There are many types of malware in circulation at any one time but ransomware – where your entire hard drive (or drives) is encrypted – has become a common, profitable weapon for online scammers.

The Good Old Days

In the early days of The Real Hustle, we decided to feature ransomware as it was beginning to feature in more and more reports of online crime; But it was still incredibly rare and in some cases, possible to defeat without paying up.

Our problem was how to demonstrate this form of fraud since the show was based on seeing how human beings interact with cons and scams and any computer scams were hardly thrilling to watch.

Our solution was flawed to say the least.

We entrusted a valuable laptop to someone who believed they were hired to do a simple job and in the process of doing that job (in a hotel business center) they had to use a USB stick that apparently locked all the laptop files then issued a warning to send/give money before the end of a countdown when it would all be deleted.

While the laptop, the USB and all the other elements were a setup, the on-screen victim believed all of it and their reaction was perfect for the show’s audience and overall, it helped illustrate what could happen under the right/wrong circumstances.

At that time, the scam was unusual but years later, it has become a much bigger problem.

Blissfully Unaware

One aspect of computer fraud that makes it both easy and profitable – even for less skilful hackers – is the fact that most people have no real idea how the internet (or the computer they use to access it) works and often feel perfectly safe because they installed anti-virus software six years ago.

An interesting illustration of this was the “shredder” scam we pulled on The Real Hustle.

Again, it was a difficult scam to illustrate since the “real world” goal would be to install the shredder into an office then sit back and collect as valuable data until the gaff is discovered or (more likely) the shredder was replaced.

In our version we had to complete the scam in one day then get reactions from people who had no idea they had been scammed!

It was a very clever device but in order to demonstrate it we had to deliver it to people as part of a “shredding service” complete with secret cameras (also inside the shredder).

Unlike most Real Hustle scams, there was no “sting” moment so instead we asked people how secure they felt after using the shredders before showing duplicate copies of the documents they destroyed.

All of our victims were baffled because to their mind the only way we could now have copies is if we reconstructed the papers with scotch tape!

The very idea that the act of shredding was also the way their information was captured didn’t occur to anyone.

The secret was a document scanner hidden inside the shredder that lit up as if to accompany the shredding paper but actually scanned both sides of any piece of paper before it was shredded.

This data was then transmitted via a cellular phone inside the device (constantly charged since the shredder was always plugged in).

This scam illustrated something that’s true to all forms of security that interact with technology: There will always be more precautions you could/should take and there always be new ways of defeating those precautions. 

Just like our scanning shredder, common steps that should protect users will eventually become corrupted or exposed to new methods.

Current Affairs

Ransomware is now a huge problem with thousands of new victims every day whose files are locked out by a bespoke cypher used to encrypt everything on a target drive.

On accessing their device, malware will notify the victim that their files have been captured and give details of how much they must pay to unlock their files and how/where to pay it.

Some criminals aim for smaller amounts from low-profile targets like private individuals or small companies but attacking higher-profile targets can earn a lot more money but with a much greater risk of being pursued.

Some ransomware attackers have targeted public services and even hospitals, locking out access to critical infrastructure and thereby getting the attention of multiple international agencies concerned that the tools of ransomware might also be used by nation states as a form of online warfare.

In fact, the methods created by these online blackmailers are powerful weapons that might open entire countries to life-threatening scenarios such as a nationwide shutdown of a power grid or essential communications.

Like many scams, the tools being used and created by the scammers can be re-applied with much more serious consequences.

An Expanding Toolkit

Many people still believe you need to open an executable file or start a program or app in order to activate a virus but these days there are many seemingly innocuous actions that can expose us to malware.

Just clicking a link in a rogue email can open the door to all sorts of problems*.

What’s more concerning is that ransomware criminals don’t even need to defeat whatever security you may have because there are other criminals who specialize in collecting passwords and existing vulnerabilities that are then sold to the hackers.

These access brokers might trawl thousands of exposed passwords, identify potentially lucrative victims and price that data accordingly or even take a share in potential ransomware attacks.

It’s like a little industry of symbiotic crooks, creating a functioning and effective network to steal more money.

Another tactic is to gain direct access via insiders who might be blackmailed but are most likely paid (sometimes as much as $1,000,000) to hand over the keys to their employer’s data.

Another “way in” is to gain access via network hardware (such as servers and storage devices) that are shipped with generic admin IDs and passwords.

Once found online, the malware can be easily applied and if the victim does not have up-to-date backups the ransom might be cheaper than any alternative measure.

And with modern encryption (a “feature” on most operating systems) there’s no need for a countdown or threat to delete – the data is just locked out (and useless) until you pay for the key.

No One Is Safe

One of the frustrating truths about modern computers that access the internet is that being online opens up thousands of potential different attacks from many different sources.

In fact, any type of connectivity exposes a device to problems and even cables bought from seemingly trustworthy sources can have tiny hardware hidden inside that will inject malware, reveal your identity/location or capture every keystroke.

It’s a game of technological whack-a-mole and no matter how many precautions you take or how clever you think you are, if targeted there’s almost no way to prevent being hacked or surveilled or having all of your data stolen or encrypted.

Seriously, if they want to get you, they’ll get you but for the most part, these crooks are fishing with wide nets and taking a few simple precautions (stronger passwords, two-factor authentication etc.) will keep you safe from lighting up as a potential target.

* For example, since the Covid pandemic, thousands of restaurants have switched from paper menus to online version accessible through a QR code. This is an enormous risk since I can think of several methods that could leverage this new habit and score millions of pounds, euros, and dollars with ease.

Lead image: Pete Linforth/Pixabay

Hoyle’s famous book of rules for many card games is far from comprehensive and there are games developed and played in scenarios most of us would rather not find ourselves.

One such game is “Tonk” (or “Tunk”), a fast-moving game for gamblers that deserves your consideration.

How Does It Play?

The secret to a good game is not in the rules but in the way it plays and how it engages the player.

The more addicting and fun a game is – and the easier it is to learn – the more it will be played and when played for money, the more opportunities will exist for cheating or advantage play.

Rummy 500 and its variations is a good example of games that – once learned – can be quite addicting whether played for money or not.

Tonk is similar in how it plays (without the running count across multiple rounds) but is played faster and has been fine-tuned as a gambling game.

Rounds of play can be surprisingly quick with outcomes that can be expensive when doubling or even quadrupling opponents’ initial stakes based on house rules and circumstances.

Tonk Basics

Some rules vary and change according to location so consider this a very basic description of how to play.

The game is mostly played for money with each player putting an initial stake into the pot, but certain situations require players to add to that stake.

The game is a variation on Gin with each player receiving five cards (seven card and nine card variations also exist) with melds and runs being laid down (“spread’) until a player is out of cards.

Alternatively, a player can lay down their remaining cards whenever they believe they have the lowest number of points.

The goal is to get rid of all your cards or lay down the lowest total value.

When cards are spread by players, other players can “hit” those spreads with their own cards so if one player spreads three kings and another player has the fourth king, they can hit the other player’s spread, often with a financial or tactical penalty to the player being hit.

During play, cards are taken from the top of the discards or the unseen stock as each player takes their turn. Players can only spread cards of identical value or a run of cards (in order) of the same suit.

If a player lays down six cards (their five-card hand plus a card they picked) that’s a “Tonk” or “Tonking Out” and will cost their opponents a multiple of their initial stake.

If a player spreads only five cards and throws away the discard, they still win the hand but in most variations, this does not score double from the other players.

Variations Of Tonk

Tonk is a fast game that is open to many variations and house rules.

“Hitting” another player’s spread can result in that player having to sit out for a round of play or for multiple rounds if they are hit several times.

Getting hit could increase a player’s stake or cost an agreed amount each time the player is hit and, in some cases, the player being hit has the option to pay to play and avoid missing the next round!

Sounds complicated? It gets worse.

In some places, you can only hit a run and not three of a kind but the penalty for getting hit can be more severe.

Another house rule might be that if a player Tonks out (demanding double the stake from each of the other players) but their spread cards allow another player to also Tonk out, then both players (or just the second player to Tonk) win a “double-double” meaning players have to pay four times their initial stake!

Additionally, if your initial hand totals 50 points you can immediately “drop” and claim double stake from the other players and if someone else also has 50 you either share the pot or the second player can claim it instead!

As you can see, even if you know the game it can take a few rounds to understand what variations apply.

It’s all about where you play and with whom.

Big House Rules

Tonk (often pronounced “Tunk”) may be played in many scenarios, but it is particularly popular in the North American penal system where players spend many hours playing the game for whatever passes as money in that “establishment.”

It is from this backdrop that I first heard of the game from my late friend, Lew Brooks, and it was my assumption he either learned it from a friend who spent some time “away” or that Lew himself had spent a little time at the government’s pleasure.

Truthfully, I don’t know which for sure and would not presume to say Lew had ever been caught doing anything illegal.

Lew was a dealer in Las Vegas amongst other things and a well-known member of the local magic community who he regularly baffled with brilliant pieces of card magic and a few mathematical miracles, including a truly ingenious keno prediction that I can’t resist performing to this day if I find tickets at a Vegas restaurant table.

Lew was a big man, gruff on the outside but an absolute teddy bear underneath.

His demeanor belied a wealth of knowledge and a razor-sharp intellect that paid close attention to any situation and could recognize a weakness or advantage in a heartbeat.

Lew’s friend Frank Zak told me Lew also worked in Casino Security and that Tonk was often played in the break room by casino staff so I prefer to think that’s where he picked up the game, though given Lew’s personal history (he told me he once roomed with William S Burroughs) anything might be possible.

Like many of my friends from that period, his knowledge of the gaming industry, the games being played and the ways they could be beaten dwarfed my own.

Lew lived in the very heart of the gambling world with a foot on both sides of the table but his eyes really lit up when he talked about how a game could be beaten.

Lew was a wealth of information but getting that information sometimes meant running a minefield of questions and challenges; Lew liked to toy with people a little and make them work for the knowledge that took him decades to obtain.

Yet to a few, he was generous with his ideas and eager to share his findings – especially with the game of Tonk.

The Brooks Advantage

Wherever it was that Lew stumbled onto the game, he quickly recognized it as susceptible to a mathematical strategy and set about analyzing the game, quickly realizing Tonk was rich pickings for smart players.

For example, “dropping” your hand at the beginning of play was a strong move if your hand had a certain number of points (or less) and Lew found he could clean up by dropping as soon as he received a low value hand and had a few ways to “encourage” that situation that were more sleight than strategy.

Lew wrote tables of possible outcomes and situations based on multiple versions of the game, each dictating the best decision or action and the best way to avoid penalties to give Lew – or anyone who had his method – the best chance of a win.

Lew was convinced he had the game beat and over time would always come out on top, but the problem was: What to do with this system?

The game is hardly common and getting sentenced to five years just so you can be the greatest Tonk player in cell block B is hardly a good strategic move.

Lew worked on a book but it was never published and may be in the hands of friends or family who received his library and notebooks after he passed away.

But would Lew’s book have killed the game of Tonk before it could become popular enough to be worthwhile?

Who would want to play a game that can be beaten with a little knowledge and absolutely destroyed with a modicum of (crooked) skill?

The answer is no, Lew’s book would not have had any impact on the game itself unless his system became so widely used that it dictated changes to the rules or made the game too easy to win (or lose).

Buried Treasures

Many games have been “beaten” to some degree or other and whether they need a Quantum Computer to play perfect strategy or for players to memorize a few statistics, there are plenty of people who will never consider or care about systems or methods that might give them an advantage.

Gamblers like to play and love to gamble and they are the vast majority of players.

If this game ever did take off (and I hope it does), Lew’s work may become a lost treasure worth thousands to those who can obtain a copy.

I always wonder how many other Lew Brooks are out there and how many other games have been beaten in theory and are only waiting for someone to put that theory into practice.

One important lesson is to realize that while you may play any kind of game for fun, if money is on the table there’s always a chance you might one day be swimming with a shark.

Lead image: Crystal Berdion/Unsplash

This is far from a comprehensive list of cons associated with ride share providers but as always, whenever traveling, pay special attention to how much you are being charged and be aware you might fall into a well-practiced, inescapable trap without doing anything wrong.

The Taxi Tax

A friend once told me he expected to be ripped off at least once in any foreign city by crooked taxi drivers.

Perhaps he took a lot more taxis than I did but my experience is that it only happens from time to time and usually when I have failed to take precautions or pay attention to what’s happening around me.

Take Atocha railway station in Madrid for example.

A taxi from there to Plaza Mayor is not an enormous amount but one Sunday, with family, I got into a cab and on arrival was overcharged by more than double!

The driver used a technique I had experienced before, where he stopped traffic behind him to apply more pressure to me to act quickly.

The last time this happened was over 20 years ago and the scenario was identical but on that occasion, I was on my own and happy to put up a fight until local police intervened.

Thankfully, they sent the driver on his way once the police officer learned what he was trying to charge me.

This time, there were no helpful officers of the law, and I was with my kids who didn’t need to see me get into another argument with a scamming taxi driver (I once faced off with an aggressive New York driver who made a blatant attempt to take us on a tour of Manhattan instead of going directly to our hotel) so I paid up and spent the rest of the afternoon fuming.

That’s the problem with this type of con: It’s a trap that takes full advantage of your situation and offers almost no way out unless you are willing to cause a traffic jam, start a fight or in some cases, get arrested (local gendarmes are not always so helpful to out-of-towners).

Scams such as overcharging or taking tourists for a longer ride are not very sexy but are commonplace in many locations and we can all fall foul of a dishonest driver.

Sadly, there’s not a lot one can do unless you can prove the driver is scamming you.

? R. Paul Wilson On: How To Avoid Getting Scammed On Vacation

The Lisbon Switch

A more sophisticated cash scam in Lisbon took advantage of a well-engineered misunderstanding where the driver would receive a 20, passed from the back seat by unwary passengers.

The driver would then switch the 20 (unseen by his passengers) and hold up a 10 while saying something in Portuguese.

This caused tourists to either assume they handed over a 10 instead of a 20 and correct that “mistake” OR challenge the driver by asserting they gave him a 20 not a 10.

And here was the genius of this ploy: If the passenger corrected their “mistake” and handed over a 20, the driver made an extra 10 euros but if his passengers were certain they gave 20 from the outset, the driver (in broken English or French or German) would say “I only have this – no change!” as if he had been holding up the 10 to illustrate he only had large bills and no coins to make change with!

The result of this cleverly-engineered confusion was that people would often be embarrassed for suspecting the driver and let them keep the change!

Rideshare Risks

Personally, I use ride share services like Uber and Lyft all over the world and while I believe they are an excellent modern convenience for travelers, users must exercise caution whenever they use them in unfamiliar places.

Rideshare problems range from questionable (and annoying) practices to outright fraud and on rare occasions, real danger to passengers.

These are not the norm but from place to place, problems can be more or less common depending on multiple factors such as local laws and enforcement of ride share rules.

Removing cash from the equation and paying a large company through trusted payment portals would seem to protect us from many types of fraud but some drivers have found ways to add unwarranted fees or penalty payments that can be difficult to challenge.

Wet Seats And Dented Doors

Passengers in multiple countries have encountered the “damage scam” where they are sent a claim from the driver shortly after their ride with a photograph that claims the customer accidentally or willfully caused some damage to upholstery or bodywork.

I find this scam interesting since users who complain about it often seem credible and even report receiving photos of damage taken during the daytime when the ride happened at night and the claim was sent immediately after, while it was STILL dark!

I’ve seen enough of these to be sure some drivers may be taking advantage but how many times can one driver claim passenger damage or cleaning fees before the ride-share company flags them as suspicious?

Certainly if a driver’s door is dented, he or she could get away with charging a customer for the repair even if they had nothing to do with it and it is not easy to claim back funds deducted as the result of such a claim.

Multiple ride-share customers have reported being charged large sums for damage they didn’t do with scant or suspicious evidence provided by the driver and typically the ride-share company sides with the driver meaning claims are rarely refunded.

One victim was able to prove that a photograph of “vomit” used to deduct $150 from his credit card was taken at an entirely different time and location thanks to the geotag on the image file BUT the company still refused to respond until he took his story to the local news and the driver was suspended.

Some people recommend taking a photo of the seats before you leave a car to prove they weren’t soiled in any way OR to take a picture of any stains you might notice when getting into the car (after the ride, it’s already too late).

I’m not sure either of these precautions are practical or effective but any local authority that permits ride share companies to operate should ensure they police their own drivers to weed out any bad apples.

Rule Breakers

Less costly but no less annoying are the drivers who flaunt company rules with regard to cleanliness, speed, safety and pickup or drop-off of passengers.

For example, drivers can’t see their destination until the last minute and can only cancel a couple of times before being penalized but it seems to happen a lot in certain cities whenever I book a short ride.

If you’ve ever been to the impromptu nightclub known as the ride-share pickup zone at Las Vegas airport on a busy night, you can expect to have several of your booked rides cancel at the very last minute if your journey isn’t far enough.

In these cases, the driver would rather cancel and go around again in the hope of picking up a more lucrative fare.

There also seems to be a way that drivers can beat the system once they realize the ride isn’t worth their time.

I assume that on some apps the destination is revealed as the driver gets close to their pickup and at that moment they can veer in a different direction and cause the pickup time to jump on the passenger’s app.

If you’ve ever watched a driver get close and then turn off in another direction (increasing their arrival time) then perhaps they’re trying to dump your ride or force a cancellation.

In some cases this can incur a charge meaning the driver gets paid without having to give anyone a ride.

In other words, a rogue driver can make money purely by driving in circles AWAY from the pickup location!

The Other Side

There’s another side to this issue and it’s with you, the passenger.

Many drivers wisely employ dash cams that also record inside the vehicle and YouTube is littered with videos of nasty, petulant, entitled, and violent passengers who damage cars, attack drivers and act like assholes as if the driver isn’t another human being who deserves respect.

Driver’s scams do happen but if you suspect something or have a concern or a request (such as a particular route) for goodness sake, be polite, kind and patient.

An issue of real concern is driver behavior and driving style.

Always issue a complaint if the driver is needlessly aggressive to you or other drivers on the road and definitely complain if they drive like maniacs!

Even if the driver is rude or nasty or causes other problems, wait until you are safely out of the car and deal only with the ride share company when you have a genuine complaint.

Travel safe.

? R. Paul Wilson On: Street Scams

Lead image: Lexi Anderson/Unsplash

Some are for playing from “the outside” but others were designed to cheat the players by giving the house complete control over who wins or loses.

But there was more to these devices than the ability to win every time.

Back To The Sting

Fans of George Roy Hill’s perfect con-artist movie The Sting will remember the scene where Robert Redford’s “Hooker,” who was flush with cash from a recent scam, bets it all on a spin of the roulette wheel.

After a large wager is approved and the ball released, the dealer reaches under the table to press a hidden button forcing the ball into a losing slot.

Hooker knew immediately he’d been had but had no recourse thanks to the “family” nature of that illegal gambling establishment.

