Styles and Technologies of Cheating

Just as Muhammad Ali inspired millions of young black men to punctuate athletic performance with loud, often rhymed, braggadocio, 19th-century cardsharps like James Ashby, George Devol, and Jimmy Fitzgerald gave rise to rivers of gold chain and validated stylish cheating above plain, honest poker. Flamboyantly dressed con artists understood that the main difference between a common criminal and a romantic outlaw is that an outlaw has a following – or a customer base. Modern casinos have an unlimited variety of electronic bells and whistles, not to mention exposed female flesh, to attract and stimulate customers. A cardsharp had only his persona.



And much like the gangsta rappers of today – Ali's godsons – riverboat gamblers set the social and sartorial standards for much of antebellum America. European gaming called for understated elegance, the de rigueur tuxes and gowns of Baden Baden, Paris, and Monte Carlo, where only well-born aristocrats were welcome in the ritzy casinos to test their fortune at skill-free games like baccarat, 21, and roulette. The new American style emerging on steamboats emphasized gamesmanship, bejeweled extravagance, hucksterism, and skill – or at least the illusion that skill was a factor.



To create as many customers as possible, American swindlers ignored all restrictions based on social rank. Fur trappers, printer's assistants, sharecroppers, free men of color – just about everyone's money was good in these wide-open poker games. By making their business as democratically appealing and audience-friendly as possible, the sharps both glamorized poker and extended its popularity into the upper Midwest and eventually out to San Francisco in one direction and New York in the other. And because of the monetary nature of the game, status among this new breed of players had to do with how many chips you cashed in around dawn, not who your daddy was.



At the same time, the outlaw cachet of professional gamblers added a darkly beguiling edge to a steamboat excursion. In the days before metal detectors, few men – and no gamblers – left home without a large knife or small side arm. Yet most other passengers realized that if they didn't sit at the faro or monte or poker table themselves, there was little danger in watching the blacklegs in action. ("Blackleg" was a 19th-century term for cardsharp, probably related to "blackguard" as well as to the dark, narrow trousers they favored.)



Since a sharp couldn't call the police – unless he'd bribed them beforehand – if threatened by angry victims, he usually had to serve as his own bodyguard. Physical toughness and proficiency with weapons were basic prerequisites of his trade. Most sharps also relied on their partners for mutual protection, and many teams chipped in to pay off members of the boat's crew and staff, both as backups in brawls and as poker confederates – accomplices, that is, not necessarily men with a zeal for secession. A bartender could sell marked decks repackaged with official-looking stamps and seals. A waiter with 20/20 vision could linger behind a careless victim, sending prearranged signals to indicate the strength of his hand. Even the captain, after dining with affluent passengers, might steer one or two toward the poker game, assuring them that the well-dressed man expertly riffling the cards was a Pittsburgh attorney who lost on a regular basis.



Once at the table together, teammates carefully disguised the fact that they knew one another while signaling back and forth what cards they held or had folded. One might distract their victims with small talk while his partner dealt from the bottom of the deck or studied the backs of marked cards. Dealers known as mechanics spent months perfecting their ability to control which players received the best and the second-best hands. When "dealing seconds," for example, they used the thumb of the hand holding the deck to push back the top card, dealing the second card to another player while dealing his partner the top card, which would improve his hand to the winner. Partners also raised and reraised in tandem to drive a victim out of a pot, ideally after he'd put a fair amount into it. Over the course of several hands, one sharp might collect three or four kings and slide them into the bottom of the deck. His mechanic would "shuffle" without disturbing the sequence, crimping a card so his partner would know where to cut, then bottom-deal the kings to him. Teammates also made a habit of dealing six or seven cards to each other. Keeping the best five, they would let the extra cards drop into their laps. Once the deal had passed to them in turn, they would sneak the extras back into the deck.



Other means of rigging the outcome included "belly strippers," decks with slightly wider aces and kings, making it easier to deal those cards to oneself or one's partner. Less dexterous cheats could still hold out a key card, hiding it somewhere on their person until a pot became large enough to risk slipping it back into their two-pair hand, say, to complete a full house. By these means and others, a team of patient blacklegs could gradually siphon up just about every chip on the table. Cold decks might get the job done more quickly, but they also risked triggering loud accusations and worse. More often than not, the best protection policy was to "win" the chips as inconspicuously as possible.



