The Cheating Game - Part I

The earliest editions of Hoyle that mention poker at all suggested most of its players were up to no good. Jonathan Green's Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling had already branded "poque" as the "cheating game" in 1834. The Hoyle of 1845 spelled it "Poke," while the 1857 edition, published in New York, warned that "20-card poker" was "one of the most dangerous pitfalls to be found in the city." (The 52-card version played along the western rivers since the late 1830s had yet to take hold in the East.) The 1864 Hoyle stated flatly: "Success in playing the game of Poker (or Bluff, as it is sometimes called) depends rather upon luck and energy than skill. It is emphatically a game of chance, and there are easier ways of cheating, or playing with marked cards, than in any other game." From reading these books and playing the game themselves, as well as what they could gather by word of mouth, most 19th-century Americans considered poker to be more about opportunities to swindle than to fairly outplay one's opponents. And at least as far as the higher-stakes games were concerned, they were right.



"Hoyle," of course, refers to the series of authoritative books about games written and later inspired by Edmond Hoyle (1672-1769), an English expert on whist and other 18th-century pastimes. After his death, subsequent volumes were put together by teams of editors, who codified new games as they emerged in English-speaking countries. Hoyles published in the United States were widely accepted as the standard arbiters of rules and opinion about "all games common or fashionable with the American people." According to Hoyle continues to mean "by highest authority."



It's also revealing to compare the 11 pages spent on poker in that 1864 Hoyle to the 28 accorded to euchre, 27 to cribbage, 10 to faro, two to brag, and one-half to a bit of silliness called Snip-Snap-Snorem, a variant of War in which the goal was to match, not beat, the card played by your adversary. The page counts imply that poker was about as widespread as faro, another game dominated by charlatans. Whist's 50 pages confirmed that it was still the most popular card game, though poker's rapid proliferation in Civil War camps wasn't fully accounted for in this edition. The editors' bias in favor of English games – the series had originated as the bible of whist, after all – may also have been a factor. In any case, once the blue- and gray-coated veterans had carried poker home to every state and territory after 1865, its status as national pastime was firmly established.



Until that happened, however, whist remained the game of choice, at least among the smart set of the Northeastern establishment. Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, and Abigail Adams, not to mention Tsar Alexander, Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Victoria, the first six American presidents – Andrew Jackson being the seventh – and Edmond Hoyle himself, were all devoted whist players. A cerebral trick-taking game encouraging honesty, partnership, sobriety, and courteous manners, this precursor of bridge was seldom played for sums large enough to encourage cheating. Competing mostly for bragging rights, upper-class whist players had little cause to hoodwink each other. Between 1772 and 1775, George Washington kept detailed records of his whist results. For one of the wealthiest men in Virginia, the biggest loss was £6; his biggest win, £13, came in a game at Annapolis. In the capital, Philadelphia, Franklin noted that whist was played "not for money but for honour … the pleasure of beating one another." Besides, if some knave wanted to cheat, he would have to account for as many as 30 cards to gain a decisive advantage.



Cardsharps immediately understood that poker offered better opportunities to fix a game profitably. Whoever could mark, or control who was dealt, only three or four high cards would have an insurmountable edge over his tablemates. If the game lasted long enough, even a single marked ace would be sufficient to secure all the money. While whist players toted up tricks on a pad and paid pennies per point to the winners, dollars were the scoring units of poker, the only way to measure and leverage the value of one's hand. And the higher the stakes, the more acumen and courage was required to pull off or suss out a bluff. Poker was the most natural game of the emerging capitalist economy for a number of reasons, including the fact that not playing for cash simply didn't make sense. Money was the language of poker, just as words, as Lancey "The Man" Howard would observe more than a century later in The Cincinnati Kid, are the language of thought.



Seasoned and aspiring cheats began flocking to New Orleans and, later, onto the steamboats that called up and down the rivers. The first wave consisted mainly of crude, violent toughs who worked the dockside saloons, preying on sailors and bargemen, who were energetic brawlers in their own right; anyone fixing to take their money was advised to be heavily armed. A card game was merely the pretext, what Alfred Hitchcock would call the MacGuffin – a red herring to get the plot rolling, or in this case, get the money on the table. The real drama involved taking it either by cheating or at gunpoint.



More urbane and lucrative targets were the sporting gentry, wealthy Southerners who played cards mostly as recreation. Many a planter's heir and cotton mill scion could afford to lose enough on one hand to support the average American family for years. Some were quite proud of their profligacy, one-upping each other to demonstrate how blithely they wagered away massive sums. The devil may care who lost $5,000 on a horse race or the turn of a card, but a sporting gentleman most assuredly did not. Robert Bailey, a lowborn Virginia rake who gambled with such men for a living, defined a sportsman in 1822 as a "high minded liberal gentleman, attached to amusements regardless of loss or gain." Professional sharps, on the other hand, cared only about "the business of general gaming, destitute of all honor and integrity."



Professionals, in other words, aimed to guarantee they'd win money. They may have looked like gamblers, and were certainly called that by preachers and editorialists, but in fact they were businessmen working in a cutthroat enterprise, as closely related to the burglars in David Mamet's American Buffalo as to the real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross. Their nine-to-five job – p.m. to a.m., that is – was to fleece wealthy suckers. Any poker game they sat in was actually a robbery staged to look like a friendly test of skill.