I loved that scene as a kid and was fascinated to learn – later in life – that such “gaffed wheels” actually exist and were once used all over the world by all kinds of establishments from back-alley gaming rooms to large-scale casinos that needed a fallback option in case some whale took them to the cleaners.

A Different Kind Of Juice

Early versions of gaffed wheels benefited from “Drop In” style wheels that fit into a large hole cut into the table.

These allowed for a ring of electromagnets to be hidden inside the wheel (behind the ball track), which could influence a special ball containing a steel core.

Once the ball passed a number the house wanted to avoid, the magnets could be flashed on and off, stopping the ball in its tracks, forcing fall immediately into the rotor where it would be almost impossible for it to land in the number that just passed by.

These “juice tables” (where the ball was manipulated by “turning on the juice”) were so well built that players and dealers could spend years playing without ever suspecting there was a large electronic device hidden inside that could blow up someone’s pacemaker if they stood too close.

I had a friend who traded in both honest and gaffed collectable gambling devices.

About 20 years ago, he bought what he believed to be a completely legitimate wheel from a casino company but when he stripped the wheel for repair, noticed a “tell” inside the wooden interior.

Suspecting there might be more to this wheel than meets the eye, he had it completely deconstructed and discovered a ring of crusty, leaking batteries behind a continuous loop of coiled wires!

It had long since expired as a working device but was so well made, not even its most recent owner knew it had been a crooked wheel!

Dropping A Pin

Another variation that didn’t need batteries (or to be plugged into a wall socket) was the ingenious “kickoff wheel.”

This type of gaff was used in conjunction with a “dead ball” that bounced a lot less than ordinary roulette balls so would tend to drop straight into the nearest slot once it fell (or was pushed) out of the ball track.

The secret was a couple of invisible holes in the ball track, under the rim on the player’s side and impossible to see from that position.

When the wheel was “operated” a thin, stiff wire would push out of the hole to intercept the ball, sending it downward into the rotor.

As with the “juiced” wheel, this simply stopped the ball after a particular number had passed but gave the house an unbeatable advantage against the players.

Hiding The Switch

Unlike the dealer in The Sting, most staff were never required to activate these devices but simply played on the level until excused and replaced with a crooked dealer, or in some cases the mechanism could be activated by a manager or pit boss.

Early gaffed wheels had switches in the leg or far side of the table, but modern versions were activated by a remote-control garage door opener!

Operating these types of crooked tables took a little skill, not just in reaching the operating button or lever but in how and when to use that unbeatable advantage.

You can’t just beat every spin or the house would soon go broke; no one wants to play at the joint where nobody ever wins!

A gaffed table or wheel must be reserved for extreme situations where the house cannot afford to lose.

Sometimes all it takes is one bad spin to interrupt a player’s winning momentum and put them back on the right (losing) track and crooked dealers must learn to bide their time for the right series of bets by the target player to inflict maximum monetary and psychological damage.

That’s not to say every crooked gambling room operated that way.

A few needed to keep their gaffed tables well oiled because they used them so much, but in those cases, the clientele was either changing constantly or had no other place to exercise their gambling needs.

There’s an old joke about a gambler who is playing a bunch of notorious cheaters in the corner of a quiet saloon when a friend arrives and gestures for the gambler to join him at the bar.

The friend says to the gambler, “Don’t you know those guys are all cheaters? They’ll rob you blind!”

The gambler shrugs, swallows his whisky and says, “I know. But it’s the only game in town.” Then returns to the card table.

Do Modern Casinos Rig Roulette Wheels?

It’s very unusual to find a modern gambling establishment foolish enough to have a gaffed game on the premises.

Apart from being a 400-pound piece of evidence, it’s just not necessary when players keep coming and playing no matter how bad the odds are against them.

Unusual doesn’t mean impossible.

Some casinos have fallen victim to staff interfering with the ball track, changing materials in the wheel, or switching the ball for one that is easier to manipulate or predict.

Crooked maintenance staff have even been known to use pliers on older wheels to narrow the pocket on some numbers, or deepening or adjusting slots to make reds more likely than blacks.

A few years ago, I heard of an Asian casino that was caught dropping a wire frame into numbers on a wheel if those numbers were being over-bet or were popular with big money players.

You’d never think that a wire frame would be deceptive since it’s visible to the naked eye, even when placed in the slot.

When the wheel is spun, however, that wire frame is rendered completely invisible!

So, yes, gaffed wheels are extremely rare but like an ageing rock band, they’re always poised for a comeback.

? R. Paul Wilson On: How To Cheat At Roulette With Past Posting

In games like high/low a strong, undetectable peek is like having a marked deck anywhere, anytime but in casino table games, the peek can be much more profitable.

I spoke previously about how cheaters can glimpse their own cards as they deal but in table games, a crooked dealer can “send” the top card or even multiple cards from known locations deeper down to players who use that information to have an unbeatable edge.

How “Flashing” Works

Hand dealt games have always been vulnerable to “flashing” where the dealer allows an outside agent to get a peek of what’s coming and act/bet accordingly.

Imagine playing blackjack for hours and often knowing the first card you will be dealt, or potential hit cards in the middle of a hand?

Such information would allow you to increase and decrease your bets based on the predicted value of your hand plus make some seemingly risky hits that are certain to make your hand.

The mechanics of this kind of player/agent scam are not difficult to learn but timing is a factor that can only be learned in practice.

Many scammers have played for years without detection by mastering how and when to flash cards to multiple “takeoff men.”

Perhaps the most powerful “flash” was accomplished by pushing the top card very slightly off the deck so part of the index of the top card would be revealed between the fingers of the right hand.

As the dealer picked up a completed round of cards or peeked at their hole card (or any typical dealing action) they could easily expose the next card.

The entire index was not necessary to show; Just a hair on the edge of the index would be enough to know if it was a 10-value or an Ace.

And if you spend a few minutes trying this yourself, you’ll quickly realize that any value can be recognized by a slither of its left-most edge.

This move may sound pretty blatant, but it can work for months or years without ever being detected, and several crews of dealers and players were caught only after years of skimming cream from the house.

Most likely, countless more have never been suspected because the move is incredibly hard to see unless you are being the flashed the card and the eye in the sky has almost no chance unless the card is moved too much and without a covering action.

Method Variations

The method used to flash often dictates where the takeoff man (or woman) would sit but clever cheaters bounced the flash around the table to further conceal their actions.

Pit bosses, security and the eye in the sky might try to see how a winning player might get cards flashed by the dealer and fail to see any possible glimpse because the flash was being sent to another player on the opposite side of the table who then signaled the information to the takeoff man making the big bets.

One such flash is accomplished by raising the top card just enough so a player to the dealer’s right can catch a peek as cards are dealt or guarded (some casinos teach dealers to hold the deck against their chest between deals, making several flashes possible).

In some places, dealers would deal the deck from a position almost at eye level so players could catch a glimpse of cards beneath those being dealt if the dealer had mastered a method to push one card out very slightly under another in the action of dealing.

All of these methods are relatively simple but when mastered and used carefully, they could steal hundreds of thousands from a casino without anyone being the wiser.

Unfortunately (for the cheaters) one of the smartest ways to use this is for a dishonest dealer to use multiple takeoff players so their bosses never see a pattern of player/dealer winning streaks.

But this strategy has a fatal flaw: The more people who know about your scam, the more chances someone will talk or trade that information to beat some other charges.

Another powerful strategy employed by these cheaters was to steer high cards to the dealer’s hand in order to bust the dealer and pay off the entire table.

This can be an easy way to make a lot of money if the cheaters have the table “locked” (every player is in on the scam) but it further exposes the crew when so many players are needed.

Before The Machines

Hand shuffling (without a shuffling machine) offered crooked dealers and their partners many opportunities to create memorized slugs of cards that could be dropped into play at a known point then used to fleece the house for one or two rounds of play.

I know of several shuffling procedures that were vulnerable to dealer/player scams where one player would sit on third base as six or eight decks were being shuffled, carefully watching the top of each stack as they were being interlaced with other cards.

From this position, the player could see a small number of cards that were dropped onto the top of the shuffled stack and memorize those cards.

Thanks to the prescribed shuffling procedure, the dealer would shuffle cards together from two larges stacks, each made up of half the decks being played.

By grabbing cards from each of the initial stacks, the dealer created a third stack that would grow until it consisted of all eight (now shuffled) decks.

What made the flash possible (and incredibly profitable) was that the dealer had to carry back a deck from the shuffled stack and then shuffle that with cards from either of the two initial halves of the eight-deck stack.

This carry-back rule seemed to shuffle the cards even more, but it allowed a crooked dealer to keep cards on top of the shuffled stack throughout the entire shuffle!

Initially, this might have been a good way to keep a memorized slug but there’s always a chance that playback (recordings from security upstairs) might reveal that a sequence of cards was repeated after a shuffle so instead, the cheaters simply flashed cards that went to the top of the shuffled stack and kept them there.

The player on third base would memorize the cards then calculate which hands to bet on for a surefire win or, more practically how to make sure the dealer busted.

With a locked table, crews could clean out the chip tray but too much and too soon will get the attention of the eye in the sky so smart teams balanced their surefire rounds with multiple rounds of honest play between shuffles.

There’s a lot more to this than I can share here and in fact, a crooked dealer capable of executing some clever shuffle strategies can reap a lot more with another scam I’ll discuss in the future.

Many of these methods are long dead in places that use shuffle machines but those devices are far from perfect and there are other ways of beating a machine either with technology or something surprisingly simple.

What’s for sure is that scams that seem to be killed off by modern technology often evolve and return with a new angle that beats whatever precautions the casino thinks it has.

If The Shoe Fits

Flashing or peeking doesn’t always happen when the cards are being shuffled or dealt from a dealer’s hand.

Special dealing shoes have been made to allow a glimpse of the next card to either dealers or players depending on the construction of a secret device that transmits that information without any electronics or moving parts!

We’ll talk about gaffed shoes another time but let me leave you with this: Some entirely legitimate dealing shoes could allow dealers to peek or flash the next card and completely crush the game of blackjack.

This is not a dealing shoe that has been tampered with in any way but an entirely legitimate piece of gaming equipment found in hundreds of casinos yet vulnerable to one of the simplest and most devastating scams in the casino industry.

More on that in a later article.

Knowing just a single card can provide an unbeatable advantage; there are dozens of methods to get a glimpse of a card and in the hands of expert players, a simple peek can reap enormous rewards.

Secret Knowledge

I’m always suspicious when casinos use technology to know the order of a deck they’re about to deal and past systems that used cameras and computers in conjunction with automatic shufflers were subject to all kinds of shenanigans if the casino or developers were so inclined to make adjustments to how those machines worked.

I’ll get into the problems and possibilities of this kind of scenario another time but just having information that could lead to an unfair advantage is dangerous if it can inform or change game procedure.

The way I like to put it to my friends on the other side of table is: If players are not permitted to know what cards are about to be dealt, why should the house have that information?

Knowing what card is about to be dealt could make an enormous difference to a player sitting at first base on a blackjack table who knows for certain that the first card out of the shoe will be an ace.

Equally, if a machine were to change its procedure according to the order of the deck, this could give the house an unfair advantage against the players.

Shuffling and dealing procedures are so important to protect everybody from everybody else and one of the key considerations when shuffling or dealing cards in a gambling situation is to ensure none of cards are accidentally or deliberately revealed.

Imagine sitting at a table while a dealer shuffles eight decks by hand, then knowing exactly what the first 10 or 12 cards are going to be. Or playing Texas Hold ‘Em and knowing whether or not you’re about to hit the flop.

How big an advantage would you have if you could deal a good card to yourself and a bad card to your opponent?

All of this without the aid of a marked deck.

The following examples presume a crooked dealer (a mechanic) working with one or more players against the balance of the table but these same moves can be used in many situations including when a cheater is working “single-o”.

From Bubbles To Greeks

The following dealer peeks are used to either gain information that could be used against other players or in conjunction with a second deal to manipulate cards into the perfect position; here we’ll look at some of the most common (and most effective) methods to get that glimpse.

The heel or “Greek Peek” is used as the dealer gestures with the left hand, which is holding the deck.

The top card is lifted at the inner left side by pressure exerted from the base of the left thumb.

There is a distinct knack to this that takes a while to accomplish but once the muscle is trained and the action reduced to a minimum, it’s possible to make multiple peeks as cards are dealt from the top of the deck.

Continuous glimpses while dealing is truly limited to a handful of experts who both know the secret and have dedicated hundreds of hours to perfecting it.

Yet the easier, single peek has proven more dangerous to players and casinos, whether used by crooked dealers to avoid busting a partner’s hand or by bust-out dealers (in the bad old days) to make sure they killed a player’s hand!

The “Bubble Peek” is more appropriate for games where the dealer is required to necktie or guard their hand when not dealing, which both protects cards from some moves but makes them more vulnerable to others.

The Bubble is so called because the left thumb pushes the top card to the right against the tips of the left finger, which prevents the card from moving and forcing the card to buckle at the outer right corner, exposing the card’s index if the deck is held at the right angle (perfectly aided by many casinos’ dealing procedure).

This is an excellent way to peek a card, but care must be taken not to leave a distinct bend in the card and the peek happens in an instant, the “Bubble” popping up and down in just a fraction of a second.

Variations on the Bubble Peek bend the cards in different directions depending on game procedure and a particularly subtle version only bends the back of the card just enough to see if the dealer has a “paint” on top (a court card), which can be more than enough information.

Left-handed dealers have their own methods for these peeks since they tend to deal from the right hand and the techniques just described would only reveal a blank corner!

Down Into The Deck

Similar moves exist to peek the bottom of the deck with the cards being slightly buckled as they’re picked up, allowing a glimpse of the bottom inside index.

Another glimpse requires the bottom card to be squeezed backwards, buckling it until the dealer can see the index; this may seem crude but performed correctly it is completely invisible to everyone but the crooked dealer.

More advanced sleights allow the dealer to catch a glimpse of any card near the top or even a card in the middle.

Players can also glimpse cards during common table procedures with a particularly devious glimpse happening under cover of a cut.

In a loose game (in terms of procedure), when the dealer passes the deck, the cheating player cuts with two hands, estimating enough cards from the bottom for all the players plus one or two more.

If the bottom card is glimpsed before the cut, the player now knows a card that’s sure to hit the flop!

The danger with such a move is the bottom glimpse (which is hard to take when other players may be watching the cut), but there’s a little-known secret called the “Shutter Peek” where the top card is lifted at the inner end as the bottom half of the deck is being slapped on top of it.

Performed correctly, the previous top card is lifted at the very instant it becomes buried under the bottom half and is only exposed for a fraction of a second.

So long as the number of cards placed on top allow for all the players plus a burn card, the glimpsed card is sure to reappear with the community cards.

The “shutter” is a fantastic move and knowing one card that’s coming in the flop is a powerful advantage but games that allow players to cut – especially with two hands – are much rarer these days.

Deeper Deceptions

These are just a handful of the most powerful and common ways to peek cards before they are dealt but when a crooked dealer is working in cahoots with players there are many more sophisticated strategies that can beat almost any game.

These methods have stolen millions from casino table games and even more from players in private games.

In my next article, “How Dealers And Players Can Work Together To Steal From The House” I’ll discuss how these simple peeks evolved to create an unbeatable advantage.

Lead image: Shutterstock

A few of these characters crossed between the world of gambling and cheating and magic.

Martin Nash was a legend in the conjuring world, and I was fortunate to spend many hours in his company.

In that time, Martin taught me a great deal and fooled me countless times with sleights and subtleties but on two occasions, I had the opportunity to the turn the tables on the old master.

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night…

It rarely rains in Los Angeles but when it does, many people choose to remain inside, especially at night.

On such a wet and windy evening at the Magic Castle in Hollywood – a private club for magicians, celebrities and wealthy supporters of the art – the showrooms were only half full and the (many) bars and corridors were mostly empty.

I found myself alone at the end of the Palace Bar, sitting at a green baize-covered table where members could perform for guests or trade secrets and ideas.

I took advantage of the quiet time to practice a move I had recently learned from a professional card cheat and was busy shuffling and dealing when Martin Nash pulled up a chair to sit down and chat.

Meet Mr. Nash

For most of you, Martin’s name will be unfamiliar but for magicians and sleight of hand enthusiasts, Martin was a legend – and deservedly so.

He was a magician and entertainer who performed under the name “The Charming Cheat” and could bring an audience to its feet with astonishing demonstrations of skill and expertise.

Martin himself was something of a mystery: In the world of magic and magicians he was a legendary figure, but he often hinted towards a shadowy other life that he rarely discussed, even with friends.

It’s possible he was nothing more than a performer who had adopted the methods of cardsharps but there was a note of guilt in his voice whenever he talked about making moves for real.

The Real Deal

I used to spend a lot of time with a gaggle of crotchety curmudgeons at the Farmer’s Market on Third and Fairfax, long before the modern Disney-like “Grove” carbuncle was built next door and the market filled with wannabes, posers, and fakers.

In the good old days, it was filled with a rogues gallery from all walks of life, including old crews from the bad old days of the Gardena Card Rooms.

Those guys thought Martin was just a pretender but when I asked if they’d even seen him in action, none of those retired railbirds had even seen a show.

Except one.

“Phil H” – a well-known former cheater (and illegal bookie) – would sometimes visit the Magic Castle to see friends and quietly enjoyed Martin’s Hollywood version of the crooked gambler and Phil once told me that Martin had “one shot” that would definitely get the money!

Sadly, I never got the skinny on what the move was or how and where (or if) Martin had ever played it.

One thing was for sure: After a career performing thousands of live shows and countless television appearances, Martin Nash’s playing days – real or imagined – were long in the past but his performing life continued until his death in 2009.

Shortly after Martin passed, magician Bob Farmer learned – while researching another project – that Martin had helped the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch card cheats who had been working the lumber camps in British Columbia.

Doctor Theatre

In his later years, Martin suffered multiple ailments including arthritis but whenever he stepped into the spotlight, he seemed rejuvenated and transformed and could perform expert moves effortlessly for a live audience despite being in pain.

At a convention in Sacramento, I snuck into the back of a showroom where I knew Martin would be closing the show and was surprised to find the Charming Cheat at the back of the theatre, watching the other acts.

He was clearly nervous about performing as he rubbed “Golden Touch” lotion into his hands to combat chronic dry skin and as I watched him prepare, I grew concerned that he wasn’t in any shape to execute expert sleight of hand under hot theatre lights for a room full of cynical magicians.

I needn’t have feared.

When introduced, Martin transformed before my eyes as he walked from the back of the room to the stage, smiling brighter than the light that followed him, eyes glistening and mind as sharp as a switchblade.

The show was fantastic and as always, ended with a prolonged standing ovation as Martin soaked every ounce of love from his audience.

Martin’s Challenge

There’s an enormous amount we can learn from old-school card men like Martin Nash, and the smart guys know when to stop and listen.

