The Mirror, the Riffle, the Shift, and the Shark

Stud poker is not a very difficult game after you see your opponent's hole card.

- Herbert O. Yardley



By the turn of the game's second century, poker was firmly established as America's national pastime. More people watched baseball, perhaps, but many millions more played the card game. And unlike baseball in that era, poker was also played in other corners of the globe, this despite numerous accounts of cheating that confirmed square players' fears about the teamwork, technology, and chutzpah of 20th-century blacklegs. "Card sharping has been reduced to a science," the British magician John Nevil Maskelyne maintained in his book Sharps and Flats. "It is no longer a haphazard affair, involving merely primitive manipulations, but it has developed into a profession in which there is as much to learn as in most occupations." As always, the higher the stakes, the more likely such professionals were to have infiltrated the action.



On the front page of the Sept. 19, 1906, New York Times, we find the following article:



PITTSBURGH, Sept. 18 – One of the members of the Americus Club was literally dragged from the clubhouse last night to a police station on a charge of swindling, and in court this morning was forced to return money which he was accused of winning at crooked cards.



The Americus Club is one of the best-known Republican clubs in the country. It has about 1,000 members, many of them prominent and influential. The scandal, which was made public this morning by the arrest of W. Joseph Johnston, has been brewing for several weeks, many members of the club asserting that they had been cheated at the card tables. Several members, friends of Johnston, had been caught cheating, but had simply been thrown out of the club.



Frank Sauers of Allegheny lost first a big roll of money to Johnston at stud poker; then lost his diamond stud, and finally his diamond ring, valued at $750. Then he began to look closely, and when he saw that Johnston was wearing a "mirror ring," he asked no questions, but jumped upon the recent member, beat him, and later had him arrested on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses.



With others, Sauers appeared against Johnston in the police court this morning.



It is alleged that Johnston is but one of a dozen gamblers who set out to make their fortunes from the young club men of Pittsburgh, and the police reports indicate that they have been very successful. Johnston came from some point in the West about a year ago and has been passing as a broker. He had money, and had little trouble getting into the famous old Americus Club as a member. His skill with cards is said to have done the rest.



At the same time, others were doing things with cards in the other clubs of the city frequented by the sons of wealthy men. The amount of money won by the card sharps from the club members here in the last two or three years is said by the police to be very large. One jackpot, played with a Judge and a bank President, had almost $50,000 in it, and it was won by a "recent member" who has since left.



The mirror ring with which Johnston was accused of beating the men of the Americus Club, and which was taken from him by the police this morning, is evidently most disadvantageous to opponents of the wearer in a poker game. A mirror about the size of a ten-cent piece is attached to the ring, worn on the third finger of the right hand, the mirror, of course, being kept inside the hand. In dealing the cards, the mirror was brought under each card as it was removed, and the quick eyes of the dealer could see just what was being dealt to the opposition. This gave Johnston knowledge of what cards his every opponent had "buried," as the first card in stud poker is known, and put the remainder of the players at his mercy.



Johnston at the hearing today did not deny having used the mirror ring, nor did he deny that he had used the different card markers, which had been found on him. He was ordered to pay back all the money which Sauers said he had won from him, also to restore Sauers's ring and stud. Johnston was then fined $50 and costs by the Magistrate, all of which sneeringly he paid.



Johnston was reminded by the Magistrate that he would be dealt with harshly if found before the court again, and it was suggested that he leave Pittsburgh at his earliest convenience. Johnston said he would take his own time about that, and would certainly not go before he told some of the Americus Club people what he thought about their "squealing."



"I'm not the only one who has been getting some easy money off you Pittsburgh suckers," said Johnston, addressing a knot of club members. "No, there's a whole lot of fellows down there, and are not there for their health. You fellows who have yelled at your losses have always been looking for the best of it at cards, yet when someone better than yourself at the game beats you, you yell."



