Rotten Library > Culture > Card Cheats
Card CheatsTraditional parlor games like Five Card Stud, Texas Hold 'Em, Blackjack and Baccarat might have been a lot more fun a few hundred years ago, without all those swiveling casino cameras trained on your every tweak and twitch. The history of card cheating as pop-cultural indulgence was first illustrated in oil paintings by Georges de La Tour and Michelangelo Merisis da Caravaggio, who in the early 1400s and 1500s brought their visions of courtly play into public view. Opting not to airbrush away Norman Rockwellian visuals of individual treachery and conspiracy among thieves, these paintings are content to wink directly at the viewer, inviting him or her to cast aside suspicion and celebrate a shared deceit. Card cheating as a viable career choice was first openly propositioned in 1902 by S. W. Erdnase, in his damning anonymous treatise, Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge, also known as The Expert at the Card Table. Erdnase's publication revealed for the first time in print nearly every cheating strategy imaginable, most of which are still being referenced by today's top hustlers and teenage magicians.
It is cautiously recommended to patrons of the Rotten Library that these techniques be exerted only upon despised family members (or friends of friends) in private home games where quick getaways are a conceivable possibility. Wholesale
magic dealers manufacture holdout devices: retractable mechanical arms
capable of thrusting up to fifteen cards directly into the palm of your hand
when they're needed most. Holdouts are strapped to the forearm with elastic
belts, enabling free movement of the elbow when the wearer is sitting or standing.
This
rig can easily facilitate the production or exchange of cards by applying tension
and release: making a strong fist is often enough to trigger the prop. Cards
are bent Taking advice from the Erdnase book into the twentieth century, a simplified device called the "reverse holdout" has become the premiere cheating strategy of choice during SAT exams at high schools across the nation. Imagine you're in class taking a test, clutching a cheat sheet in your hand. You've printed your notes on sturdy cardboard, and anchored one end of it (through a punched-out hole, or otherwise) to a rubber band conveniently safety-pinned all the way up inside of your shirt sleeve or sweater vest. When the teacher walks by, simply release the card from your grip, and the elastic will "zip" the card up your sleeve, immediately away from curious eyeballs. Naturally you will have to reach your hand up your sleeve to retrieve the cheat sheet, but that can only be described as a small price to pay for the spontaneous ability to show a teacher your hands and balls are empty and clean on all sides. This cheating strategy works best when used in conjunction with a long-sleeved, white-collared shirt with unbuttoned cuffs. It takes a little practice: the last thing you want is a cheat sheet snagging on your wrist watch, or a rubber band / safety pin combo snapping off and shooting across the room into someone's face.
One of counterfeiters'
earliest targets was a mimick of the Bee bridge-size deck manufactured
by the U.S. Playing Card Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. Fake Bee decks
are still being manufactured: they're factory-marked for suit and value,
and etched into the uppermost (and lowermost) lattice work on the back
of each card are tiny, coded indicators revealing the hand.
Card cheats
have formulated age-old and inexhaustible strategies for dynamically marking
cards in active play -- cards they didn't have time to prepare in advance.
The easiest and cleanest method involves arranging cards in a one-way deck:
a pack of cards with an asymmetric back design or retarded photograph, i The next baby step up is nicking, so named because during play, the cheater quietly slices a portion of the card open with a freshly-sharpened thumbnail. Nail marking requires that the cheater not bite his nails for several weeks: the natural enamels must grow strong enough to perforate the edges of slick, coated card stock quickly and cleanly. As a nicker at the table goes through hand after hand, more and more cards can be marked in easily discernable ways. A nick along the top versus a nick along the side, for instance. Two nicks next to one another. A nick on the corner. Advanced nicking involves localizing the card marks: performing the same nick twice so the nick is visible whether or not the card is right side up. Anything which makes its way into your fingers can be nicked -- and equally helpful is nicking the shitty cards, which can help telegraph well in advance when your opponent is bluffing.
Possibly you'd prefer to crimp your ride. Crimping is the act of warping, twisting, bending, creasing, or otherwise dog-earing a selected card, and it serves a far greater purpose than secret identification. When the corner of a playing card has been bent, its position anywhere in the pack is easily spotted. Valued cards in the deck are effectively "bumped" by an arced fraction of a degree, casting a slight but slanted shadow onto the lower hemisphere of the pack. By eyeballing the thickness of pack hemispheres and estimating the number of cards above or below a crimp, one can more confidently predict the next occurrence of a winning hand. Please remember that crimping is not a full, snapping fold -- you're only warping it a half inch. Don't curl it up like a quesadilla.
Despite casinos' best efforts to demonize the process, card counting is not illegal and therefore cannot be considered much of a cheat. Nevada courts ruled long ago that "players are free to use any information made available to them," short of conspiracy or collusion with casino personnel, or using an electronic card counter. The house reserves the right to refuse service at any time, however -- and players are regularly asked to leave, or perm-banned, or arrested for trespassing.
One
hundred years after the initial publication of Erdnase's groundbreaking framework
for career card cheating, the popularity of Poker is again surging across the
Western hemisphere. This time around, it's popular with the NASCAR crowd, celebrities
"showing down" on Bravo, Chinese math students looking to oust cigar-chompin'
frat boys, and overweight, online shut-ins with severe reality problems. |
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