I was lucky to be very friendly with Martin and he would often share secrets learned over a lifetime of study.

As he joined me on that rainy night at the Castle, I was delighted to have him all to myself, but our privacy was short lived when a couple of young members – wisely spotting an opportunity to spend time with Martin Nash – joined us.

As we chatted, I continued to shuffle the deck in the hope Martin would take it and show us something but instead, he asked me to shuffle and deal a hand of five card stud to every player.

Unfortunately for Martin, I knew what was coming as I had seen him pull this trick before.

It was a few years earlier at some hotel, at some convention late at night when Martin asked someone to deal a round of stud before asking them to name the unseen hole cards.

When his victim admitted he had no idea what those cards were, Martin slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “Then what are you doing in the game?” before breaking the tense moment with that famous smile of his.

I knew I was Martin’s next victim but unfortunately for him, he couldn’t have chosen a worse time.

I did as I was asked, pitching a face down card followed by a face up card to each of the people around the table.

Martin asked me to name the cards and I immediately did so, calling all five hole cards, catching the old master completely by surprise!

He looked me dead in the eye and knew I had the jump on him – and he loved it.

He spent the next two hours sharing ideas generously but when the others were gone, he had to know how I knew those cards.

As it turned out, the move I had been practicing before he sat down was a way to peek cards as they’re being dealt; Martin literally couldn’t have chosen a worse time to “get me” with his favorite challenge and I’m glad he took it well.

This wasn’t the only time I managed to fool Martin Nash but the second time I wasn’t even in the room.

All Change

While making the film Shade where I was second unit director and expert consultant, I had developed a way to change a 5 Card Poker hand visibly while the cards were face up.

You can see the effect if you watch the opening titles of the movie, which I directed.

The method I invented allowed the performer to immediately hand the cards out for examination – a new development – and I shared it with a few friends at the Magic Castle.

Word of this effect reached Martin Nash who bumped into card expert Jason England sitting at “The Vernon Table” contemplating a terrible 5 Card Poker hand.

Martin joined him and after a few pleasantries, asked Jason if he’d seen my new effect.

Jason instantly transformed the five cards in his hand to a Royal Flush before passing the cards to Martin.

I had taught Jason the sleight earlier that week and he was practicing just as Martin arrived and asked about it!

Martin Nash was more than just a great card technician, a performer, or an expert in his field. Martin was a true gentleman cut from classic cloth.

Whether or not he was ever a cheat is moot, but he was charming to the end.

Lead image: Shutterstock

The real danger from modern impostors is not someone claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son or a lost Russian princess – it’s from scammers pretending to be your boss, your bank manager, or even your own flesh and blood.

The Communication Factor

I’ve talked about impostors before but every year, new scams appear thanks to changes in social dynamics, new technology, and new ways of working.

How we communicate often defines how an impostor operates since the ability to verify their claims should be either limited or controlled to ensure the success of a lie.

In the past, the speed of global, national, or local communications was decided by the means of conveying the mail, it might take months to find out that someone is not the brother of Wyatt Earp or a missing Romanov princess.

This meant impostors could claim almost anything without fear of being proved a liar for weeks, months or years.

As technology improved from the telegraph to the internet, impostors became more sophisticated and used increasingly clever techniques to discourage interrogation of their claims.

Social compliance, politeness and deterrence all play a factor in this kind of con game, as does the con artist’s greatest technique, which is to offer people what they really want.

The play Six Degrees of Separation illustrates this perfectly with high-society suckers all too happy to be rubbing shoulders with the son of the great actor and director, Sidney Poitier, and all too self-satisfied to properly verify the impostor’s story.

This was based on real-life serial impostor, David Hampton, who would mingle with students from Columbia University and to gain immediate credibility, he would claim that his father was the legendary movie star.

This worked so well that he was soon able to mix with the great and the good of New York where his story gained him greater access to that world and he wasn’t discovered until the dean of Columbia’s school of journalism caught Hampton in his home with another man and the Poitier story (amongst others) quickly unraveled.

This all happened in a time when people could feasibly have investigated this young man’s story and quickly learned that he was not who he claimed to be, but such was the allure of that story and the sheer audacity of his claim, few questioned it at all.

Amazingly, he even mingled with other movie stars who promptly fell under the notion that only the real son of a fellow celebrity would make such claims to them since they were essentially part of the same “community.”

Investigating further might have taken a little more effort but today any search engine could inform anyone, regardless of their celebrity status, about a person’s real family or whether they have an estranged offspring bouncing around the Big Apple.

Or maybe not.

As the internet became more accessible, smart scammers found countless ways to take advantage of its flaws.

Smart impostors made websites or updated online open-source encyclopedias in order to provide quick and easily found proof of their spurious claims.

But for the emerging criminal industry of pretenders, the key to a great impostor scam became anonymity.

The Rise Of Remote Impostor Scams

Once technology made it easier to search facts and harder to make false claims, impostor scams retreated into another, long-proven method of pretending to be who they’re not: Remote scams.

Just as letters from afar could convince a wealthy family that their long-lost son had been found on the island of Fiji 200 years ago, texts and emails became a favorite method for modern-day pretenders around the world.

Thanks to this new form of communication, scammers could target elderly relatives claiming to be their grandchildren, nephews or nieces allegedly in a situation that required money to be sent urgently.

The rise of social media made it even easier for scammers to find perfect candidates bragging about their skiing holidays with enough information in their profiles to find a victim who might pay non-existent hospital bills after falling off a non-existent cliff.

This ability to hide behind technology created a booming criminal industry of impostors pretending to be our banks or internet suppliers or computer services in order to con people out of their hard-earned cash (I’ll talk about the mechanisms used for this type of scam in another article).

Spoofing phone numbers gave immediate proof that a scammer was who they pretended to be since that number would appear on their victims’ phones as the name of someone they knew.

This has been used to fool millions of people and is still used today by bogus businesses to make incoming calls (to you) appear to be from a local number when it’s actually from a criminal call center thousands of miles away.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg for existing impostor scams, but things are about to get a lot worse.

The Real Dangers Of Deepfakes

In movies like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible, characters can wear amazing silicone masks with miraculous voice changers taped to their neck that make them sound exactly like who they are impersonating.

In real life, this type of technology is not exactly practical in-person but used remotely, it could be devastating and thanks to modern times we are all communicating across video or voice calls that are about to become all-too-easy to fake.

Deepfake technology, where a video can be manipulated to change one person into another – even a familiar movie star or politician – has improved greatly in a short time, as has Deepfake voice software that can change anyone’s voice to sound exactly like someone else whose voice pattern and cadence has been previously analyzed.

This form of vocal impersonation is incredibly convincing and can already be transmitted live so that a con artist could contact the employee of a bank pretending to be a client or a manager that the target knows well enough to recognize their voice.

In concert with a few emails and other convincers, the scammer could then order that bank’s employee to transfer millions of dollars into the scammer’s accounts.

This sounds like it came right out of a movie but it’s already happened at least twice, with international authorities still trying to hunt down both the money and the pretenders at the other end of one such phone call.

Soon, the video version of this type of scam will happen as Deepfakes become even more sophisticated and computer processing power catches up with the idea of a live deep fake and while this will certainly be used by con artists (if it hasn’t already), the real danger to society is much greater than that.

Imagine suddenly not being able to trust your own eyes and not knowing whether who or what you see on screen is real.

Suddenly all news can be manipulated even more than it is today, video evidence will cease to be effective, and the world we’ve learned to see through the windows of our machines will cease to exist.

In the end, only the reality we experience directly might be trusted and as any magician will tell you, even reality can be distorted.

Lead image: Shutterstock

Sadly, these tend to either require a lot of work or are nothing more than fantasies based on bad math and wishful thinking.

How The Martingale Works

If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’re already familiar with the system we’re about to discuss and chances are you have an inner gambler who is convinced the system has merit for reasons I’m about to get into but first, let’s define the difference – for this article – between a gambler and a player.

A gambler relies on luck while a player relies on knowledge of the game.

Gamblers love systems like the Martingale because, frankly, they can be fun. Players, on the other hand, recognize the obvious (to them) flaws in this kind of strategy.

So here are the basics to the Martingale System:

You choose a 50/50 proposition such as red or black on a roulette table and place your initial stake on red, and if you win, you collect your winnings and repeat the bet.

That’s the easy part.

If you lose, you simply double your bet for the next spin so that if you win, you recoup your losses and have a profit equal to your initial stake.

Let’s say that again because we’ll be coming back to it in a moment:

If you lose your initial stake, you double that bet and if you win, you get back everything that you lost PLUS a profit equal to your initial bet.

If you keep losing, you keep doubling and doubling and doubling your bets until eventually red comes up and you get back all of the money you lost, plus a profit equal to your initial bet.

A “profit” equal to your “initial bet.”

That’s it.

That’s what you win no matter how many times you double your bet to chase your losses, all you will ever win is equal to that first (lowest) bet.

An Example To Demonstrate

So let’s play this out.

You bet $1 on red and you lose, so you bet $2 on the next spin and lose again.

In fact, thanks to the fickle hand of fate, you are going to lose the next 21 spins BUT you are going to win the 22nd spin, so I guarantee that if you keep playing you will eventually see the ball land in red.

So let’s keep doubling until we hit that red.

Our initial stake is $1, then we double to $2, then 4$ – $8 – $16 – $32 – $64 – $128 – $256 – $512 – $1,024 – $2,048 – $4,096 – $8,192 – $16,384 – $32,768 – $65,536 – $131,072 – $262,144 – $524,288 – $1,048,576…

So we just bet $1,048,576 and all we need to bet on that guaranteed 22^nd spin is a little less than $2.1 million dollars and we win back everything we just lost PLUS we will be ONE DOLLAR in profit.

One dollar.

One buck.

That’s what we just won for risking around $4.2 million dollars of our own money (roughly the sum of everything we lost plus our last bet, which we won).

Another Gambler’s Fallacy

Gamblers will no doubt state the chances of 21 spins without a single red appearing is extremely unlikely and I agree that it doesn’t happen often but it really does happen.

And when it does it might keep happening until you either run out of money or you run into the table limit which forbids you from doubling any more bets.

In fact, players are probably already screaming this at their screen.

No one has a limitless bankroll and if they did, no casino will let them play without a table limit to protect the house but even in the above scenario, the house only loses one dollar whenever your lucky red number finally comes up.

So why is it such a compelling idea for a system and why do people still play it?

I guess it’s fun, especially if the spread of reds and blacks is relatively “normal” since most players will win in a couple of spins and return to their initial bet.

In these scenarios, the Martingale brings seemingly guaranteed rewards until a string of losing results ultimately breaks the player’s bankroll.

And that will always happen eventually because – and I know this is going to be hard for many gamblers to believe – roulette wheels do not have a memory.

Every spin is independent of every other spin and the chances of a red or a black number coming up remains the same for each individual spin no matter how many reds or blacks preceded that spin.

The gambler can’t accept this and simply points to the long list of blacks and zeros (more about those in a moment) and believes that a red number must eventually appear and the more non-red numbers that preceded a spin must greatly improve the chances that the next number will be red.

Except – maddeningly – this is false, but the gambler’s brain often refuses to accept that.

A Stupid Way To Win

I once sat in a casino in Europe where we could monitor all the LED number displays waiting for a run of six red or black numbers before signaling players to hit the table and bet on the opposite color.

Amazingly, this tactic paid a healthy profit until we hit a period of persistent losses that would have deleted our profits had we not pulled back our bets in time.

For months afterward I would watch those same LED displays from the poker room and record how many times a run of six became a run of seven and the answer was about half the time, immediately recognizing how stupid that entire strategy would have been in the long run.

Of course, that red/black bet was never a 50/50 proposition since there is a green zero on the wheel that keeps the odds against the player; and in the US there are two zeros, making their wheels even less attractive over time.

Sure, we won a little, but the method was flawed and had we been overly distracted by our initial success we might have followed subsequent losses into an inevitable black hole.

We made a lot more (though small beans compared to well-funded teams) by identifying biased wheels, which I’ll discuss another time.

Variations

There are of course variations on the Martingale strategy that seek to improve chances and returns while supposedly addressing the weaknesses just described, but all of these are failing to defeat the casino’s mathematical advantage.

One such variation is the “Split Martingale” also known as “Labouchere,” or the now infamous “Reverse Labouchere.”

If you want to know more about the Reverse Labouchere system, it’s accompanied by a fantastic story of a little guy breaking the bank in Monte Carlo that I covered in one of my previous articles.

Not real truth: Selected, approved, manipulated and fabricated truth that will engulf each of us from all directions.

The digital age creates new opportunities and presents new dangers to all who engage with information online and as more countries come to rely on the internet for entertainment, commerce, financial security, and news, this ethereal platform on which billions have come to depend will become increasingly deceptive and manipulative.

In this article, I’m going continue my reflection on how increasingly difficult it has become to avoid being deceived, controlled, and manipulated in the modern world but in particular, how something that in theory was meant to unite us, has in fact divided us.

Ideological Tilt

Gamblers know the dangers of going into tilt where, on a rush of confidence or despair, enormous bankrolls can easily be lost on foolhardy bets made in moments of panic or misplaced certainty.

We’ve all experienced it ourselves from time to time in our daily lives and with honest reflection, we might recognize where we strayed from balanced decisions to reflex reactions.

At the poker table, bad decisions by opponents can be provoked or anticipated by experienced players using psychology and long-proven tactics that capitalize on a multitude of scenarios and this is extremely similar to how a professional con artist manipulates their victims.

As I’ve stated many times, if I know what you want, I can take everything you have but if I know what you think, I can easily shape how you think.

At the most basic level, this is how scams work but it’s also the secret to politics, propaganda, and population control.

One of the enormous downsides to social media has been the ease with which we have become polarized to one worldview or another thanks to algorithms that learn what we like in order to feed us even more of the same, until we find ourselves living inside information bubbles of our own making.

As a result, it has become increasingly easy for people to go on ideological tilt where anything that challenges their worldview is immediately (and sometimes violently) rejected.

For those who seek to divide and control large numbers of people, this is a Godsend and as technology has evolved, so have the tools that influence us.

Conspiracy Theories

One person’s truth is another’s conspiracy and as we navigate online platforms we find ourselves constantly dissected into various “us and them” categories.

Democrat or Republican? Are you vaccinated? Are you for or against the latest thing? Do you like Marmite?

The moment you can be accurately categorized, you become subject to an online barrage of positive or negative bias depending on where and with whom you choose to engage.

Even now, readers will be trying to nail down my personal affiliations, unaware they are following their own internal tilt mechanisms to decide how to interpret this article.

This isn’t about my personal preferences (or yours) it’s about the weapons being levelled to keep us in a state of perpetual ideological conflict.

Beyond Likes And Shares

Social media has been the most powerful new force for mass influence since the invention of the printing press and as engagement with platforms increases, so does global dependence.

The more we feed these beasts, the more we are labeled, separated and ultimately, controlled.

Much has been written about how historic events such as Brexit have been influenced by firms like Cambridge Analytica, but the tactics employed by that company have not been diminished by exposure; instead, their methods have been refined and better concealed.

The version of ourselves we present to social media helps software gauge our preferences then shape what we see and therefore influence how we think about what we see.

It’s entirely possible to influence two very different people in different ways to provoke the same outcome in both cases.

Equally, it’s possible to amplify the opinions of one group and suppress the feelings of another simply by adjusting who gets more coverage on selected platforms.

If you can’t change an undesirable opinion, you can at least smother it, isolate it, discredit it, and ultimately neuter it through multiple methods of data control.

A powerful method used to disarm any piece of data is to control the data that surrounds it.

Let’s say you post something that disagrees with an online majority and your post gets a little traction or even goes viral.

There are several ways to discredit your opinion either by prioritizing dissent and surrounding your post with opposing views or by linking your post to extremists and radicals, thereby attracting a horde of equally radical and extremist opinions from the other side.

Quickly, your post – even if it was the absolute truth – is tainted by the support of extremists and smothered by the voices of opposition.

Best of all, almost any revelation can be dismissed by characterizing it as conspiracy theory or right-wing or left-wing or racist or sexist – or all of the above.

Many times, there’s truth to this but there are lots of crazy conspiracies flying around; all one needs to do is associate an inconvenient fact with some seemingly similar nonsense and you can quickly and easily quash anything anyone tries to say.

These tactics are all right out of the con artist playbook and have now become so common that if the Watergate scandal story broke today, it would be old news in a day and respond into a dozen versions, each casting doubt on the other until the majority obediently dismiss it and anyone still pushing the story sounds like a nut.

The Trunami

But what exactly is “absolute truth” and can it ever exist on social media?

Truth has become so flexible that objective facts are now easy to dismiss with opinions and lived experiences.

Meanwhile, opportunities for deception multiply exponentially whenever truth becomes a subjective idea rather than an objective reality.

Whenever truth can be shaped to individual desires and preferences, we all become easy targets for manipulative mass media, online scammers, and more sophisticated con artists.

One thing I believe is certain: A deluge of malformed, carefully tailored truth is coming and will almost certainly drive a deeper wedge between us.

AI: Artifice And Information

Artificial Intelligence is evolving at a frightening rate.

Perhaps not to a level of consciousness but certainly to a level of practical application where it can be employed to make decisions on our behalf or, more worrying still, to make judgements that impact us on a daily basis.

AI can now create impressive works of “art” by processing words and selected criteria to make something that might easily hang in a museum or a house in the Hollywood Hills but it can also generate pages of text according to some simple inputs that can be used for websites, blogs or even articles like this one.

What should frighten us all is how untethered software can shape how we see the world and how we engage with each other. 

Soon, poorly conceived AI will be recognized as a root cause of society’s widening algorithmic divide but will it be improved to lessen such divisions or fine-tuned to divide and conquer?

AI is yet to emulate my personal grammatical glitches or naive writing style or my writer’s voice but given enough samples, it could do a pretty good job of faking something that seems to be written by me in the same way it can conjure an image of a juggling dog on a skateboard painted by Van Gogh.

I’ll explore how these advances in technology and software impact us financially (both in life and gaming) in a future article.

In the meantime, I like to listen to Bill Hicks who observed that news networks feed their audience a constant menu of “war, famine, death” while outside his own windows, all was peaceful except for a few crickets chirping in the grass.

I know things are bad in some parts of the world and may get worse or better and I know I can do something sometimes while others can make no difference at all.

What’s damaging is the constant flow of uninterrupted noise that keeps each of us concerned and engaged instead of looking outside our own windows to enjoy whatever peace we are fortunate to have.

For similar articles by this author, discover how your biases affect truth and why you need to act like a poker player to avoid being deceived.

One story that I would love to tell has been filmed before but in my opinion remains an untapped source for a brilliantly funny, suspenseful adventure featuring a gang of English middle-class misfits breaking the bank of an iconic European casino.

This is what they did, how they did it, and why it hasn’t happened since.

Meet Norman Leigh – The Mastermind

In my version of this story, Norman Leigh would be straight out of an Ealing comedy casting book – a mixture of Alistair Sims, Sir John Mills and Bill Nighy.