There is a rumor tonight that the police may close the club because of the gambling expose. Johnston offered to remain in town and give testimony against the Americus Club if wanted, but he was told that the authorities, if they chose to prosecute, would try to get along without his testimony. Johnston asked for his mirror ring and gambling devices back, but was threatened with rearrest by the police.



Having bolstered his credibility by admitting he used the mirror and other devices to his advantage, Johnston maintains, in effect, that such tactics are a natural part of poker, things his accusers have themselves deployed while "looking for the best of it" – they just failed to do it as artfully. And when everyone knows poker is a cheating game, it's unmanly to "squeal" if someone gets the better of you. And besides, his victims are spoiled "suckers," born to squander whatever allowance their daddies dole out. By virtue of superior sharping skills, Johnston and his cronies have earned the right to take it from them.



The article also makes clear why five-card stud, with its single holecard to detect and remember, would be the favorite game of the mirror men. And it raises our eyebrows even higher when Johnston, instead of lawyering up, stands cockily before the court and dishes out his withering sarcasm about the sore losers. That Sauers' assault on him seems to faze neither Johnston nor the magistrate suggests that getting caught and fighting over the spoils are equally natural parts of the game. And while the magistrate remains unpersuaded by Johnston's defense, he does let him off rather easily.



Judicial discretion tends to emanate down from the top, and the Justice Department under Theodore Roosevelt was more devoted to prosecuting antitrust violations of blue-chip players on Wall Street than policing short stud in the hinterlands. Secretary of State Elihu Root was known to play stud with a group including Henry Stimson, the U.S. attorney in charge of antitrust prosecutions; Sen. Charles Curtis, a Native American from Kansas who later played in White House games hosted by President Harding; and influential Rhode Island Sen. Nelson Aldrich, known as "The General Manager of the Nation."



In 1914, as honest players continued to face off with cheats, Theodore Hardison published an expose in the tradition of Maskelyne and Jonathan Greene that also played to the Belle Epoch's taste for grandiose titles: Poker, A Work Exposing the Various Methods of Shuffling Up Hands, As Well As Other Ways of Cheating That Are Resorted to By Professional Gamblers, Also Embracing the Cardinal Principles By Which Every Sleight-of-Hand Trick Known With Cards May Be Played. Anticipating the sticker shock caused by the $3.00 price of his 120-page booklet – a quart of milk cost 9 cents in those days, and most full-length books retailed for about a dollar – Hardison declares on the title page: "The price of this book is based on the information it contains, which is worth its cost a hundred times over (in protection) to anyone who ever expects to play cards for money." By protection he means that his primer explains how to spot sharps and thereby defend yourself from their sly machinations. But what will prevent would-be mechanics from boning up on his lessons in how to fix poker games, most of which are accompanied by precise illustrations? To men such as Johnston, wouldn't the book be worth its cost 10,000 times over?



Hardison hems, then he haws, before going on rhetorical tilt. He claims at one point that "it is the inclination of most all poker players to be 'on the square' (especially so in the beginning), but as the novice begins his career in the game, and is fortunate enough to enjoy a few good winnings, his natural ambition, as it is with all 'Young America,' is to go higher (and he is not to blame), for it has been instilled into his very nature by his forefathers for generations. In fact, ever since the landing of the Pilgrims from that noted ship Mayflower, has the air which Americans breathe been contaminated with that arduous love for chance and adventure which lures the young beginner on and on, into games that are higher, and higher, and while bravely and manfully shouldering his losses he is led up into the unknown realms of space in his wandering

fancy of a lucky day to come when …" What reputable publisher, we ask, would offer for sale such a spaced-out, Ashcroftian sermon, especially one coyly doubling as an instruction manual for sharps? Why, it is none other than the Hardison Publishing Co. of St. Louis, Missouri.



