are YouTube, Podcasts. In writing about mob history and Las Vegas, I loved these. Pod Casts are a source. A great, great place to start is TwoPlusTwo archives. I write the history of poker through the lives of some players to reveal the differences between the old days and the now. TwoPlusTwo is up on both. History books are often cheap used online and I have a big gambling library. I might go to Amazon or google books to find something when the book is laying on my desk. If they are not indexed, this works.
You'd be surprised how often links from TwoPlusTwo'ers inform my research. When I wrote about Johnny Moss vs. The Greek in 1949, I learned a ton right here on TwoPlusTwo.
Haters search through my work for a misspelled word or missed fact. One hater posted over and over that Johnny Moss and Benny Binion did not meet as paper boys in Dallas. They both said they did. There was a picture. This small-minded hater had seen a census that would mean that Benny never left home, because it listed a town he lived in before he left. We talked about that for days. I'll bet Skalad or whatever cannot name any facts that are wrong. Of course, there are facts repeated from history that are wrong.
My funniest stalkers, haters, make me a big part of their non-lives. A couple said I wasn't me, wasn't from Lubbock, made it all up. One issued death threats, posted on several sites, and was obsessed. Then later he said I was credible. Weird! This went on a couple of years!
If I research any one person, I might consult several books, wiki, and many Internet sources. Sometimes the falsehoods, such as Benny Binion's history, dominate the Internet. This MEANS that I am the only one in poker who has written accurately about Benny Binion, often from Texas and the Las Vegas newspaper. I also have my memory about being around Benny from 1960 on, and the stories of people who knew him.
I learn things on TwoPlusTwo. During this thread, I have realized I had two West Texas places confused. The big gamblers were at both Ft. Griffin over Abilene, and Mobettie up in the panhandle. A great source to fact check is the Handbook of Texas History. Here is a brief excerpt,
U.S. Highway 283 runs by the site about fifteen miles north of Albany in northern Shackelford County. The town, begun in the late 1860s, grew and quickly gained the reputation of a lawless frontier outpost that attracted such women as Lottie Deno and Mollie McCabe; lawmen Patrick F. Garrett, Doc Holiday, and Wyatt Earp; outlaws such as John Wesley Hardin; and men such as John Selman and John M. Larn, who lived on both sides of the law. By 1874 the lawlessness of the community had become so extreme that the commander of the fort placed the town under government control and forced a number of undesirable residents to leave;
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That's when the Comanches were run out of these parts, and these gamblers moved up to Mobettie. It is amazing that America's most famous gamblers./gunfighters were often in the same small boom towns.
Last edited by Johnny Hughes; 02-17-2012 at 10:56 AM.
Reason: I had a misspelled word the haters would jump on like a duck on a June bug. It would eat up days of their lives.