An English gentleman with a plan to beat casinos on the continent with a seemingly ingenious twist on an old betting strategy.

To realize this plan, Norman placed an ad in the newspaper that attracted the interest of a dozen characters who could each be found in a usual suspects line-up of 1960s English society.

This included an undercover policeman who believed the scheme might be some kind of con or a fraud against the gambling establishment but soon discovered that Norman’s idea was perfectly legal and seemingly, a sure-fire way to beat the casinos at their own game.

He was so convinced that he took a leave of absence and joined Norman’s team!

The game was roulette, and the system was the “Reverse Labouchere.”

It’s Pronounced “La-Boo-Share”

First, let’s start with the Labouchere system that is relatively simple to understand but do bear with me as it can seem more complicated than it actually is.

This type of system is designed for (almost) 50/50 type bets like red/black on the roulette table.

The player starts with a series of numbers which can be as short as three digits, but longer strings can be used with some gamblers insisting certain combinations offer better odds (I would advise you to ignore this because – ultimately – the flaws in such systems remain the same).

So let’s say you write down a string of digits as follows: 1-2-3.

The sum of these digits is 6, and that’s the amount you should expect to win if this plays out in your favor.

To play, you must always bet the sum of the first and last digits in your string.

In this case it is 1 + 3, which means the first bet is $4.

The rules are that if you LOSE that bet you add the amount of the bet to the end of your string of digits, which would become 1-2-3-4.

This would continue for each loss, the next bet being $5 (1 + 4 – the sum of first and last digit) adding the number 5 to the end of your string should you lose.

But what if you win?

When you win, you delete the first and last numbers and then add the first and last remaining numbers of your string of digits.

Let’s say you win the third bet, which was a $6 bet since 1 and 5 were the first and last digits after losing the second bet.

You now delete the first and last digits (the 1 and the 5) leaving you with 2-3-4 as your remaining string.

And so it continues until your string of numbers is erased by enough wins (if you get down to just one digit remaining of your string – that’s the amount you bet).

In the end, if you erase all your digits, your profit will equal the sum of the digits in your initial string.

I told you it would seem complicated but play with this for a few imaginary bets (maybe toss a coin and bet heads and tails with this system) and you’ll see that it’s really quite simple.

So long as you don’t hit a long series of losses, you can absolutely make your target amount (the sum of your initial string of numbers) providing you have deep enough pockets to increase your bets whenever you lose.

In this sense, it’s really just a version of the Martingale and can be both fun to play and deceptively effective over time.

But, just like the Martingale, it’s primarily a betting strategy; not a playing system that offers any kind of advantage against the house.

Playing The Reverse

Norman Leigh’s preferred version was called the ‘Reverse Labouchere’ because it increased bets when the player won and decreased bets when they lost.

As with the Labouchere, the Reverse requires players to write down or mentally track a string of numbers.

Like the Labouchere, bets are decided by adding the first and last digits of the string but here you will add your winning bets to the end and delete the first and last digits when you lose – the exact opposite of the method dictated by the Labouchere.

So if you lose the first two bets, the string is deleted and you either begin again with a fresh string (in our example, 1-2-3) or leave the table.

If you win, however, you add the winning bet to the end (1-2-3-4) and then bet again by adding the first and last digits ($5).

Continue until you reach a pre-determined profit, at which point you either retire from the table or start a fresh string (1-2-3) and pocket your winnings from that round of play.

In effect, it is a money management system similar to that of gambling legend Nick The Greek whose book “Gambling Secrets of Nick The Greek” amounted to “bet more when you’re winning and less when you’re losing”!

The 13 players who descended upon Nice, France, and Monte Carlo, Monaco, were also able to increase the amount being risked, since Norman’s bankroll was distributed between the players who were essentially hiding in plain sight.

And did it work?

Did Norman and his 12 cohorts defeat the casinos?

You bet they did!

Norman and his dapper dozen broke the bank at Monte Carlo and Norman was quickly blacklisted, despite the casino having no idea what he was doing to beat their games.

If they had known – and had they been smart – they should have given Norman and his crew free rooms for a fortnight and watched them blow back every penny that they’d previously won thanks to pure luck.

Here’s the rub:

The Reverse Labouchere doesn’t change the odds, it only limits your losses.

But if you keep playing, those losses will add up and while the same system increases returns during a winning streak the only way to benefit from that is to stop playing, which they did – only thanks to the casinos shutting them all down!

What About That Movie?

Other than a dry TV Mini-series, the adventures of Norman Leigh are best presented in his book “Thirteen Against The Bank” and I’d rather you read that than spoil all the details for you here.

It would make a fantastic comedy adventure for anyone who owns the rights and can raise the budget; there’s a fantastic story to be told but there’s one factor many neglect to mention in the telling: That it’s never been repeated.

Martingale-type systems chase ever-increasing losses until stopped by the table limit or a player’s limited bankroll.

Such losses can be a lot more than players might imagine thanks to the nature of random outcomes and the fact that gambling devices have no memory, so it is entirely possible for a 50/50 outcome not to occur after dozens of fair rolls, spins or turns.

The same can be true for a series of wins and in the case of Norman Leigh and his assault on Monte Carlo, he was simply the benefactor of a terrific run of luck that was halted before the tide could turn the other way as it always, always does.

That being said, in my movie, the ending would be better…

Not every opportunity is a new one, of course, and during a recent lunch in a Glasgow pub, I spotted an accidental vulnerability that might give a dishonest gambler the opportunity to repeat a very old scam that usually requires a great deal more work.

Real Hustle On The Wire

During our time filming The Real Hustle, one of the main challenges presented to us (by being on the BBC) was that any scam we staged had to be something that had really happened.

Many con games are based on principles that can be adapted or applied to countless situations so often, our hands were tied in terms of creativity where a true con artist would be free to innovate however they please.

Thankfully, we earned a little latitude over time since many old con games were now redundant in their original forms yet still applicable to the modern world.

In fact, technology and innovation had created many more opportunities for old scams to remain both feasible and profitable to contemporary scammers.

So it was with the old wire scam: A con game where the mark was made to believe they had an unbeatable advantage due to some flaw in the communications network of the time – such as the telegram system or “wire” – and were convinced to buy stocks or make bets based on early access to results that were seemingly being delayed on their way to legitimate banks or betting establishments.

You may remember this scam from The Sting where con artists Hooker and Gondorff built a “Big Store” scam in which they built and ran an entirely bogus underground sportsbook filled with fellow con artists eager to take down Robert Shaw playing evil crime boss, Doyle Lonnegan.

Hustlers Are Ahead Of The Pack

In the movie, Donegan was convinced by a western union clerk – actually another hustler “borrowing” a legitimate clerk’s office – that he could delay the results of any horse race then relay the winner to Donegan in time for him to make a bet on a race that had already been won.

If you haven’t seen the movie, add it to your list immediately – I envy you your first viewing!

The principle at work in this con is the simplest of betting scams or cheating advantages – knowing the outcome before making or taking a bet.

This applies to so many betting scams, such as “The Flipper” who could make a coin land any way he liked but his real money was made from knowing the outcome of a legitimate coin toss then selectively taking bets on the supposedly unknown outcome, thereby skimming the losses to always be in profit.

So any situation where a hustler can know, predict or force the outcome is a powerful, unbeatable edge that only needs a fresh supply of suckers to keep the money rolling in.

An Unbeatable Edge

When we orchestrated a time delay for The Real Hustle, we set up an event in a London pub and used results obtained from a legitimate live event (dog racing) to set up a simple wire where we conned people in various ways, including a sucker who thought he was in on it but ended up losing all his cash to us.

As with The Sting, we manipulated the mark to believe they couldn’t lose then fed them bad information so they would blow their entire bankroll on a big bet (secretly losing to us) for apparently making a mistake which was carefully engineered in advance.

In The Sting, you’ll see how Lonnegan was fooled in a similar way and that method was actually drawn from the king of wire scams, “Yellow Kid” Weil whose methods I will discuss in a later article.

In order to make this scam work we had to delay the live broadcast of those races, which required a little technology and some distraction to build the delay over time until the crowd had no idea they were a couple of minutes behind the real world.

One would think that modern technology would prevent this and in fact it would under most circumstances.

The delay we orchestrated in the pub would have been quickly detected had people used their phones in the same way they do today but at that time, online services were not so advanced, and we were also able to limit phone use through the rules of the event that people were attending.

These rules were convenient for us and necessary because of the limitations of our filming options but if one were to repeat that scam for real, they’d have to deal with phone-use in other – less legal – ways.

Back to that pub in Glasgow.

Taking Advantage Of A Natural Delay

So here I am in 2022, sitting in a pub with multiple screens showing the same live horse race broadcast for customers who were constantly in and out of the pub to visit the bookies next door and after a while, something caught my attention: The footage on the pub’s televisions were not exactly synced.

In fact, they were off by over one second.

Curious, I took my phone and checked the live results, which told me the winner of the race more than 30 seconds before the race being watched in the pub was over!

I spent the next hour ignoring my friends while watching other customers and tracking each race to see if the delay persisted – and it did.

I surmised that the delay is inherent to however the footage is received and then distributed to multiple screens.

In other words, I had discovered a potential ‘natural’ wire scam!

Of course, I didn’t take advantage of this advantage (sadly!) but I spent a few days considering how a con artist might use this type of opportunity and concocted several feasible methods to make use of that delay.

Free from the shackles of network rules and regulations, I came up with a completely workable con game that could place a suitable mark in a situation where they might lose a lot more than a few small bets at the bookies.

I’d love to share the details but I’m not in the habit of giving scammers fresh fish.

Suffice to say, though, that the opportunity definitely exists in one pub on the west end of Glasgow and is sure to exist in many other locations.

Wire scams are inherently difficult, precisely because they require a lot of effort to manipulate technology such as a telegram relay buried in the desert in 1902, a seemingly live satellite feed or a cloned website on a sucker’s phone but modern communications are far from perfect and people’s faith and reliance on that technology could make any “found advantages” extremely profitable in the wrong hands.

What’s amazing to me (and should be of concern to you) is that while technology can protect gamblers who seek to verify the conditions of a betting situation, it also offers hustlers the chance to spot potential scams just waiting to be taken advantage of.

If you enjoyed this, check out this author’s other piece on the scams that were forbidden on “The Real Hustle.”

Many players are fascinated by how games can be beaten both legally and otherwise, which is a good thing but a few would tell war stories about being cheated by casinos and would ask my opinion on a variety of circumstances.

In each case, I had one question that would tell me exactly how likely it was that they (or anyone) had been, or could be cheated, by a casino:

“Where is it?”

Location, Location, Location

If you’re traveling somewhere and are invited to (or discover) a local casino without doing a little research on that country, its laws and reputation, then you might be walking into a trap designed to snare unwary foreigners.

Illegal and unregulated casinos can look remarkably convincing.

Once inside, though, you could just as easily be in a garage on the outskirts of town since many victims are already “in their cups” before being offered the chance to play by a local roper (a con artist tasked with attracting potential marks to a crooked game or scenario).

These establishments are often card rooms or perhaps one or two table games crammed into a garage or apartment.

But equally, very casino-like interiors and exteriors have been known to be operating completely outside the law even though they look and feel a lot like a miniature version of Las Vegas or Macau.

If your bad-beat story starts in a country or region that isn’t known for well-regulated gambling houses and features such classic story beats as “I was pretty drunk,” “he or she was really attractive,” or “I woke up in hospital/in a ditch/back in my room and had no idea how I got there,” then you might have been rolled in a country where secret or hidden casinos operate outside of local laws and are as likely to be scam factories as they are gaming houses.

In these clip-joints, you can expect to be cheated either by outright manipulation of the game or crazy-bad odds that will clean out any bankroll in a fraction of the time of a legitimate casino.

What about under the bright lights of gambling meccas like Las Vegas, Atlantic City or Macau?

These cities depend on their image as a place to gamble, see great shows or live the high life inside big, gaudy, neon-lit hotels that attract millions of players a year to risk their money and chance their luck.

Any proof of foul play might damage an entire city’s reputation in one wave of bad news or social media so naturally, their games are controlled and policed from all sides.

Imagine a big-name casino being caught dealing seconds, loading dice or stripping decks to fleece their customers.

The scandal would be enormous and the collateral damage to other establishments would be unacceptable.

The Bad Old Days  

It wasn’t always that way.

The history of Las Vegas features owners who turned a blind eye to managers and dealers who might shift the odds on a lucky player to avoid a major loss on their shift.

As the connection between criminal enterprises and Las Vegas casinos was broken, house cheaters became a thing of the past but before that transition, big winners might have found their hot run of good luck being reversed by a change of dealer.

Bust-out dealers were career cheaters who crossed to the other side of the table.

Their job was to work their magic on behalf of the house whenever necessary and would often work as pit bosses, occasional honest dealers or even remain on-call should a lucky whale start to hurt the numbers.

The smart bust-out artists knew how to make a game turn gradually and keep a player on the line until he or she had played back and lost everything they’d won.

Second deals and slug controls were often used to control what cards hit and what missed but from the moment they arrived at the table, odds were no longer a factor.

Worst of all, there was always the chance of a “Micky Finn” being dropped into a player’s drink to keep them playing, while making them easier to manipulate and less likely to make good decisions!

Some managers simply culled-out high cards from the deck or shoe and let worse-than-fair odds do the damage for them but once the corporations had taken over, the tide turned against these practices though it may have taken longer than some would admit.

While the name on the sign may have changed, the same tags on the floor remained the same so it took a gradual shift in perspective (and culture) to stop staff from protecting their bottom line with bottom deals.

Today, we are a couple of generations past those days and while there are still dealers and managers who remember the bad old days of cheating and stealing, they know that the eye in the sky is protecting the house from all threats foreign and domestic.

If a player wins too much, p*sses off the pit boss or is an asshole to their dealers, no one is calling an 80-year-old, bust-out man out of retirement.

The numbers will do their work if you can keep the sucker at the table and a few sh*tty cocktails will shift his game into reverse without the need for slipping them a Mickey.

As time went on, the value of reputation convinced bosses that this might hurt their business in the long run and cheating customers became unnecessary once the house began to trust their mathematical advantage.

Bias Confirmed

A run of great cards or a fantastic roll of the dice has to end sometime.

Just because the dealer’s changed, it doesn’t mean that sudden shift in fortune is down to anything that interfered with the natural outcome of the game.

It may seem like the cards are always against you or that you always seem to hit a bad run of luck when some dealer, manager or other player arrives, but most of that is just the human brain making connections that don’t really exist.

If you happen to believe in luck, coincidence and the fickle hand of fate then perhaps these events or influences might fit your worldview but that doesn’t mean or prove anything illegal or sneaky was necessary to bump your bankroll back into the red.

So, if you really did get cheated by a casino, it’s all about where you chose to risk your money (and potentially, your good health).

The same is true online, though that’s a discussion for another day.

None of this goes to say or prove it might never happen in places like Las Vegas or Macau but if reputation is obviously important to a city, state or country, and gambling is closely guarded by the law as well as the owners of a casino, chances are excellent the only danger to your purse is what and how you play.

These methods are seemingly simple, innocuous or – as they are often described – subtle, but they can have a powerful effect on the decisions we make in all walks of life.

In this article, I’m going to describe the lessons I learned selling a deck of magic cards where the real art proved to be how people were being manipulated.

Let’s Go Back In Time

In the late 1980s, I found myself employed by a rather odd little man who set up “Svengali” pitches around the UK using young people – often magicians – as pitchmen for a deck of cards that could perform multiple astonishing card tricks that were then offered for sale at an inflated price.

I stumbled into this job thanks to a fellow magic performer who connected me.

After a brief audition period, I was shipped from Glasgow in Scotland to Newcastle in the north of England where I was installed in Fenwick Department Store to gather crowds, amaze them with these magical cards, then hit them with a carefully-designed sales pitch.

In fact, I was pretty lousy at this from the outset and my sales were so noticeably poor that my boss returned after my first week and secretly watched me work.

Later, he explained a few hard truths to me, the most disappointing of which was that my sleight of hand skills were hurting my bottom line!

The way he put it was that the real skill was in making ordinary people believe they could perform these miracles merely by buying the special cards and to convince them I had no unusual abilities or experience beyond what the trick deck of cards provided.

In other words: Stop showing off and act like your hands are all thumbs.

Hide Your Skill, Appear Normal

This approach, combined with a strict adherence to my employer’s proven sales patter worked wonders and my sales rocketed from almost nothing to being one of his better pitches.

But when he returned a few weeks later to chop money and catch up, he offered more advice on how to increase sales with a few subtleties designed to open people’s purses and wallets.

My sales improved overall but more interestingly, I saw greater consistency in my pitches; whereas I might have the occasional no-sale pitch, almost every pitch I gave after adopting those psychological tricks paid off, so my confidence soared.

One of those little tricks was incredibly simple in principle and amazingly effective in practice.

Subtle Doesn’t Mean Weak

These “little tricks” seemed (at first) too subtle to really work but were in fact, extremely effective.

I would begin by building a crowd, which is not as easy as it sounds.

Any street performer will tell you that making people gather to watch their show is one of the hardest skills to master but keeping that audience can be even harder!

For a pitch at a table in a store or a mall, I could work for five or 50 people but only if I could command their attention from the beginning to the end, otherwise the whole exercise would be pointless.

A trick I was taught to attract people to my table was to simply begin the scripted pitch for nobody!

That’s right: Just start talking and performing and hope that people will come.

And people did come.

Once one person had stopped to watch, another would stop and another and soon I would have enough to bring them all closer and form a mini audience that never failed to attract even more people behind them.

As soon as I had maneuvered people to “see better” and formed the beginnings of my crowd, I would begin the pitch all over again, exactly where I started when I was alone at the table.

This worked because people are naturally curious but also reluctant to engage with strangers or feel exposed to unwanted sales pressure.

The key to success was to present what I was doing as a show – NOT a sales pitch – and to keep reminding people that the show was “free”.

I soon learned that these potential customers would quickly walk away if I came at them too quickly with the pitch, so the second phase was a performance framed as a demonstration of this amazing deck of playing cards that could somehow read minds, or make cards vanish or reappear entirely thanks to its remarkable – but secret – properties.

And once people saw what those cards could do, they would be hooked just enough to see how they worked.

And if they stayed to see how they worked, they would stay to hear the pitch.

And during this pitch a final psychological trick was used to trap even the most cynical of buyers into a sale.

A Simple Psychological Trick

Having brought a crowd of strangers this far, it would be a waste of my time to let them leave without buying whatever I was pitching but this can be a delicate moment in any pitch of this nature.

The price (at the time) was quite high.

In fact, that same deck of magic cards could be purchased from any magic shop for a fraction of the price, but my employer had stacked the end of the pitch with several psychological weapons that when used correctly, made it very hard for people to resist.

It was all about perceived value.