As cheating became more commonplace and lucrative, manufacturers began selling holdout devices capable of snatching a card from one's hand and tugging it up that sleeve until the time was right to push it back down again. The instructions for one device promised: "Holding out one card will beat any square game in the world." Overstated salesmanship? Hardly. John Scarne (1903-1985) was the author of 28 books about magic and gambling, worked as the double for Paul Newman's hands in The Sting, and was hired by the Army to teach GIs how to avoid being cheated. It was his opinion that an expert could "take all the chumps in the game simply by knowing the location of a very few cards. If he knows the exact position of only one of the 52 cards, he will eventually win all the money in sight."



P.J. Kepplinger, a San Francisco sharp known as "The Lucky Dutchman," designed what may have been the most sophisticated holdout device of all. It featured a metal slide attached to a rod retracting into a pair of steel clamps. Concealed beneath an extra-wide sleeve, the device was triggered by a cable wire running through a series of pulleys and flexible tubes. One length of tubing guided the cable from a seam in Kepplinger's pants near the knee through a pulley system ending at his shoulder. Getting dressed before a game, he pressed a small clip that opened the seam through which the wire was threaded, letting the end of the wire hang loose in his hand. Once he'd been seated at the table, he set the tension in the circuitous rig by attaching the wire to an identical clip near his other knee. By spreading or pushing together his knees, Kepplinger – both puppet and puppeteer – could make a clamped card snap cleanly into or out of his poker hand.



For less patient and creative cheats, gaming supply companies made a variety of gadgets designed to bust a victim in a single hand. The H.C. Evans & Co. offered the Improved Cooler, for example, a "simple and noiseless" machine for switching a cold deck into the game via the waistband of one's trousers as soon as a strategically dropped glass or head-turning woman distracted the other players for a moment. Evans customers were encouraged to send in a pair of loose-fitting pants "so we can have the machine fitted into them by our experienced tailors. There is no extra charge for this." Charge or no charge, what sharp would want a badly fitted metal contraption malfunctioning in his pants, especially when he was trying to cold-deck a well-funded sucker?



Cunning as such devices might be, the most efficient means of controlling a game remained a marked deck. Those marked ahead of time were of course the easiest to use. Steady-handed artists peered through magnifying glasses to etch tiny variations in the scrolls and arabesques of straight decks. "Line workers" might add a faint extra flower petal or hatch mark to indicate the card's value. "Edge workers" did so by thickening the lines around the back's border, while "shaders" used diluted ink to faintly tint one spot or another. Once marked, the cards were replaced in their original package and resealed with a counterfeit tax stamp.



But suspicious opponents calling for fresh decks every other hand often forced the sharp to mark a clean deck at the table. As the action proceeded around him, he had to unobtrusively mark or nick the aces and kings that passed through his hands, using a thumbnail, ring stone or file edge, or a needle point welded onto his ring. Minuscule holes and abrasions could be read by the dealer's fingers as a kind of pasteboard Braille, though this was possible only when it was the sharp's turn to deal. Marks could be read during any hand – when they appeared on the facedown cards of a victim or on the top of the deck, ready to be dealt. Producing and reading such a deck required almost superhuman dexterity and eyesight, together with months of practice both making and spotting the marks without staring at card backs in an obvious way.



Another approach involved "shiners," the reflective surfaces on rings, snuff boxes, or cigarette cases angled to reveal the faces of cards as the "mirror man" dealt them. Gambling supply catalogues (operating in much the same spirit that later promoted Fuzzbusters) began selling thumbnail-size reflectors designed to jut out from the table bottom just above the sharp's lap. Assuming he had superb peripheral vision and a photographic short-term memory, a mirror man could reconstruct fleeting glimpses of the cards as he dealt them into an accurate picture of each opponent's hand. Yet because opponents losing money might become wary of a dealer glancing toward his lap as he pitched the cards around the table, the best reflectors were designed to snap out of sight at the touch of a button. Once he had won a huge pot, the sharp – if he had any sense, that is, which in turn depended on his greed and self-confidence – could also dislodge the reflector, excuse himself to go to the W.C., and toss the incriminating evidence into the dark Mississippi; or not.



As the state of the cheater's art developed over the decades, both cardsharps and honest players got smarter. Sometimes the cheats gained the upper hand along one stretch of river, and other times the square players barred or intimidated them. Port authorities and steamboat companies cracked down. State legislatures wrote laws and sheriffs enforced them. Local magistrates got tough, while others were bribed not to. Hundreds of sharps were imprisoned, driven out of business, or hung. At each stage, as the forces aligned against them gained the upper hand, future victims were lulled into letting their guard down.



