"'Go ahead and prove your case,' said Wooton, and a dealer who was off duty was called upon to deal. Plantagenet kept cases himself and played his own particular system with all manner of care and effort. Wooton stood by and saw that Plantagenet was playing his regular game. Plantagenet's luck had deserted him, and he lost two bets out of every three. It seemed impossible for him to get down right, and he lost steadily. He had played in his last stack in an hour and forty minutes and Wooton hand him the $1,000.
"'That's the way it would have been had I been playing with money,' said Plantagenet, and Wooton agreed with him. Plantagenet was one of the men who knew when to quit, and when he died, with his grandchildren around him, in the early seventies, he left more than $500,000 to be distributed among his heirs.
"Edmund Baker of Louisville, who was not a professional gambler, but who outdid most of the famous professional gamblers of the South in the late fifties in the heaviness of his play when he felt in a winning humor, was another man who knew when to quit. I saw him win $32,000 in one night at bank in the rooms of the old Crescent City Club. Then he curled up all of a sudden and cashed in. He wasn't a quitter in the ungenerous sense, but he used to say that the little angel, supposed by the sailors to sit aloft and watch out for Jack Tar, had a habit of informing him, when he was bucking another man's game, just the proper time to pass it up and quit. It was a matter of pure hunch with him. On this occasion Joe Randolph, a heavy player from Virginia, twitted Baker a bit for not pressing his luck—for quitting when he seemed to be winning four bets out of five.
"'All right, Randolph,' said Baker after he had cashed in. 'I'll let you make five $10 bets in my behalf on the deal now running and I'll bet you an even $2,000 that I (or you) lose four out of the five; this, just to show you that my intuition about the proper time to lay off is good.'
"Randolph took that bet, which was a good one, with more than an even chance in his favor, and he lost, for every one of the five bets lost. Baker would quit when he was loser just as suddenly as he would when he was away ahead of the game. I saw him lose over $3,000 in a four-handed poker game with friends in one of the parlors of the old St. Charles Hotel between the hours of 6 and 9 o'clock one evening. He had practically an unlimited amount of money at his disposal, considering the size of the game—$200 limit—but he yawned and pushed his chair back with the simple statement that it wasn't his night. The next night he lost $2,000 more to the same three friends, and again he resumed his seat. On the following night he was $4,000 loser after four hours' play, but he gave no sign of quitting.
"'Isn't it pretty near time for you to stretch your arms and forsake us again, Baker?' asked one of his friends in the game, jokingly.
"'No,' said Baker, 'I'm going to stay along to-night. I'll begin to win soon, and then you can all stand by.'
"He began to win on the very next deal and at 2 o'clock in the morning he had not only retrieved his losses on the week's play, but he had all the money in the crowd. Baker was possessed of a species of intuition that was something extraordinary. I don't know what else to call it but intuition. I never saw him take a daring chance that he did not win out on it—chances that no professional gambler would dream of taking, and diametrically opposed to all of the rules of percentage in games of hazard. One night he walked into 'Don' Haskell's Madrid Club in St. Louis—this was in the fall of '59—and stood and watched a few deals out of the box at the $500-limit faro table. Then he reached over and bought five yellow—$100—chips from the dealer. He put them all on the ace and coppered the card. The ace lost, and the dealer put five yellow chips on the top of the original five on the ace, and waited for Baker to haul them down. Baker absent-mindedly made no move, to take the chips until the dealer reminded him of them.
"'Let them stand, with the ace coppered,' said Baker.
"'But it's $500 limit, Mr. Baker,' said the dealer.