First, I would perform two other tricks during my pitch using their own special packets of cards and quite often, these tricks would attract attention from certain types of people who wanted to perhaps win some money in a bar (with a special version of Three Card Monte) or read someone’s minds (with a classic but easy mentalism feat) but these additional tricks were never for sale.

Instead, they were included in a package that I would collate at the end of the pitch.

After demonstrating the cards, I would introduce a large box that looked like a jumbo deck of playing cards and into that box I would place the (ordinary sized) cards I had just performed with   and then I would toss in the Monte trick and the Mind Reading trick as “bonuses” before closing the box and placing several identical jumbo boxes on the table.

Only once I added all of that “value” did I tell them the price.

While this was truly effective, it had a fatal flaw because the pitch was over and the product was still in my hands.

People could (and would) still walk away but thanks to one of the most powerful subtleties my employer shared with me, sales more than doubled and fewer people left my table without a box of those cards!

Imagine that – one little “trick” that doubled my profits, overnight.

What was it?

It’s so simple, I still have trouble believing it was so damned effective.

After introducing the boxes and adding the “package”, I would hand out those boxes instead of placing them on the table and would comment on the size and weight and what a fantastic gift this “magic set” would make.

In fact, I later came up with the idea of wrapping several boxes complete with a bow and placing those behind me!

At the end of my pitch, I would also hand out a wrapped box and this served to convince even the most dubious of people to buy!

Why these little touches work so well, I am not qualified to say but they were so effective that I see variations employed everywhere from a car showroom to an online app store or a website that seems to go on forever without revealing the price of a product but subtly describing all the amazing benefits of their product.

A common tactic used by all scammers is to blend into their surroundings and bide their time until an opportunity presents itself to move in for the kill.

In this article I’m going to illustrate how a super-simple swindle can be adapted to any game but also show how the game itself can be adapted to make new scams possible.

A Cheating Lesson

At the card table, cheaters learn to follow accepted procedures and to emulate common physical actions while practicing to subvert these elements through sleight of hand, gaffed cards, loaded dice, crooked chips or electronic devices that might offer an unbeatable edge over time or steal every chip at the table in a single round of play.

Typically, in any game where strange hand motions or a break in expected procedure would be noticed, the goal is to find a weakness in the established order of play that can be used to create an unfair advantage for the cheater.

For example, most private games share the deal, passing the deck from one player to the next who also collects the cards from the previous round of play.

This gives a mechanic (an expert in crooked sleight of hand) plenty of opportunity to set a hand, load the flop or just know what he’s about to deal and to whom.

There are plenty of sleights to facilitate this kind of unfair advantage while completely complying with the agreed order of play.

Cutting the cards is designed to beat this type of cheater since any stacked cards might be relocated to a random part of the deck but cheaters have known how to beat the cut for centuries with methods that range from staggeringly difficult sleight of hand to more risky techniques that force other players to cut exactly where the cheater wants them to!

The simplest solution is also the safest the most effective; to have a partner sit to the mechanic’s right and make the cut exactly where the dealer tells him to – usually thanks to a tiny brief when the cards are passed.

Attempts to beat this method vary in effectiveness and my favorite (failed) procedure was to have the person to the dealer’s left shuffle the deck and the person to the dealer’s right cut the deck so the dealer would deal cards he neither shuffled nor cut and in the passing of the deck (so the theory goes) it would be impossible to cheat.

Of course, this presented no problem for pairs of cheating partners who simply straddled an honest player at the table sitting either side of a sucker who would be forced (thanks to this procedure) to deal the cards the cheaters had already stacked and cut into play.

An Aside

Incidentally, when I played poker regularly around the UK, many casinos offered the cards to be cut and if I was in the right position to do so, I would make a complete false cut where the top half is snapped forward as if came from the bottom, then slapped back on top.

This sleight is difficult to master but the illusion it creates is perfect and had the cards been stacked in advance, my cut would have kept the pre-ordered cards in play making this a powerful move in concert with a crooked dealer.

The purpose of this false cut was nothing more than practice since the house dealer was never cheating (as far as I could tell) and I was just rehearsing a move to see if anyone noticed, which they never did.

During this time, I also noticed a potential opportunity thanks to the way the cards were passed across the table to be cut.

Since I always cut with two hands, I realized the back of the deck could only be seen by me and that I could use this now-familiar action to spot the top card of the lower half as a legitimate (actual) cut was completed.

This might not seem like much of an advantage until I trained myself to always cut a certain amount, ensuring the card I spotted would hit the flop!

I practiced this technique for years and while knowing one card that will hit the flop every nine or 10 hands might offer some sort of advantage to an expert player, it was really no more than an interesting move that would be better used by a crooked dealer with a confederate on first base to see the exposed card during every shuffle.

Faking The Familiar

Adapting to legitimate procedures isn’t always the most profitable strategy and when cheaters spot the potential for a more effective method that requires a change in those procedures, they corrupt the order of play slowly until the suckers become comfortable with anything new.

It works like this:

Let’s say I want to steal chips from the pot, and I happen to have access to a good bottle of “check cop” (a sticky substance made by manufacturers of crooked gambling devices for the sole purpose of palming chips without transferring the sticky stuff to the chip).

The problem is that I need to lay my hand flat onto a chip for it to adhere to my skin and if I reached into a pot and just slapped my hand onto a pile of checks, people are bound to notice.

So how do I make this method work without attracting attention?

First, I figure out a way to steal that doesn’t require me to flatten my hand onto a pile of loose chips. 

Instead, I’ll steal a chip from the top of a pile where it is less likely to be noticed vanishing and to cover it even further, I’ll then stack more chips onto the stack I just stole from in the process of counting.

This means that if I break off five black chips and stack those then steal the top chip as I collect six loose chips, once I stack those six onto the first pile It will leave a stack of 10, which would be expected.

Timing-wise, I would do this before the end of a hand or during a showdown as I arrange the chips for active players to see and while attention is towards those players or the dealer.

This allows me plenty of cover so long as I am not attracting attention for stacking the chips in the first place!

Once I have mastered this technique until I can make it look almost like magic – in fact, even a close observer would never notice a high-value chip vanishing in the process – I need to create the perfect conditions to secure my advantage with minimum risk to my life and limb.

The secret is to “splash the move” for hours, days or even weeks, months and years – always being the one to stack chips mid-hand or organize pots for other players to see whenever I’m out of the hand.

This becomes normal and comfortable and when it feels safe to do so without suspicion, I might begin stealing the occasional chip to bolster my stack.

This may seem like a lot of work and a lot of risk without much reward, but many crooked players have risked a lot more for a lot less and, over time, little scams like this can add up to a very unfair advantage.

Splashing the move is a powerful way to introduce new actions and put even the most alert players to sleep thanks to eventual familiarity that gives the cheater increased opportunities to steal.

In The Real World

Away from gambling games, this same strategy is used in all forms of deception where tiny changes (or nudges) in everyday situations can corrupt, convert or change any outcome to varying degrees.

Consider how high-stakes advantage players encourage “tweaks” in casino procedures in return for bigger bets and longer playing sessions while potentially giving the player a powerful advantage against the house.

In life, huge changes are often forced upon us in tiny nudges that people are prone to accept when they would have taken to the streets with flaming torches and pitchforks had those changes been made more quickly and openly.

The same is true in deception where tiny shifts in procedure can put people at their ease until the barn door is wide open and horse are long gone.

But in the gambling world, cash remains a powerful tool for managing one’s bankroll, tipping staff, or sharing profits away from prying eyes.

Sure, crypto offers some financial anonymity while also being in the sights of authoritarian regimes that would prefer some control over whatever monetary tools are used within and without their borders.

But for most offline transactions, cash is still king and there are countless scams to be wary of in your travels.

I Need A Guy Who Knows A Guy

Exchange rate cons are so common that anyone who travels regularly will know where to find them, which is often at a “legitimate” bureau de change in airports or tourist hotspots.

In Paris, these money changers are everywhere and appear to compete with each other while their rates or fees make all of it a wash in terms of being a sh*tty deal no matter where you go.

Unless you happen to be a Parisian who knows a guy who knows a guy – who knows another guy.

During a profitable visit many years ago, I found myself with a lot of cash that would need to be changed before returning home, but I quickly balked at the exchange rates and fees being offered around the city.

Luckily, my friend and host was also a frequent traveller and drove me to a little office down a back alley and up some stairs near a side street in an obscure part of the city.

I couldn’t find that office again for love nor money but on that day, I saved a large chunk of change for the price of lunch and a few card tricks between friends.

Ever since, I’ve always asked local contacts where the “place” is to change money and am often lucky to find someone with a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy.

In Macau, we changed our cash at the cage in several casinos; in Tokyo, a local friend navigated Japanese rules and paperwork to get me the best deal while in Ho Chi Minh City.

A friend visited a little apartment where his cash was whisked away for 10 worrying minutes until an old lady returned with fresh dollar bills that his local contact carefully checked before completing the transaction.

Herein Lies A Problem

The risk in each of these situations is that you could easily be entering into a scam where you can be robbed or ripped off with counterfeit cash so in each of these cases, I (or my friends) relied on a trusted local contact who knew “the lay of the land” in terms of fraud and deception.

I’m not saying that theft doesn’t happen in Tokyo but there are clear signs whether a business or a procedure is legitimate and in Paris, my friend was too important a guy and too smart to be taken in by (or to facilitate) this type of con game, so I had confidence in that scenario.

In Macau, the casinos change money easily and regularly so long as the cash (and the person carrying it) isn’t criminal and they offer better rates than one would find at home, presumably to keep some of that cash on their tables.

But an apartment in Vietnam with strangers taking the money away before they exchange it?

No thanks.

Cash can be dangerous for all sorts of reasons, so when moving it around and changing currency we all need to be careful that a familiar method in one location doesn’t expose you to scams in another.

So sure, my friends and I tend to ask trusted local contacts where to find better deals but if there’s any doubt – any at all – I’d rather line up behind the tourists to get robbed by a clerk with a calculator.

Counterfeit Exchanges

Across Europe and in many parts of the world, fake exchange offices attract transient victims to lose money either through bad arithmetic, counterfeit cash, or outright theft.

In many cities an office isn’t even necessary.

In Prague, for example, bogus money traders prey on tourists near legitimate (though ridiculously expensive) currency exchanges and approach people claiming to be from an exchange with preferable rates.

The scam is simple since it’s easy to spot someone checking posted exchange rates, highlighting that they must be carrying cash and are therefore worth scamming!

So once a likely target is spotted, the hustler knows they are ripe (worth taking) but also what they want and are actively searching for at that exact moment in time.

Knowing what someone wants is the con artist’s most powerful advantage and in this scenario it can be all too easy to leverage this information into a quick and easy deception.

All the scammer needs to do is cut into the tourist before they approach the exchange desk and give them a story with promises of a better rate and no fees.

 Needless to say, many people are quick to jump at that “opportunity”.

The twist (in Prague) is that these counterfeit currency converters do not trade people’s cash for Czech Crowns but for expired Belarusian Rubles that appear similar to foreign eyes and are (of course) completely worthless.

Around the city, you can see signs warning people not to exchange money on the street.

But human beings are often victims of their own impulses, which scammers know how to trigger using centuries-old psychological tricks that never fail to manipulate people in the heat of the moment.

And it’s not just exchange offices where these scammers prey upon the unwary.

At ATMs, clever con artists wait for travellers to withdraw cash, spotting anyone who receives large denomination notes, such as 2,000 CZK, then offers to break their bill in exchange for four 500 CZK notes that are actually – you guessed it – expired Belarusian bills.

Familiar Territory

As with many con games, being unfamiliar with a city or country means you might be easy prey for this kind of “fish out of water” con so care must be taken in any cash transaction on foreign soil but also at home.

In the UK, I was once approached in the waiting area of a bank with a proposition to swap cash since I had dollars and they had pounds; the logic being that the bank would only take a chunk of our money when we could both save by exchanging directly.

My “swindler sense” told me immediately this was too well practiced a pitch to be trusted so I turned down her “kind” offer and sure enough, before reaching the counter she left the bank to find another sucker.

How common this is inside banks I can’t say but while financial institutions can cost more in terms of fees or less attractive rates, going off-reservation requires a lot of trust and an unknown degree of risk.

Lead image: Donald Trung/Wikimedia Commons

But while most people assume this software and technology is available only to the user to use (and abuse) many of us have learned that bad actors have found ways to access those devices.

Through multiple means, software can secretly be loaded onto your phone, tablet or computer that will allow all sorts of access to your data, camera, location, and microphone.

The question is how these ‘viruses’ get onto your devices and how to avoid falling victim in the future.

Dodgy Apps That Steal Your Data

If you’re reading this, there’s an excellent chance you’re already hip to how seemingly simple software applications downloaded from the internet can contain hidden programs designed to capture private information and share it with unknown sources.

Perhaps the most famous of these were a flurry of ‘flashlight’ apps that activated the LED next to the camera on your phone so you could find your keys (and the lock) at three o’clock in the morning.

While these apps only appeared to turn a light on and off, many were also making requests for access within your device that can only mean they were harvesting private data.

According to some reports, many apps were requesting an average of 25 five permissions in order to function, none of which were required to activate the flashlight itself.

One app was downloaded and installed over 1 million times and had 76 requests to access contacts, camera, microphone and other areas of your device you would rather not share with strangers.

Some requested to record audio, access contact lists and even write to those contact lists.

At best, these apps were engaging in an intrusion of privacy, sharing data with unknown recipients for unknown purposes but at worst they might be actively monitoring everything you say, do and see.

Many phone operating systems now include a flashlight app that does exactly what it claims but as hackers get more sophisticated, malware can be found in all kinds of apps and on all platforms.

Android vs. OS X

It’s pretty clear that Android apps suffer a lot more from malware since the process of adding new software to the Google Play store is less stringent and has fewer checks than the Apple App Store, but unexpected activity can be found on apps from both sources.

Malware is not only installed as part of another app but can be injected onto your device if you click on a link or website that can access vulnerabilities in your device.

Beware of any app, game or utility that contains ads as your data or behaviour may be shared with companies providing the developer with ad revenue.

And you should think twice before downloading any app from any unknown developer.

Software For Both Good And Evil

Injecting millions of phones with some form of covert software is not just the pastime of small groups of hackers looking to sell your data or watch you get dressed in the morning.

Governments around the world have been licensing software that can access almost any phone.

This can be injected onto OS X devices using previously unknown flaws in the operating system that allow the malware to be secretly installed and gain full access to the device, even remotely.

This same software was also found on Android devices and has been used by all kinds of users, from members of the intelligence community to private companies all with seemingly good justification.

But the software in question has already turned up in several episodes that make its very existence a real concern for all of us.

After journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered, investigating journalists found multiple attempts to place this advanced form of surveillance software on phones belonging to people close to Khashoggi, including his wife.

Whether or not they were successful is uncertain but phones were certainly targeted with links to inject this malware so it’s entirely feasible that Mr. Khashoggi’s own phone and those of his wife and close contacts played a part in his ultimate demise.

This same software is used globally to secure secrets and trace targets and while the company that maintains the software claims no responsibility, it is certainly offering a tool for both good and evil.

It’s important to note that the software providers denied any involvement in the Khashoggi affair and while this may be true, their product can obviously be used for reasons they might never endorse.

Always Be Alert

The problem with breaking safeguards designed to protect the privacy of everyday users is that once a tool is created for nation states, the cracks that tool create in the general safety of a device and the software operating within it can be far-reaching.

New and creative methods for circumventing software protections are appearing every day.

While some are based on ingenious code with concealed purposes, there’s one very common factor in almost all such breaches of private security: You.

Flashlight apps with onboard malware only works when people choose to download and install without really thinking about where such apps come from.

Links to inject intelligence-gathering malware only work when they are clicked without questioning who sent them, why, and for what purpose.

How many times have you opened a link sent by a friend without wondering if it might not be from who you think it is?

The problem is that even if you’re over-cautious, there’s that one time you click without thinking because a nasty link appears in concert with legitimate activity and seems to be part of another conversation or communication.

Many people who get conned by opening a bogus link to their bank do so because they were already in contact with their bank and this link seemed to make sense at the time.

The people who sent that bad link probably sent millions of emails and only need a few to get lucky either because the victim is ignorant of their own online security or was just talking to the same bank that was being spoofed in that dodgy email.

You’re Being Tracked Everywhere

So be aware that your personal, financial, and live data might compromised at any time thanks to that expensive little spy in your pocket.

Or perhaps by the phones in your friends’ pockets, or on the poker table, or beside you on a plane, or behind you in a coffee shop – or anywhere you might be in modern life.

I should probably say there’s no need to be paranoid, but the truth is— there’s plenty of reason to be paranoid.

I’ve seen many crazy bets based on this kind of proposition and most are genuinely suggested at random but with a little advance knowledge you can play with an edge that is sure to pay off over time.

At the very least, you’ll learn how powerful even a slight advantage can be, and have a useful weapon in your arsenal to reclaim some of your bankroll in a pinch.

As stated in my other articles on this topic, these are not scams but real games where you can secure a slight or powerful advantage depending on how and what you play, so I encourage you to share the secret with anyone you are able to fleece (for a fair and reasonable amount) as compensation for their losses.

I can’t tell you how much has been won and lost on a misunderstanding of seemingly obvious odds that are actually quite complex and bear the opposite return to what many might assume.

These propositions will all return a positive outcome over time, but they require a little shaping (scamming) on your part to rope your mark and get their money into your game and your “personal casino”.

Card Hustle #1 – Seven Card Monte

So let’s start with something that’s really unfair.

Ask your target to remove five court cards (K/Q/J) and two spot cards (2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9) from any deck and then mix them thoroughly on the table.

Make the following proposition:

If they turn three court cards face up (one at a time) they win, but if they turn over any of the spot cards, they lose.

Of course, this seems perfectly simple.

If they figure incorrectly, they will believe that each turn of the card is in their favour with the first turn offering five chances in seven, then four chances in six, followed by three chances in five!

In fact, I like to point these odds out, but the odds of turning three cards in seven without turning one of the two spot cards are more than two to one against the sucker overall.

This is more than enough of an advantage to win plenty in the long run but beware sneaky players who may try to mark or identify the spot cards (or one or more court cards), which is disappointingly common.

A crooked variation on this uses identical jokers instead of spot cards and the game ends when any joker is turned over.

The crooked part is that one card of the five court cards is secretly swapped for third joker making the odds almost impossible.

This, of course is a real scam and should not be encouraged.

Card Hustle #2 – Three Cut

This is a simple swindle but can be used to manipulate people effectively into playing deeper into the hole with a little social engineering.

Have a deck shuffled and cut into three piles, then bet that there are no picture (court) cards on top of any of the packets.

A smart person will reason that since only one card in four is a court card, the odds must be in your favour and this is a reasonable (but wrong) assumption that you can use against them by flipping it and betting that there will be a court card on top of any of the three randomly cut and shuffled piles.