Since their sole interest was the bottom line, they preferred to run "bank" games that gave the dealer advantages as steep as 50 percent. Mexican three-card monte, along with French roulette, faro, and vingt-et-un were fast-paced swindles appealing primarily to intoxicated, low-income rubes. But as more and more "liberal gentlemen" shunned these obvious cons in favor of American poker, a game requiring tactical skill when played on the square, many sharps decided they had little choice but to switch games themselves.



By practicing sound poker tactics, the rare honest professional could outplay all but the craftiest amateurs. Yet the element of luck still kept him from winning often enough when the games were played straight. Instead of boom-or-bust swings, professionals wanted their income stream to be a smoothly ascending diagonal. To achieve this, they needed to cheat.



Rigorous training was required of every new sharp, as well as for monte and faro cheats looking to make the switch. Many were self-taught, while others apprenticed themselves to a master and paid handsomely for the privilege. Poker's best cons required a magician's sleight of hand and mastery of precision technology. Tiny mirrors had to be positioned just so to remain unnoticed while reflecting the faces of cards being dealt. Needle tips were soldered to rings, then used to punch holes in well-camouflaged spots in the aces. The backs of certain cards were deftly marked or stained in precise locations – difficult enough to begin with, but especially so when the marks had to be applied, accurately read, and remembered amid the kaleidoscope of badly lit, fast-moving action.



As the steamboat era matured, simply getting a seat at the table in the suite of an overconfident millionaire called for a subtly cunning modus operandi. You couldn't just bludgeon your victim, snatch a few dollars, and make a run for it. Working the texas deck of a luxury steamer required courtly manners, superior acting skills, slicker methods for "ringing in" a marked deck, and foolproof getaway plans. First and foremost, a sharp had to be convincing as a gentleman – well-spoken, recently bathed, perhaps even giving the impression that he didn't want to gamble at all. He also would require several well-tailored suits, to go with a tall black hat and below-the-knee broadcloth coat. Beneath the coat he'd sport the regalia of big-spending Southerners: ruffled white shirts, silk ties with diamond stickpins, vests with hand-painted fox-hunting scenes. One sharp, George Devol, even hired Negroes to carry his bags aboard the steamer, enhancing the impression that he owned a plantation or two and had plenty of money to risk in a poker game – provided it was played on the square!



When the big money was finally on the table and the cards were in the air, no sharp could count on the luck of the draw or fortuitous timing – four kings with an ace, for example, when his quarry happened to draw his fourth queen. Thousands of steps would have led up to that fatal pair of hands, and how they played out would be vigilantly scrutinized by gun-toting big shots not in the habit of giving their money away. Rigging a $500,000 poker game and getting away with it called for genuine artistry and considerable grace under pressure.



Artists or thugs, flawless mechanics or conspicuous fumblefingers, by 1835, between 600 and 800 sharps were making predatory excursions from Pittsburgh to the Nebraska Territory, from the Gulf to St. Paul, with the number reaching 2,000 or so by 1850. Usually working in small, proficient teams, they boarded a steamboat at different ports, pretending not to know one another. Assembling in the saloon after dinner, they ordered a cognac, a bourbon and branch, and lit up their Cuban cigars. The most polished would make convincingly refined conversation with well-to-do passengers – about the price of cotton in London, say, or Sen. Benton's latest bon mot concerning his son-in-law's run for the presidency. Sooner or later, one of the gentlemen would suggest a game of poker, if only to pass the long evening.



Savvy sharps usually let the suckers win for a while, hoping to build their confidence to a level where they'd be willing, even anxious, to raise the stakes; a well-hooked sucker might even call for them to be raised a second or third time. As the betting got more furious, the team's "mechanic" – a nimble-fingered sharp capable of sequencing the deck in his favor while appearing to give it an honest shuffle and cut – took over. The most extreme sequence was called a "cold deck," which gave the sucker a hand strong enough to bet all of his money on, and the sharp a hand slightly stronger.



Teams without a reliable mechanic figured out ways to get a marked or cold deck in the game. Failing that, partners stationed behind the sucker employed a technique known as "iteming" to reveal what cards he held. Signals could involve smoke rings, fingers held against a cheek or lapel, scratching an ear, or turning a cane like the minute hand of a clock. The sharps at the table would then raise against hands they could beat, and fold against those they could not. "It was dead easy money," one retired con man admitted. Suckers, he and his colleagues believed, had no business with money anyway.



When no high rollers happened to be on one leg of a trip, a flexible sharp might present himself as one of the roughhewn hicks he hoped to fleece, donning sheep's clothing and accents to win the trust of actual sheep. Others took the opposite tack, showing up the regular gents with dandyish extravagance: sleek English suits, ruffled Parisian shirts, thousand-dollar Swiss watches, enormous diamond pins known as "headlights." The notorious James Ashby sported a pair of gold-headed canes and often kept a diamond-studded gold pencil clenched between his teeth. But the biggest dandy of all may have been Jimmy Fitzgerald, who attached his oversized timepiece to his vest by means of a 20-foot gold chain looped several times around his neck.



Who in their right mind would play high-stakes poker with someone ostentatiously strutting the proceeds of earlier swindles? Lots of people, as it turned out: headstrong young swells, for example, with wads of legal tender burning a hole in their pockets; farmers or trappers who resented bigwigs and showoffs; poker studs who hadn't lost yet; any lawyer or politician or real estate magnate who'd convinced himself he was invincible. Sharps like Ashby and Fitzgerald were serenely aware that their gaudy costumes served as a goad to such folks: Come and get it.



Next issue: styles and technologies of cheating.