Hardison insists his book is "solely for the protection of lovers of card games … in no case ever to be used for the purpose of giving an unfair advantage." Yet he seems to believe the very nature of poker makes cheating, and even a hideous death, unavoidable: "as these young fellows continue to play, their morals diminish, until many of them descend to the level of the 'tin horn gambler' and eke out a miserable existence with the human vultures in the bottomless pits of degradation, until they 'cash in their chips' to fill a gambler's space in hell." Claiming distress at this prospect, Hardison solemnly swears: "Were it within my power to do so, I would deliver in this volume the most scathing denunciation of poker playing that has ever been conceived in the mind of mortal man, and I want to say in the very beginning, if you are not a poker player, never start it." In the meantime, whether from aspiring mechanics or square players hoping to thwart them, he's happy to accept the three bucks.



Once the brimstone stops bubbling, Hardison covers the marking of cards and other ways of manipulating a deck, including the Shift, the Riffle, the Slip, Laying Brick, and the Haymow Shuffle. The Shift, for example, is a false cut designed to undo the real one made by the player to the dealer's right; that is, to put a cold deck's fatal sequence back into play. Just before making the Shift, Hardison warns or instructs, "the performer generally makes some pretense of straightening himself up, or seeking a more comfortable position in his chair, and at the same time, his hands, with the deck, drop slightly below the level of the table and the shift is made in the twinkling of an eye." After weeks or months of practice, a deck can be made to disappear from view so briefly that "it never creates suspicion, and will pass in any company, except among those posted in the art," a group that now includes Hardison's readers.



Such maneuvers need to be mastered to a fare-thee-well, of course, since large sums of money and even the mechanic's life will be at stake if he fumbles. He should therefore practice holding the deck "in the left hand with left thumb on one side and left second, third and little fingers on the other side, and left first finger curled and pressed up against the bottom." The next step is to "pass right hand over deck with all fingers covering outer end to about the first joints, and thumb at inner end to about the first joint, and insert the left little finger at the place where it is to be cut; this divides the deck into two parts. Now they seize the lower part with right thumb at inner end, and with right second and third fingers at outer end …" and so on for another hundred words, until the lower part of the deck has dropped into place on the top. Forgetting his principled intentions for a moment, Hardison assures his readers that "with but little practice they can soon acquire the knack." Once the cold deck has been cut and passed to them, the place to make the shift "is always inadvertently indicated by a slight break being left where the cut was made, one-sixteenth of an inch is sufficient for the skilled."



All of this begs the question, where did good Mr. Hardison learn such techniques? Anticipating that his reader might wonder, he slips – or is it shifts? – into a disingenuous third-person voice, claiming to have innocently mastered these digital arts "when quite a young boy." His friends are astonished by them, "and, boy-like, he delighted in pulling off his sleight-of-hand stunts" for their amusement only, never for profit. Suddenly, however, "to his great surprise and regret, he noticed that he was no longer invited to their gatherings, and when he chanced to meet some of the girls, he noticed a marked coolness," this despite never being "other than a gentleman in their presence." It turns out that "he had been cast aside because they had learned that he was a 'professional card shark.'" (A shark, of course, is an even more ravenous variety of sharp.) Yet why would the girls shun the young Theodore, when he "had never even so much as seen a game of poker played in his life"? His denials and protestations fall on deaf ears, and the shark reputation "clings to him until this day."



Another fairly obvious tell that Mr. Hardison has been a shark all along is his claim that his false accusers are motivated by "envy rather than of founded suspicion, and generally voiced for an ulterior motive, which usually has its origin in a mealy-mouthed excuse to refuse payment of their losses. And these people are held in such bitter contempt by the writer of this little book that he would really like an opportunity to marry them off to his office dog in a futile attempt to improve its breed."



Whatever Cash Coolidge would have to say about such bitchiness, Mr. Hardison clearly has what we would call "issues" of "misrepresentation," though what poker player does not? His self-published booklet is a well-illustrated, 120-page bluff. Yet none of its weird obfuscations change the fact that it remains useful not only to modern mechanics and those who would foil them, but as a rich source of insight into how men like Johnston, George Devol, and Jonathan Greene – and probably Hardison, too – managed, in their day, to dominate the tabletop landscape.