This reversal is a great way to manipulate the situation (and your mark) and puts the odds firmly in your favour.

You could obviously simply start from that proposition but since people will try to outthink you, knowing how they might think is a powerful advantage employed by real con artists all the time!

I’ve seen a genuine scam based on this where suckers were paid for any non-court card and the scammer was paid for court cards when three piles were cut at random (by the suckers) – and this seemed incredibly fair.

In reality, several (or all 12) court cards were secretly shaved very finely on all four edges which made it almost certain that at least one court card would appear and, thanks to this ruse, two court cards were more common and would shift the odds to the hustler.

Variations on this (with the short cards) paid odds for court cards (or penalties if roles were reversed) and the game could get quite complex based on true odds that were circumvented by the short and narrow cards, which were more easily cut to the top of any pile.

In fact, a brilliant play on this swindle was to re-cut each packet individually and bet on two or more court cards, which was almost certain under those conditions.

The ‘fair’ version (without the trimmed deck) can also be played when cutting four packets.

Card Hustle #3 – Quick Props

I’ve seen this played for real and it’s a great proposition bet that will often pay off.

Here’s the bet:

Name any four of a kind, shuffle, and deal 32 cards face up from anywhere in the deck without peeking. If you turn up all four cards of your nominated value, you win. If not, you lose.

This is a simple idea, and many will assume it’s possible to turn over four of a kind out of any 32.

It is possible, but the odds are truly against this happening.

If/when they lose, repeat the same bet but offer 39 cards instead of 32. Repeat the challenge, allowing them to name any four of a kind, shuffle, and turn over any 39 cards.

Another challenge is to have a shuffled deck dealt into two even piles and bet that if you turn over cards simultaneously from each pile, two of the same colour and value will appear together.

This actually happens more often than not so, again, odds favour the hustler.

Finally, a perennial favourite of mine is to have someone name any two values in the deck, shuffle, and spread face up. They lose if there are two cards of the named values together anywhere in the deck.

Each of these is a simple, quick challenge played between other rounds of poker and if you’re around real gamblers you should have no problem inviting them to play in your own personal casino.

For more similar content, check out the other articles in this series on dice hustles and coin tricks.

I must re-iterate that these games are for entertainment purposes only and as always, while I encourage you to play for affordable stakes, it’s always good to share the secret when the game is over so your suckers can enjoy the same benefits with fresh fish on another day.

Here we will take the flip of a coin and turn it to our favour with some ingenious games that ultimately push the money in your direction.

The Fun Of Coin Flips

I’ve written elsewhere about the master of crooked coin flips AKA “The Flipper” and the many ways he would manipulate a coin toss or secretly know the outcome.

It’s also possible to buy (or have made) a “wobbler” – a coin that has been re-milled on the edge with a slight angle towards one side so that, when spun on a hard surface, it favours one side more than the other and, in many cases, the work is so heavy it’s almost impossible to force a losing spin!

Such gaffs can be fun, and the above variation was my preferred method for securing a free lunch by spinning a coin and asking someone to call heads or tails while still spinning.

The bet was for who would pay for lunch and if they called the winning side, I’d scoop up the coin and say, “I’m only kidding, I wouldn’t force you to pay for this!”

But if they called the losing side I’d let it fall!

What follows are games played entirely with fair coins and can be a great ongoing game or distraction between other gambling sessions and have been used as such by smart players and grifters for decades.

Coin Hustle #1 – Eight Coins Out

With eight pennies, propose a simple bet that once all are flipped, spun or tossed in a random fashion, you will pay two to one any time that the player throws four heads out of the eight coins.

A simple calculation makes four heads (or tails if preferred) the most common outcome of eight 50/50 flips but in fact the odds are absolutely in your favour, since you win if the result is one, two, three, five, six or eight heads (or tails)!

I prefer to do this in a cup or glass (a glass attracts attention and more suckers in the right scenario) and simply and fairly spread out the coins once upended onto the table without changing how they landed.

This is such a simple proposition that you can play this edge for hours both winning and losing but always being ahead.

And if you can’t find any takers for a two-to-one proposition like this, you’re probably not cut out for this kind of friendly swindle!

Coin Hustle #2 – Threesomes

The same proposition can be made with just three coins and again is based on encouraging a simple fallacy.

With just three coins, point out that there are only four possibilities when all three are flipped at random:

1. Three heads.
2. Three tails.
3. One head and two tails.
4. Two tails and one head.

Now state that if they fall all heads or all tails they win, and you will pay two to one on any reasonable bet but if the coins land with any other outcome they lose.

Personally, I prefer to randomise the coins in a glass or cup but the result is three individual 50/50 propositions. You may prefer to simply flip one coin three times, but the result is the same.

Think about this for a minute.

If there are only four outcomes, then you are essentially offering them two to one on a 50/50 situation and that’s madness.

But be warned that if they’re smart enough to think it over they will exit the logic trap you set up at the beginning and realise that there are actually six losing outcomes and only two winning possibilities since each of the three coins has a 50/50 outcome.

You lose when the coins land:

TAILS, TAILS, TAILS

or

HEADS, HEADS, HEADS

You win if the coins land:

HEADS, TAILS, TAILS

HEADS, HEADS, TAILS

HEADS, TAILS, HEADS

TAILS, HEADS, TAILS

TAILS, TAILS, HEADS

TAILS, HEADS, HEADS

Think of it as individual rolls and it makes sense but the beauty of rolling three coins at once is that this is harder to intuit and many people will be blinded by your two-to-one offer on a game that is actually three to one against the player.

Coin Hustle #3 – Penney’s Game

Finally, let me share a brilliant bit of mathematics that will guarantee a powerful edge almost by magic if you follow some simple rules.

As stated above there are eight possible outcomes when flipping three coins and each outcome should be as likely as the other.

But for this version, only one coin is flipped repeatedly until a chosen three-flip combination appears.

So, if the chosen combination is TAILS, TAILS, TAILS, a single coin is flipped until three tails have appeared in a row. So it might be flipped 10 times before this occurs in three consecutive flips.

Similarly with any selected possible outcome – such as TAILS, HEADS, HEADS or HEADS, TAILS, HEADS – you keep flipping coins and recording the outcome until three consecutive flips produces one of the wagered results.

I hope you got that.

It can be confusing, but just keep flipping and noting down the result until one of the wagered three-coin outcomes happens and whoever bet on that combination is the winner.

So where is the scam?

Walter Penney discovered that a simple calculation based on your opponent’s choice of three-coin combination will place the odds firmly in your favour in the worst case, and seven to one in your favour for the best case scenario!

The secret is to make sure they choose their three-coin combination first and then you state your three-coin combination based on their choice as follows.

Whatever combination they choose, consider it as A/B/C so if they nominate HEADS, HEADS, HEADS:

A = HEADS

B = HEADS

C = HEADS

If they pick TAILS, HEADS, TAILS, then:

A = TAILS

B = HEADS

C = TAILS

And so on.

Your nominated three-coins should be X/A/B where X = the opposite of B.

I know this sounds complicated so let’s look at a couple of quick examples.

For the two examples above X/A/B would be TAILS, HEADS, HEADS (if the sucker nominates HEADS, HEADS, HEADS) and TAILS, TAILS, HEADS (if the sucker wants TAILS, HEADS, TAILS).

So, another way of saying this is that you take their choice (A/B/C) remove C (their third flip option) and simply add the opposite of B (their second flip option) to the beginning of your three-coin combination.

This means that X/A/B for their choice of HEADS, TAILS, TAILS would be HEADS, HEADS, TAILS.

Play with this for while with all the combinations mentioned in the previous coin flip game above (Threesomes) until you can quickly calculate X/A/B for all outcomes, then flip a coin to see how often your three-coin combo will win against theirs.

Sure, it sounds complicated but all advantages in gambling require a little extra work and understanding and if you can decipher these instructions, you have a powerful winning strategy for a seemingly simple game.

For more similar content, check out the first part of this series on dice hustles.

I spend a lot of time explaining how to narrow and occasionally beat the mathematical edge in certain casino games and in turn, I read and discuss these matters with expert players who put these methods into practice with various levels of success.

Concealed computers and complex mental gymnastics can offer individuals or teams of players a better return for money they play but it’s a lot of work and can require a particular mindset to commit the effort required to beat the house.

So let’s take a different approach and put ourselves into the house’s position of playing with an edge against anyone curious (or stupid) enough to accept a seemingly simple proposition.

Games With An Unfair Advantage

Proposition bets often have a trick to them that is revealed when enough money is bet against us but with clip games, there is a concealed advantage that is only apparent to players who can calculate the true odds against them.

Whether you read these games as curious examples of skewed chances or as an opportunity to fleece your friends or fellow players in the future, I guarantee there’s plenty to learn from understanding how to play with an unfair advantage!

Carry a few dice in your pocket and you’ll find no end of gamblers interested in playing a seemingly fair game, but you need to make sure the rules are clear and any apparent advantage to you is hidden or far from obvious.

So the approach – like all good con games – has to be as subtle as possible without going unnoticed and not so strong you wake up their suspicions!

Dice Hustle #1 – Six And Four Before

With two dice, make the following proposition:

In any round, I bet you will roll a six AND eight BEFORE you roll TWO sevens.

Now think about that.

A seven is the most common number rolled with two legitimate dice so the chances of rolling a six and an eight before two sevens seems to be weighted entirely in the favour of the player (remember: you are the house) so you’re going to get a lot of takers if they can figure the odds of rolling a six and an eight compared to the odds of rolling a seven.

They should figure like this:

There are five ways to roll a six, and five ways to roll an eight.

There are six ways to roll a seven.

Therefore, it should be easier to roll two sevens than to roll a six and an eight in any round of play.

In fact, the odds against them are almost two to one against but the false logic that most people fall into will set them up for a (minor) financial fall.

Be prepared to play several rounds and if you happen to lose the first one, be prepared to play even more than if they lose the first roll.

That first win is a powerful convincer and some dice mechanics have been known to fix the first roll on bets like this to drive the hook even deeper into their mark!

Dice Hustle #2 – Add Up To Seven

For this you will need four identical dice.

With three dice, there’s a devilish little swindle that can play entirely in your favour but be warned it’s limited, as the secret can easily be recognized.

The first couple of rounds require some careful management (and explanation) on your part.

Stick a die inside a coffee mug with a little blu-tack or similar product with an ace (one dot) uppermost.

Add two more dice and find a suitable cover (a saucer, plate etc).

If you have a home poker night, this is a perfect little set-up for a break in the main game and I encourage you to share the secret after winning but only if the original bet stands, of course!

Here’s the proposition:

The dice will be shaken inside the cup while covered with the plate and when stopped, if any two or all three add to seven, you (the house) win. But if there’s no seven then the players win.

All should be encouraged to bet against you since the odds in this round are entirely in your favour.

Play several rounds and you’ll be shocked that no-one will notice there is always an ace amongst the three dice.

Be warned, though, that if you win too often they will start to question what’s in the cup or notice that one die never moves.

Tip: I stick it off-centre, near the inner edge and I use a shallow coffee mug, so the dice are easily seen and the mug does not need to be picked up to show them.

With this method you will win five times out of nine.

After a couple of rounds, secure an extra die in your hand and then tip the dice in the mug onto that hand and pass out the three dice (one will remain stuck inside the mug) as you place the mug and plate aside while you offer a variation on the game just played.

This time the dice will be rolled openly and this time if any two or all three add to seven the players will win, apparently turning the odds in their favour but in truth you still hold enough of an edge to win more than half the time!

Dice Hustle #3 – Aces Wild

For this, you’ll need five dice and enough gall to offer the following proposition:

With aces wild (three ones), players win with any pair but lose with any three of a kind!

Without aces being wild, two of a kind is much easier to roll than three but making aces wild makes three of a kind more likely than a pair!

This is hard for people to figure but after a few rounds they’ll soon realise that three of a kinds happen almost twice as often as pairs, making this bet a license to print money!

I’ve played this with poker dice and somehow the added colour and playing card dice make it less obvious but over time, anyone is sure to wake up to getting fleeced.

Remember To Reveal The Secret

The goal here is to win a little money but the host thing to do with this information is to expose how and why you are able to win more often than you lose.

The doesn’t necessarily mean they get their money back!

As the great Bob Farmer has often coached, the secret is part of the price of losing a proposition bet and is therefore a fair trade so long as you’re playing for reasonable stakes.

In our next “Be Your Own Casino” article we will explore a brilliant mathematical principle that can turn the flip of a few coins into a winning proposition for the house (you).

This particular masterpiece has been shared with only a few friends and students but creates a staggering moment of wonder if the audience can only understand just how completely and utterly impossible the final effect actually is.

Juan’s solution to this is both beautiful and elegant, and if you saw him (or I) perform it, you would soon have a real understanding of how quickly numbers can increase and odds can become astronomical so that when the final effect is revealed, the enormous improbability is interpreted as something wonderful, amazing and utterly impossible.

Without giving anything away, the secret is in illustrating how quickly large numbers become truly enormous and lose their meaning once we are unable to compare or contrast these numbers based on our own experience.

Tamariz gives the audience this understanding by tapping into their emotional intelligence and the result is pure astonishment.

In many aspects of life, especially gambling, investing or taking “calculated” risks, there’s a point where numbers cease to have meaning and intuition takes over but is often way, way off target.

Seriously Terrible Odds

We can see this effect in any weekly lottery where people who buy tickets fail to understand the sheer size of the odds against them; seemingly happy with the idea that “someone always wins” and frankly, I think there’s nothing wrong with that if it’s merely a weekly or occasional purchase to feed one’s dreams or imagine “what if” so long as the price of the ticket is affordable.

Some people, however, take this way too far and buy dozens of tickets every week chasing a great mathematical dragon that will only consume them over time with odds that are far from fair compared to other, much wiser bets that are available to knowledgeable gamblers.

The reason is not just one of addiction, it is a failure to comprehend the sheer weight of improbability against the player when buying a lottery ticket, not to mention the outrageously unfair reward for beating those lottery odds.

Let’s consider it for a moment and look at our chances of winning the UK national lottery.

If you buy one ticket, the chances of hitting all six numbers are over 45,000,000 to 1 and your chances of hitting just two numbers are around 10 to 1 against you.

Chances are, anyone can understand 10:1 against in terms of probability but in most people’s minds, 45,000,000 to 1 is immediately translated into “big number versus small number” and falls squarely into the “guesstimate” part of our brains.

This is what people do when the numbers start to lose their meaning and it’s all too easy to misunderstand or poorly estimate the real odds of something when numbers get so big that our internal system of weights and measures simply bundles them into a “big” or “really big” category.

In fact, many con games work by concealing astronomical odds or reframing them easily by dictating how those odds are interpreted by a potential mark.

This is incredibly easy to do if the target has a limited comprehension of how numbers relate to any outcome but when dealing with people who do understand the odds and can recognise a skewed (or fraudulent) proposition, con artists tend to either make for the door or take an entirely different approach.

But generally speaking, most people fail to understand the odds against them.

And the bigger those odds, the less they seem to understand and the easier it might be to focus them on an impossible reward.

Inability To Comprehend Big Numbers

In The Real Hustle, we once showed people a non-existent stocks and shares computer that apparently (thanks to some cool graphics) could predict the outcome of a multi-layered investment over several weeks or months while those “grey-suited morons” at the stock exchange were stuck in the last century using outdated methods and technology.

As with any “big store” set-up, we used the single location to bring in multiple potential marks compared to a typical scam that might only have three victims lined up, two of whom would be cancelled if the scam worked first time as it often did.

In these types of scams, however, numbers were part of the story as were the number of victims we could convince to sign up for our scheme.

Almost everyone who saw the “flash” (how we dressed the scam – the graphics, the computer screens, the office, the suits etc.) immediately accepted the concept and moved quickly towards being convinced they could make a great deal of money if they were “allowed” to invest.

Only one potential victim immediately understood the sheer mathematical impossibility of what we were supposedly doing and while he couldn’t calculate the odds exactly; based on what he was being shown, he could see an enormous improbability that only got worse the more he thought about it.

It turned out he was an amateur poker player who had very recently learned to calculate odds at the table (an invaluable skill that many still refuse to learn) and could immediately see that the number of permutations based on the number of stocks being invested (according to our bullshit story) made our “sure fire” system impossible based on our claims.

Needless to say, he was quickly shown the door!

What worked with this kind of scam was the inability of most people to comprehend numbers beyond a certain size and our ability to quickly distract them with promises of easy money based on a compelling idea that was little more than a bedtime story.

In short, the idea was easy to grasp but the reality was harder to recognise because the numbers were simply too much to calculate, unless you had developed the habit (and the mental muscle) to do so.

Lottereality

Going back to the UK Lotto: Millions of people buy tickets every week and if I were to ask any of them to quote the odds, I genuinely believe many could quickly state around 14,000,000 to 1.

This may have been true at some point and has somehow stuck with people as the “big number versus small number” that they are happy to live with but the true odds of 45,000,000 to 1 are far worse yet would only be interpreted as another “big number versus small number” and would fail to have the impact it should on their understanding.

In actual fact, while the odds are bad, the potential prizes are far worse in terms of return since the minimum prize is only ￡2.5 million.

While many would quickly mistake this as being paid odds of 2,500,000 to 1, smart gamblers would remember that a ticket costs ￡2, so the average return is half of that!

Being paid 1.25 million to 1 on a bet of 45 million to 1 against is a staggering mathematical advantage for any lottery but it has to be remembered that they all pay out many more prizes (for less than six winning numbers) and the easiest prize to win (by matching two numbers) is still 10 to 1 against and all you win for that is a free ticket for the next draw!

Perhaps people should consider the smallest odds rather than the largest to gauge just how fair a proposition is, but truth be told, that simply creates more possibilities for fraud, deception or manipulative psychology.

But when the three parties go their separate ways, one of them has unknowingly lost (at least) a thousand dollars.

In a world where scams make real money with mundane ideas, I was surprised to hear that this old swindle was still circulating with a fresh (and clever) coat of paint and while it’s certainly rare, it’s out there.

The Set Up

The story goes like this:

A group of ‘businessmen’ are looking to recruit players who have clean accounts and player profiles at casinos around town and are offering to trade high value casino chips for cold cash with a 20 percent bonus for every stack they trade.

So for a $100 chip, the ‘businessmen’ will pay $120 in cash.

For $1,000, they’ll pay $1,200.

The only question you should be asking is: “Why?”

The Story

Reasons tend to fit a certain profile and so do the characters making this type of offer.

Whether it’s a possible mobster, gang member or drug dealer; a dodgy stockbroker, a crooked dealer or casino employee and even card cheaters looking to clean their cash, but all these setups have the same apparent objective: To launder money without setting foot in an actual casino.

So whatever the story, their reason for not spreading their cash in person is that they might be recognised or are wanted by the law and so on, and this will make sense and help ease any suspicions of a potential mark.

Here’s the hook:

We have large denominations of cash that need to be cleaned. We need players who can increase their chip buys but retain a large portion of high value chips over a month and then exchange those chips at an attractive profit.

