Six degrees

President Xi Jinping’s (left) recent tour of Africa began in Tanzania, a country that rarely makes global headlines. A glaring exception occurred in 1871, when, in Ujiji (in what is now western Tanzania), the “scoop of the century” was bagged by a young, hungry reporter from the New York Herald. The reporter had risked life and limb (his own and those of many others) to find an explorer who had been missing for several years, and utter, upon discovering the man, the immortal line: “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” That reporter would go on to be a noted explorer himself. His name was Henry Morton Stanley …

James Butler Hickok was a gunfighter, scout, lawman and folk hero – but also a very good card player. In 1876, at the age of 39, he was playing poker in Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, when he was shot in the back of the head by a buffalo hunter known as Broken Nose Jack. The cards Hickok was holding at the time of his murder – which have since become known as the “dead-man’s hand” – were a pair of aces and a pair of eights, all black (it is not clear what the fifth card was). In 1979, Hickok was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. Unlike Hickok, 21 of its 44 inductees to date are still living, including Johnny Chan …