What did president Warren G. Harding once lose in a poker game?

Usually cited as the worst of all US presidents – at least until the Bush era – Warren G. Harding (November 2, 1865 – August 2, 1923) was oddly likeable in his ineptitude. A former newspaper publisher, he was nominated by the Republicans as a compromise choice and campaigned with the promise that he would return the US to "normalcy". He won with an unprecedented 60 per cent of the popular vote.

Harding lived in rural Ohio all his life, except when political service took him elsewhere. As a young man, he bought The Marion Star and built it into a successful newspaper. In 1899, he was elected to the Ohio State Senate; he spent four years there, then was elected lieutenant governor. He was defeated for governor in 1910, but was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1914. He ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1920. Harding's support gradually grew until he was nominated on the tenth ballot. He conducted a front porch campaign, remaining for the most part in Marion and allowing the people to come to him, and running on a theme of a return to normalcy of the pre-World War I period. He won in a landslide over Democrat James M. Cox and became the first sitting senator to be elected president.

He was a keen poker player, who once gambled away on a single hand an entire set of White House china dating back to the presidency of Benjamin Harrison. In a 1962 poll of 75 historians conducted by Arthur M Schlesinger, Harding was ranked worst of all the 31 US presidents to date.