With a few dozen players, we can run millions of dollars a year through casinos more safely than doing it ourselves and even with a 20 percent loss, we’d be making more than running our cash through other methods and sources.

All you need to do is bring us $10,000 a month in black chips and we’ll trade those for cash that’s untraceable and you can do with that whatever you want.

A common question might be: “If you don’t go into the casino, what are you going to do with the chips?”

The answer is simple and easy to believe when a mark is falling for the bait: That they have other people who cash out and deposit funds into accounts they control and it’s impossible to trace those funds back to where and who the cash originally came from.

The Meet

Somewhere far from the Las Vegas strip, away from electronic eyes, the scammers meet their mark to exchange chips for cash – but there’s more than one potential customer at the table.

The mark has been made an offer to enter into an exchange that nets a healthy profit, but this deal is clearly not legal so in order to meet the man he or she will do business with, and to verify that the deal is real, he is invited to a late-night meeting where a second ‘player’ is in the bar at the same time.

When the mark arrives, this ‘other player’ joins them, supposedly to take advantage of the same deal but when they each present their chips, the shill has a lot more than the mark.

The second ‘player’ offers the mark a degree of comfort; that he’s not alone in this proposition but even better, the second player has some hard questions for the man who’s buying chips and isn’t shy about asking.

Why don’t you do this yourself?

How do we know this cash isn’t fake?

What are the limits on how much we can exchange?

Naturally, the answers to all these questions are aimed at satisfying the mark’s suspicions which creates a simple and powerful effect on that person.

When we challenge someone directly, we tend to be more contrary or suspicious but when we are separated from this challenge (as an observer) we are more likely to listen (and believe) the response.

A psychologist might debate this or explain it with a bucket of $50 phrases but as someone who has used this ploy hundreds of times during real scams, I can confirm that employing a shill to dispel expected suspicions is a well-proven and powerful tactic.

The tip off for this scam is actually a subtle one: The scammers tell you where to play and buy chips.

The Twist

The role of the ‘other player’ is more than just a shill in this case.

In fact, they’re critical to the outcome of the scam since they will motivate everything that’s about to happen.

The second ‘player’ acts more suspicious and may even accuse the mark of being part of a scam to trigger a natural response to prove their honesty, which makes them even easier to manipulate as the scam proceeds.

But the second ‘player’ has also brought a lot more chips than the mark so when everything is counted on the table, the apparent money-laundering ‘businessman’ tells his shill and the mark that he only has enough cash to cover one of their stacks.

Immediately, the shill demands that his chips are covered since he brought more and after a little byplay, the businessman agrees to pay the shill and not the mark.

This is more than just theatre, it’s a test.

If the mark drives headlong into this argument and demands that they’re paid instead, there’s an excellent chance of taking that mark for much more than $1,000 (which they were instructed to bring in black chips from a particular casino).

This is an important step since it tells the scammers whether or not to rip and run or play their victim for more money.

The Sting

So, what happens?

The shill gets paid off in cash, with a 20 percent profit that leaves the businessman without enough cash to pay the mark, so his chips are returned with an invitation to meet up tomorrow night and complete the transaction.

This is also a blow-off if the con artists will have read the mark as being too suspicious or too unpredictable to play for more, which is doubtless the real objective of this con game.

If the mark is insistent and clearly hooked by the idea, there’s a real possibility they might bring $10,000 instead of just $1,000, in which case they would be allowed to return home with the same chips they brought to the bar with instructions to buy $9,000 more with their hard earned money then lose it all thanks to a bait and switch at the same bar.

But even when a mark is too difficult or isn’t worth playing, the con artists can still walk away with a $1,000 thanks to a devilishly simple switch of the mark’s real casino chips!

The Switch

The switch is what we call a ‘non-move’ and (from the story I heard) seemed to go like this:

The mark’s (real) chips are counted, then the shill’s (fake) chips are counted and stacked alongside.

After the discussion (or argument), a stack of fake chips is simply passed back to the mark from the combined stacks.

Unless the mark is particularly suspicious, this will work every time thanks to the delay caused by the shill’s questions and demands.

If the hustlers are extra smart, they might use a little added misdirection to adjust the stacks at some point, moving a stack of fakes to the position previously occupied by the mark’s real chips.

Later, the scammer would apparently take the mark’s chips and return them but even this is unnecessary if the mark is completely convinced that all the chips are real.

The Blow Off

This was the clever part and it surprised me at first but makes complete sense.

On returning home, the mark receives a call from the businessman, accusing him of being in on a scam with the other player and telling him all the chips are fake!

Sure enough, on closer examination, the chips they returned home with now look a lot less convincing and the mark is now the owner of $5 worth of rebranded house chips.

The beauty of this deception is that the mark has nowhere to turn to report the crime.

He or she cannot go to the police because they were obviously taking part in a crime themselves!

And they can’t go to the casino because they would immediately be under suspicion there too.

Best of all (from the hustler’s perspective) the fake chips are never revealed to the casino who would no doubt investigate further.

That’s the beauty of the blow off – it stops the mark from finding out they have fake chips at the cashier’s desk and causing the casino to investigate further.

The Lesson

This scam is a simple test to see if someone will take bigger bait but when it doesn’t work, they still lose a lot of money to the scammers.

So what happens if the mark takes the bait and returns with 100 black chips?

Well, it could go several ways from a straight steal to a clever switch of chips or cash when the exchange is conducted – perhaps in the car park from the trunk of a car, which has proved to be an excellent location to switch entire bags or suitcases in the past.

A clever (but nasty) strategy would be to swap the cash for a duplicate bag filled with cheap drugs mixed with innocent powder but just enough that the mark would panic and never report anything to the police.

How it ends is less important than how the scam begins – with a believable story designed to hook a likely mark, then take them on an expensive rollercoaster ride.

The harsh truth is that if you get involved with something that is clearly illegal, you’re most likely just a bucket of chum in shark infested waters.

In the 20th century, Dai Vernon was most famous for courting cheaters and adapting ideas for the art of close-up magic but these two worlds are not as alike as you might think.

What works perfectly for one rarely works so well for the other.

Cross Purposes

It’s often assumed that the methods of magicians can easily be shared with cheaters and vice versa but in truth, while both manipulate cards, dice and people in order to deceive; the actual techniques created for either purpose rarely work outside of their intended context.

Very few sleights or strategies have successfully made the leap from magic to cheating because magicians tend to dictate the conditions in which they operate while cheaters must respond to conditions dictated by the games they play. 

A sleight that controls a card to the bottom of the deck in a magic show might never be possible in a card game if it requires the performer to look through the deck or handle cards in a manner not acceptable in a game.

Equally, a cheating move that adds an extra card to a player’s hand might depend entirely on a situation that’s commonplace on a gaming table but unusual or suspicious in a magic performance where the cards are not naturally set for the move to work.

In order to be useful, a sleight must be adapted to fit its new purpose.

This often requires too many adjustments to be practical or deceptive, so magicians with a real interest in gambling sleight of hand tend to recreate the gambling context as a means to practice or perform (demonstrate) cheating techniques.

This can be an art in itself and highly entertaining if you’re lucky enough to catch a live performance from a true expert but card magic has also evolved to create impossible effects around the idea of cheating, and these can be truly astonishing despite being performed under test conditions.

Check out R. Paul Wilson’s video on card mucking to see some expert sleight of hand in action:

“The Vernon Touch”

Dai Vernon’s approach to card magic was inspired by the book ‘The Expert at the Card Table’ by S.W. Erdnase which taught two approaches to sleight of hand with ordinary playing cards; the first half being dedicated to cheating methods and the second half teaching methods for conjurors.

This combination inspired Vernon to continue seeking out new techniques from the dark corners of the gambling world to give him new ideas for his card magic.

In fact, Vernon’s finest effect was inspired by a cheating technique that was conspicuously absent from Erdnase’s book but is now in the repertoire of card magicians everywhere.

Of course, this was not always a one-way exchange and Vernon was known to trade magic methods for cheating secrets with one particular sleight being widely adopted from the conjuring fraternity and used in countless crooked card games, but such transitions remain rare because unless a move fits naturally into a magic or cheating context, it tends to feel forced or unnatural.

From his time spent with crooked gamblers, Vernon learned how to analyse and improve techniques for both magic and gambling and this talent for making sleights more deceptive became known as “The Vernon Touch”.

Vernon could watch a fellow magician demonstrate a new idea for a move and immediately suggest a more elegant solution or devise a new approach to old techniques that would make them more deceptive or natural.

He championed this natural approach to card magic where complex sleight of hand is concealed behind layers of subtlety to create the illusion that nothing is happening except what the audience sees, despite whatever secret actions are being performed beneath the surface.

This reputation made him a legend in the magic community, but it also served him well when seeking out gamblers and cheaters who are naturally wary of strangers asking questions.

After a few demonstrations and dropped names, Vernon would quickly gain the confidence of cheaters but on one occasion, he found himself ‘on the spot’ when a cheater refused to tip the secret of a technique unless Vernon could solve a problem the cheater was having with a situation at the card table.

The Card Cheater’s Problem

During a game, the cheater was able to steal an extra card into his left hand but needed to transfer that card to his right hand in order to return it to the deck and end clean.

The steal into the hand was beautiful and the addition to the deck was perfect but getting the card from one hand to the other proved to be a real problem since the cheater felt that existing methods were too obvious or unnatural.

The challenge was for Vernon to find a way to transfer the card without changing the position of the cards or any other adjustment that might look odd or out of place to other players.

While there are many ways to move cards from hand to hand, they often require a hand-washing motion that some people find comfortable but for others, it looks (and feels) like an impersonation of Fagan from Oliver Twist!

This was not the cheater’s only problem.

All existing hand-washing methods turned the card over between hands but for the cheater’s purposes, the card needed to remain face-down with the back of the card against the palm of the right hand.

But since it also started with the back of the card against the palm of the left hand, the transfer would be doubly difficult.

Worse, it might require an additional action to prevent the card from turning over and that would definitely attract unwanted attention.

All of this had to happen above the table, in an instant and without raising suspicion!

So Vernon retired to his hotel, laid a towel over the dresser and spent several hours trying to find a technique that would move a card from one hand to the other without turning that card over and without calling attention to the action.

Time To Think: The Solution

Vernon worked for hours without finding a solution until, in the small hours of the morning, he checked his watch and decided to sleep on it.

Then he stopped— and checked his watch again.

Vernon’s natural action of looking at the watch on his left wrist was to lay his right hand over the back of his left, framing the right side of the watch as he glanced at the time.

In fact, this was a common action when most people looked at their watch and Vernon instantly recognised the solution he had been searching for.

The position of the two hands was perfect and allowed Vernon to slide the card backward from the left palm, pulled away by the fingers of the right palm after checking the time; invisibly moving the card without turning it over and under cover of a completely natural action!

The cheater didn’t just need a move, he needed ‘shade’ to cover that move and avoid suspicion and was delighted when Vernon shared the solution.

Vernon stumbled onto that solution after many hours exploring everything that didn’t work and while the resulting technique seems obvious today, without that Vernon Touch, I doubt anyone would ever have come up with it.

Whether or not the technique shared by the cheater in return was ever useful to magicians, I can’t say…

Whenever I talk for private clients or perform sleight of hand, I’m often asked if I’ve ever cheated the casinos or genuinely conned people and kept their money.

It would be easy to lie and fabricate years spent on the other side of the tracks, but the truth is more complicated and difficult to package in a glib soundbite and from a personal perspective.

Having had the unique opportunity to perform every type of scam on real people for my work on TV, the last people I would want to be confused with are real scammers.

This presents me with a constant ethical dilemma that illustrates the dangers of oversimplification.

Never Trust A Con Artist, Ever

It would be a lot easier if I claimed to be a reformed card cheat or con artist or pickpocket or fraudster, which has been a proven path for many predecessors and contemporaries who claim to have veered from the dark path of criminal enterprise into the light of public protection.

For a few of these predecessors (and contemporaries), there may be a smattering of truth to their questionable pasts but for others (most, I think), it’s merely a convenient backstory built on complete fantasy or (at best) brief flirtations with the other side of the law.

People who ask the question are seeking authenticity and would be thrilled (it seems) to rub shoulders with a genuine con artist, but those same people are exactly the people who need to stay the hell away from real con artists who would cut into them without a moment’s hesitation.

Seriously, con artists are f**king scumbags and the more I get to know about their methods, the more I despise everything about them.

While Hollywood has successfully promoted the idea of the charming, dapper swindler with a heart of gold, I’ve found the truth to be nothing but ugly and cruel.

Yet that Hollywood lie seems to stick and there’s real disappointment when I tell people I’ve only experimented as a card cheat (in live games), conned people for TV or played against the casinos more for experience than for money.

That disappointment cultivates a constant temptation (on my part) to ‘fess up and give people what they want but therein lies the mechanism of a real con game: offer people what they want to take whatever they have.

It would have been so easy to paint a simpler picture of crime and redemption and become a supposedly reformed, honest con artist that lazy writers or unimaginative PR firms could easily understand.

My true backstory is far more complicated and while a simpler lie would be easier to convey, understanding complicated truths is essential to properly being protected from the intricacies of deception and it would seem dangerous to support these lessons with a lie.

Such is my personal struggle to avoid a simple (but potentially profitable) lie and stick to a more complicated truth.

And for the record: You probably shouldn’t trust anyone who claims to have been a real con artist because the worst case scenario is that they’re telling the truth!

The Oversimplification Fallacy

People, as a rule, respond to simple explanations or concepts and it often requires a certain level of understanding and interest to delve deeper into any subject.

Sometimes, simplification is a perfectly valid form of communication that offers fast, necessary understanding without distorting deeper facts, but oversimplification can be a form of manipulation that can mislead millions of people.

In fact, the oversimplification fallacy is a recognised way to draw seemingly obvious conclusions that make complete sense unless the intended audience is willing to delve deeper than a few pithy soundbites.

Politicians constantly simplify their message to achieve desired results and can whip up immense support based on well-crafted messages that (deliberately) fail to properly, fully or fairly represent the truth.

For example, how often have we heard that violence amongst young people has increased since the introduction of video games, therefore violent games must be responsible for this increase in real life violence?

It makes perfect sense as an idea and for many people, it’s more than enough to jump on board and vote accordingly. 

In fact, this is a naive argument that fails to consider countless other factors but it draws a compelling and easy-to-understand correlation between violent games and actual violence, yet this paper-thin argument has sent millions of people to their social media pages to signal support for regulating violent video games.

If you’ve ever seen a politician dogmatically refuse to say more than a handful of predetermined phrases in answer to a topic during an interview, repeating the same words in the same order as dictated by his or her spin doctors; you’re watching a deliberate attempt to shape opinion or force a message onto the audience without addressing the real meat of a subject.

Governments, corporations, ideologies and religions all know how to shape a message to ensure the maximum positive response and we are constantly being bombarded by these messages every day.

Even the most cynical of observers (hello!) can’t possibly delve into every nugget of information that passes his or her consciousness.

While I read everything I can find about how people are being manipulated by governments, at the same time, I’m passively absorbing information that conveys no real facts but has been deliberately designed to subconsciously shape my opinion and drive subsequent conclusions.

Some of that manipulation is bound to take hold and I constantly find myself in possession of opinions shaped by others and while I may be well-read on many topics, I’m just as ignorant, misguided and manipulated on countless more.

Convenient Lies vs. Inconvenient Truths

Understanding deception is about recognising it in all walks of life, even those where it might be acceptable or bearable but by doing so, we continue to cultivate our individual grift sense that could potentially protect us in the future.

A simple lie is as easy to buy as it is to sell and I’m probably poorer for holding to the truth of my own past but since my goal is to educate people on the subject of deception, I feel obligated to stick to the facts.

Sadly, people tend to prefer a convenient lie to an inconvenient truth, and this has become a principle of communication familiar to anyone with flexible morals or questionable ethics.

Obviously, there are many things in life that might be as simple or authentic as they first seem but I remain wary of anything that can be explained easily, understood quickly or accepted automatically.

We live in a time where facts are all too pliable and whatever version of the truth we prefer can be found with few clicks on a device that soon learns how to pander to our individual biases and in no time at all we don’t need to search for comforting answers or opinions because they already know where to find us.

By combining our natural inclination towards simple stories or solutions with our individual preferences is a powerful, transformative means of communication that has come to manipulate and divide people until we became so polarised we forgot how to communicate with anyone who differs with our own perspective.

While I have fought the temptation of giving my audience the story they want to hear, others choose to embrace expectation to shape their image or their message based on what their audience desires.

Con artists do this every day, and it has worked for centuries.

But whenever I see the tools of scammers being employed to such devastating effect in all walks of life, I can’t help but wonder if I should have just invented a more appealing backstory and reaped the rewards.

Instead, I remind myself of a more complicated truth:

Manipulation is manipulation and a con is a con no matter who is using those methods or why.

Lead image: conartist.tv

From sporting events to all-or-nothing gambles, the ability to predict or control the outcome of such a simple thing as flipping a coin can be a powerful advantage.

Controlling A Coin Toss

Controlling how a coin will land is not always as difficult as you might think.

The “wobble” (as I was taught it) is a simple idea that only requires a thousand hours of practice and is usually performed with a larger coin to aid the illusion of it spinning in midair when it is, in fact, merely oscillating without turning over.

The method is to spin the coin horizontally and give it a little kick with thumb as the coin is tossed upwards, so it rotates and wobbles without flipping.

The knack is to give it enough of a kick to create this pronounced wobble while throwing it straight upwards to emulate the well-known action of flipping a coin legitimately.

I’ve used this in several scenarios to great effect from magic performances to Real Hustle scams and occasionally in real world situations to decide all manner of things.

It’s not the easiest move to master and it takes consistent practice to retain the skill but for a while I was obsessed, flipping thousands of times not just to get the wobble to work but to make the false flip look perfect!

Later, I learned another secret that made the turn of a coin seem much fairer and while it was not quite 100 percent accurate, the odds were so far in my favour that over time it has proven much more valuable and far more convincing than a perfect fake flip.

Gaffed Coins

While there’s a secret method to flipping a coin so it lands exactly on the side you need, there are other solutions that make it almost automatic in the correct conditions.

I have a friend who can let you spin a coin on the floor, then stamp on it with his foot and guarantee the outcome.

I also knew magician in Edinburgh who carried a double-headed coin and a double-tailed coin so he could flip and win no matter what side was called.

I remember watching him perform this feat and was amazed that no one noticed that for heads, he always flipped the coin from the left hand and for tails he always flipped from the right.

People assumed he only had one coin, but his secret was to have a coin in each hand, so he never even bothered to switch the coins!

Ricky Jay, in a quick item for Simon Drake’s excellent early 90s TV show The Secret Cabaret suggested an even smarter use of a double-headed coin where he would propose flipping a silver dollar to decide who paid for dinner and invite his companion to call it while the coin was still in the air.