Hoping to do their part, honest printers tried selling inexpensive decks with blank backs. The theory behind these "club cards" was that any marks would be so instantly noticeable as to defeat their own purpose, because once a single card was marked, inadvertently or not, all 52 would be replaced with a virgin deck. The bottom line, however, was that thin, flimsy cards with ghostly pale backs never caught on among poker players. Meanwhile, other trustworthy printers moved in the opposite direction, designing ever more elaborate backs: plaids, crosshatching, geometric and arabesque patterns, all with the purpose of foiling card markers. But this only challenged the edge and line artists to come up with more precise, better camouflaged ways to mark them.



As the arms race escalated between cardsharps and card makers, it was crucial to keep every card opaque under the strongest of lights. Legitimate printers glued two pieces of card stock together with a thick dark paste called "gook." Precision dies then cut them to uniform dimensions, producing a knifelike edge that prevented fraying and made them easier to shuffle. Special glazes were applied to leave them smudge- and stain-resistant. Inevitably, though, innovative sharps learned to transfer a tiny smear of moisture from a mint julep, say, to imbue significant cards with watermarks visible only from certain angles to someone trained to pick them out. Because suit and rank were revealed by the stain's exact location, the watermarks had to be applied with painterly precision. Not only that, the more cards marked in this way, the better visual and numerical memory was required to keep them all straight.



According to magician Gary R. Brown, sharps known as "smudgy movers" hid homemade dyes made from olive oil, stearine camphor, and aniline in mini shading boxes sewn into their clothes. The best of them could wet a fingertip with the dye and transfer it to a precise point on a card's back. A few seconds later they would wipe the card clean, removing all evidence of foul play – in much the same way that grease on Kenny Rogers' hand appears and disappears from inning to inning.



As the spiraling numbers of marked decks threatened to overwhelm even the possibility of a fair game, the makers of Hart's Red Angel decks offered a guarantee that their cards were both unmarked and unstainable. But in due course a dye purveyor offered a counter-guarantee that its product could stain any deck. Another company developed a line of unglazed Steamboat decks, pricing them so low that they could be replaced every hour or two.



Larcenous printers jumped into the arms race around 1850, producing marked facsimiles of the most popular decks. Called "readers" or "paper," they featured slight variations in popular back designs to reveal each card's rank. Suit markings raised the cost by about 15 cents per deck, a laughably small price to pay once flushes were accepted in the hierarchy of hands. Openly advertised in catalogues and mainstream magazines as being "easy to read" or (for the cognoscenti) having "fast blockout work," readers drove home the point that confident familiarity with the marks on such decks far outweighed any aspect of what we would call poker skill. Some sharps even worked as middlemen for crooked printers, delivering readers to unsuspecting dockside cigar stores and newsstands, or – in the best of all possible worlds – to the buyer in charge of a steamboat line's authorized supply. Sold by the dozen or gross in the standard colors of blue and red, readers became so widespread, it was all but impossible to know if even the smallest poker game was played on the square anymore.



Recalling the endless cheating and gimmickry that prevailed for so long over poker skill, Mississippi cardsharp Tom Ellison rationalized his career: "that's what went as gambling in those times." Ellison admitted to working with mechanics who could shuffle cards "one for one all through from top to bottom, so that they were in the same position after a dozen shuffles as they were in at first. They'd just flutter them up like a flock of quail and get the aces, kings, queens, jacks and tens all together as easy as pie. A sucker had no more chance against those fellows than a snowball in a red-hot oven."



Even against run-of-the-mill sharps, an honest player had to summon prodigious amounts of concentration and courage simply to limit the sums he was cheated out of, which didn't leave much left for playing good poker – calculating pot odds and value bets, picking up tells while disguising your own, figuring out who to bluff and when. A poker world in which those skills were paramount wouldn't fully evolve until late in the 20th century. In the meantime, not playing in the biggest game in town – or on the river, or in the mining camp – would remain the best option. Pure poker skill withered in such an environment. Gold chains and cold decks were what drew young talent to the table, where the main kinds of skills getting sharpened were the facility to angle a mirror or bottom-deal the second-best hand.



Next issue: The Reformed Gambler, Jonathan Green.