If they called tails, the coin was sure to land heads up and the sucker would pay the cheque but if they called heads, Ricky would catch the coin and return it to his pocket, claiming it was just a joke to see if they would play along then proposed splitting the cheque as normal.

This was a simple swindle but an ingenious construction that might gain a sizeable advantage on the number of free meals a hustler might win in a year.

Other gaffs include coins that have had their edges expertly filed and re-milled so that when spun, they might land on a preferred side more often than not.

Professional hustlers can make these with simple tools, though I’ve seen poorly made examples in joke shops that are almost impossible to make land the other way!

But the best controlled flip did not use mechanical shoes, gaffed coins or even controlled tosses and yet, over time, many millions were won by the master coin flipper of all time.

Meet “The Flipper”

As a con man, “The Flipper” has succeeded in creating his own legend with almost no personal details being revealed and much of what I learned about him came from second or third-hand accounts.

Details of what he could do with a coin soon began to baffle me because it seemed impossible that anyone could control a coin under the circumstances being described.

The Flipper didn’t just toss a coin and slap it on the back of his hand; he span it high into the air then tossed it unseen under a cup or even an upended trash can.

Sometimes he allowed others to spin the coin – often borrowed and freely examinable at any point.

I was baffled by these stories because I assumed he simply had to be controlling the outcome, but this was not always the case (though I’m certain he was also a master of all the methods previously described).

In fact, a controlled flip would be a disadvantage for the Flipper’s purposes because when he tossed a coin, it was never to win a free lunch or a few dollars.

When the Flipper flipped a coin, thousands of dollars would ride on the outcome.

The Flipper’s Secret

So if the flip was fair, how did the Flipper cheat?

When a coin was tossed, the outcome was truly random but what happened to the coin after the flip is where the Flipper’s genius excelled.

No matter if coin landed heads-up or tails-up or whether he threw it a hundred yards away onto an empty field, ricocheting into a trash can or under his own foot – that coin never flipped again.

The Flipper’s process of trapping the coin in a seemingly fair manner so it couldn’t be controlled, allowed him (by sense of touch) to tell if the coin was heads up or tails up and then keep it that way while placing it into a seemingly fair position for people to then gamble on the outcome.

This meant that he alone knew for certain what the outcome was before any bets were made and since he would be the bookie for the bets that were taken, he had the ultimate advantage.

From that moment, he would take bets on heads and tails but make absolutely sure he took more losing bets than winning bets since he already knew the outcome.

The Flipper’s skill and showmanship gave him a powerful advantage and he would often have dozens of people betting on the toss of a coin, each winning and losing according to an obviously random and fair coin toss but thanks to already knowing the result and being able to retain that result in a theatrical and convincing manner, the Flipper was guaranteed to make money.

Shill Work

The Flipper also worked with shills who bet money on the winning side so the Flipper could encourage more bets from suckers on the other side of the coin.

An expert shill might bet on heads after receiving a signal on the Flipper then offer odds to anyone who would bet against him, so pushing all the suckers towards the losing option.

There are so many ways to manipulate a crowd once the outcome is certain that the Flipper probably made millions during his ‘career’ but what became of him is unknown and in a dozen years of asking and searching, I am yet to even learn his name.

In fact, a cheater would avoid such ‘Hollywood’ endings and engineer more subtle situations but in real life and in real card games, the seemingly impossible happens all the time at tables all over the world.

That being said, if it happens twice in one night, I’d suggest finding another game.

Pay Attention

Gambling on anything forces the participants to pay attention to the outcome and notice when unusual or unlikely events take place.

The same number can come up several times in a row on a completely legitimate roulette table purely by chance but try explaining that to the players, the dealers, the managers or the owners who will almost certainly tear down the rotor and oil every cog before putting it back on the floor.

To better understand just how often seemingly impossible coincidences happen, I’d like to share a couple of personal stories to illustrate how circumstances can converge to create something almost magical.

The following story is 100% true and proves (at least to me) that anything is possible.

The Penn & Teller Coincidence

Sometime in the early 2000s, I was traveling around the United States giving lectures about deception, sleight of hand and magic. I took the opportunity to see the country, drive from place to place and get to know America.

As I traveled, I was a slave to internet cafes or friends’ computers in order to keep up with emails since at that time, I had no laptop and pocket devices such as Blackberries were new and prohibitively expensive.

My trip ended in Las Vegas where I was to attend a magicians’ convention being held at the Rio shortly after Penn and Teller had taken up residence there. I arrived a few days early and met a friend from Scotland who was staying at the Sahara where we shared a room for a few days.

The day before the convention, we had planned to visit a friend who showed us his collection of gambling and cheating paraphernalia during the day while at night, my Scottish friend had a ticket to see “O” at the Bellagio.

I did not have a ticket but had plans to meet friends Mike and Lisa Close for dinner at the buffet but when we met them, I found they were sick and had decided not to stay for dinner and because I was hard to contact (I had no US cell phone either) they felt obliged to come and tell me in person.

Indeed, they were both at the tail end of a bad flu and when they headed back home, I was suddenly alone in Las Vegas with nothing to do.

This is a familiar situation to many people who’ve spent time in Vegas and some stories end much worse than this one (perhaps in a motel bathtub missing a kidney) but while I was now on my own, I knew that a short taxi ride away I could find a hotel filled with fellow magicians, many of whom I knew well.

At that time, I’d never been to the Rio so was curious to check it out since we’d be moving there for the convention the next day.

Arriving at the hotel, I quickly navigated the gaming the floor on the lookout for familiar faces and at the bar, spotted someone I knew.

We chatted for about 20 minutes before his girlfriend arrived and I realised they were on their only night together before the convention and I should probably leave them to enjoy their own company.

Alone again.

It was almost nine o’clock so I decided that I would find the convention centre before heading back to the Sahara for an early night since the rest of the week was guaranteed to be crazy-busy.

From the casino, the convention centre is reached via a long hallway and about halfway down that hallway I saw a good friend smoking a cigarette.

This would change everything since that friend was also a blackjack expert and I knew we’d spend hours in the cafe as I traded card tricks in return for picking his brain into the wee-small hours.

I tapped him on the shoulder:

“Mike! How are you?” I said.

“Quick, this way,” he replied, taking my elbow and marching me out of the hallway and into a theatre where he handed over two tickets before showing me to our seats in the Penn and Teller Theatre.

The show was already starting, and I spend the next 90 minutes baffled by the magic on stage and by how the hell I found myself watching it!

When the show broke, we pushed our way into the lobby where a hundred friends were leaving the same show and it took another 30 minutes of shaking hands, hugging and promising to get together before Mike and I were alone in the coffee shop.

Finally, I was able to ask him: “What just happened?”

He looked at me, puzzled by the question, so I reminded him that I just said hello to him in a corridor and was whisked off to a free show without so much as a by-your-leave.

Still baffled, Mike said: “Didn’t you get my message?”

The next moment is one of the most bizarre of my life as I sat in the middle of my own personal dolly zoom.

While I had been mostly incommunicado and traveling around the States, Mike had scored a couple of tickets for Penn and Teller and hearing that I might attend the convention that followed, had reached out to me.

Not on email but on a message board for magicians.

His message was: R. Paul Wilson – If you are in Las Vegas the night before the World Magic Seminar, meet me at nine o’clock outside the Penn and Teller Theatre, I have an extra ticket.

After weeks on the road, and after a dozen tiny events and decisions – and without any idea whatsoever about that message from Mike – I just happened to walk down the right corridor at the right time to make a rendezvous I had no idea was meant to happen.

Therefore…

No one believes this story, least of all Mike who posted the message and was not at all surprised by my arrival.

Later, when I tried to convince over late-night waffles, he refused to buy a word of it yet it’s completely true and still baffles me to this day but as I said previously: these types of impossible coincidences are supposed to happen from time to time.

As unfathomable random events tumble like infinite-sided dice, occasionally the outcome will seem impossible when in fact, it’s just one of a gazillion possibilities that we just happen to notice.

Finally, A Confession

In a basement in Los Angeles, I was asked to spend time with one of the world’s biggest A-list actors to show him what was possible with a deck of cards as inspiration for a role he was about to play in the film I was working on.

With me was one of the world’s finest sleight of hand magicians and together we showed some card tricks and moves and got the actor suitably excited to play the part.

But towards the end, he asked me to show the “real work”, so I invited his brother to shuffle the deck and deal any number of five-card hands.

I had already palmed out a straight flush and when I was given a hand, I immediately switched all five cards while the actor, his brother and my friend checked their hands and all agreed they would bet heavily after taking a draw.

My fellow magician was utterly astonished to find that I not only had the straight flush but that he had a flush, while the other two had a full house and a four of a kind!

What really baffled him was that the actor’s brother had shuffled, dealt, and handed me the five cards that I switched out – I never touched the rest of the deck!

To this day, it probably still troubles him since I never tipped the switch or any of the other details and since he missed that switch, what chance did he have to realise the truth?

Here’s what really happened: while my hand was a lock, the others were down to pure chance and I had just gotten fantastically lucky at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place – their hands were pure luck and nothing else!

As discussed there, the need to control 51 percent of a currency’s ledger record means that the bigger (and faster) a network is, the harder it is to access the necessary nodes and keep up with updates.

My conclusion (and I’m essentially a noob) was that the coins themselves are difficult to hack, but what about individual holdings such as software-based wallets or online accounts?

That’s where real digital danger lies.

In this article, I’m going to lay out the most common threats to your digital pocketbook.

Nothing New Here

For the most part, cryptocurrencies are just another item of value and like many other digital items, access to where records are held can be enough to defeat our individual (often inept) security measures.

Like your online bank account, if someone can gain access to that account with your details and password, they might easily steal all of your money with a click of a keyboard.

The methods used to do this are not dissimilar to how local crypto wallets (stored on a device) or remote exchange accounts might be compromised.

To gain access to your funds, thieves can take several approaches from stealing your ID or password to convincing you to send the funds yourself.

If you have a healthy interest in all things deceptive, these tactics will be quite familiar.

The fact that most digital currencies are unregulated creates a Wild West aspect that attracts online bandits and offers them a degree of impunity compared to other forms of theft.

As a result, the diversity of thinking from this new generation of fraudsters can create remarkably complex or elegantly simple methods for taking your money.

How They Find You

With any con game, knowing what a potential target wants is the foundation upon which most scams are built but scammers also need to target victims with treasure that’s worth stealing.

Online profiling can create a catalogue of viable crypto investors simply by trawling forums, video comments and social media groups while collecting any available data from these sources.

With your email, phone number and real name, scammers can attack people in several ways so fostering a disposal identity that’s difficult to connect to your own might be a good strategy in terms of protecting your true identity.

I don’t particularly care for anonymous online interaction since it tends to foster negative discussions, insults, lies and general bad behavior but when it comes to not revealing yourself as a target for thieves, an alter-ego might not be such a bad idea when publicly discussing financial matters.

I leave that up to you but please, act responsibly.

An important factor is that there are a lot of new investors vulnerable to many forms of attack and crypto seems to attract a certain type of investor who tends to be overconfident in the face of much more sophisticated adversaries.

Like a brand-new chess player convinced they could hold their own against a grandmaster when in fact, they’re almost certain to lose; whereas a more intelligent beginner might have the self-awareness to recognize when they’re sitting opposite a superior opponent and expect the inevitable.

This is nothing new and poker players everywhere have learned the hard lessons of hubris only to take full advantage when tables are turned later in their playing careers!

How They Get You

An exhaustive list or description of methods might fill a book so take these are merely examples of how scams might catch you. You should always be aware that new variations are common.

You will hopefully recognize all of these tactics from other types of scams but that does little to help if you don’t remain vigilant when trading online and accept that you might be outplayed and outgunned if you fall into a well-concealed trap.

1. Pretenders

Traditional methods like phishing, where an email or online communications trick people into accessing bogus sites and/or installing (openly or secretly) malware onto their devices remain successful.

No matter how hard we try, there will always be a link we shouldn’t have clicked or a page we shouldn’t have opened.

A key component to the success of phishing is timing and while billions of emails might be sent in the hope that a few will fall into a victim’s inbox just after they’ve spoken to the bank or company being emulated; crypto scams can make excellent use of data trawled from the sources previously mentioned and be almost tailored to individual recipients.

A powerful tactic is to find subscribers to certain websites, channels or individuals and then spoof these sources to make it look like you are talking to someone you may already trust.

Recently, multiple celebrities were hacked and their online identities used to advertise a giveaway of cryptocurrency where any amount of crypto sent to them would be doubled and quickly returned.

Of course this sounds like a scam, but the fact it came from verified sources (apparently) gave it enough credibility and inherent trust in these famous accounts trapped lots of people into foolishly sending their money.

2. Infestment Opportunities

Malware can come from many sources and now that the incentive to hunt and steal digital currency is high, don’t think that dodgy emails or texts are the only ways to get past your personal security measures.

Genuine software updates from major companies have had viruses incorporated at source and it’s only a matter of time before one of the big two operating systems has a disastrous event baked into its own code that might trigger before it can be recognized.

Hardware is also a very real danger and anything you plug into your computer might have something unexpected lurking inside.

Personally, I’m hyper cautious about all USB sticks and hard drives to the point where I would prefer to use one device purely for financial matters and protect it from all other unnecessary software or hardware.

I recently heard of a USB flash drive company sending tens of thousands of sticks to corporate clients, each with a virus on board waiting to find the right conditions for a digital heist.

It’s easy to become super-paranoid but a little paranoia is warranted in the face of unwanted parasites infesting seemingly legitimate products and providers.

3. Online Imposters

Unsurprisingly, fake websites have become increasingly common as a way to facilitate various types of crypto theft and these sites might run for hours, days or months before recycling into a different form with a similar name.

Fake websites might be a complete copy of a recognized legitimate site but with a tweaked URL to fool those who don’t double check such things and still click through from emails.

Social Engineering attacks often direct people to these bogus sites and encourage them to create accounts or enter details that might be useful elsewhere.

This type of attack uses human-to-human (apparently) engagement to gain trust or manipulate people into giving sensitive information or taking actions that compromise their personal online security.

You can check these sites for yourself with services like Crunchbase but if you don’t know what you’re doing or have any reason to doubt, my advice is to stick with well-known exchange sites and always check the URL you’re using.

Your Best Defense?

As Mr. Miyagi says, the best defense is to “no be there”.

I’d caution anybody about getting too deeply and too openly involved in any financial venture without learning as much as you can about what’s safe and what’s not and to always recognize that the less you know, the more vulnerable you are.

Make sure your passwords are as strong as possible and be equally careful with password recovery methods that should be as strong as the password itself.

Think of it this way: if you have a 50-digit password with numerals, letters and symbols but your password can be recovered by knowing the name of your dog or grandmother’s maiden name, you’re not as safe as you think you are.

By using two-factor authentication on all your accounts, tracking all wallet or exchange activity, deleting any remote access software that might be on your devices and using advance phrase recovery for your accounts, you minimize the chances of being scammed.

And of course, make sure your anti-virus software is up to date on any devices you use for financial purposes.

Such steps will make you a harder target but if hackers smell blood in the water and concentrate their efforts on any one of us, it’s only a matter of time before they break through.

And if you do get hit, stop all activity immediately, reset passwords and report it immediately to your brokerage.

If at all possible, have a trusted, verifiable source for advice on how to navigate the minefield of cryptocurrencies.

As always, bar bets, proposition bets and betchas are like jokes or stunts with money on the line and should be presented as such.

Make it clear your friends will win back anything they lose once they know the secret and only bet what your friends can afford to lose.

1. Which Is Taller?

For this, you need a pint glass, a thick pile of drinks coasters (bar mats), a napkin and plenty of hustle.

I perform this at the bar, where the coasters are stacked nearby or grab a pile and take them to the table.

I ask someone which they think is greater, the circumference of the mouth of the pint glass OR the height of the glass.

Many will immediately say the height, but clever folk might reason that the two could be similar and bet on the circumference. So to make it interesting, I add a few coasters under the glass to increase the height.

Now the height of the glass plus the coasters must be greater so people will be inclined to bet on the height. I then add more coasters until the combined height is obviously much more than the distance around the mouth of the glass.

During this process, it’s up to you to cajole people into betting.

I often present it as proof that even when the odds are obviously in people’s favour they are too scared to take a simple bet, even for low stakes like the price of a drink and to prove all of this I offer to pay 2/1 for anyone who bets on the height of the glass.

The logic seems to explain why you are making it impossible to lose and eventually people will bet a drink or a pound on the height of the glass (plus coasters) being greater than the circumference of the mouth of the glass.

NOTE: This is where the hustle lies and it’s where you can tease people a little but also make it clear that the only way to find out what happens is to take the bet.

Using the napkin, measure the height of the glass on top of the coasters, then move the glass to the bar and measure the circumference.

So long as you checked earlier how many coasters you can safely place under the glass, the circumference will always be a LOT more than the height of the glass itself and even more than when combined with the coasters.

This also works with tall thin glasses (without being able to add so many coasters) but always check first just in case.

2. The Traveling Olive

This is an oldie, a goodie and an opportunity to scam people who know the secret.

Get a little black thread and piece of tape and carry those in your pocket when going to the bar or pub or a friend’s house (I used to loop some around a credit card and stick the tape to the card, which was easy to remove and use.

Secretly attach the thread to the bottom of a beer mat and replace the coaster on the table. So long as it’s a dark surface, the thread won’t be seen.

Otherwise, place the coaster near the edge of the table so the thread dangles over the edge and can be easily grabbed later.

The following betcha works without this set-up but it affords you a terrific opportunity to have some fun with people even if they know this bet (or can work it out).

The challenge is to move an olive from one coaster to another when the coasters are several inches apart and without touching the olive with their hands.

The only thing they can use is a brandy glass, but they can only turn it over (end for end) ONCE.

The secret is to place the glass mouth-down over the olive on the coaster and then make circles with the glass until the olive is propelled up into the glass, rotating inside thanks to the circular action.

The glass can now be moved, still making those circles, to the other coaster where the olive drops after successfully completing its journey.

A little practice at home will show how the circular action scoops the olive into the glass as it spins inside, and that action is easy to maintain as you move to the second coaster.

SO— what about that thread?

Whether you run into someone who already knows this bet or decide to prank someone who just learned it, the thread is a great way to pull another fast one.

Once they pick up the olive inside the glass, wait until they get close to the second coaster and slowly pull the thread, so the coaster moves away!

This will surprise them so much they stop spinning or mess it up so the olive falls (or flies) out.

No need to hide the thread; show everyone and take a bow (and several free drinks).

3. Seven And Three

This is such a simple bet but one of my favourites since it’s earned me several free lunches.

When arriving at a diner or restaurant, ask for three shot glasses and change of a dollar or pound (or whatever) so you have 10 identical coins.

Tell your victims they need to use all 10 coins and all three glasses – and they must place an odd number of coins into each glass.

Tell them if they can do so, you’ll buy dinner and if they can’t they have to buy yours.

The secret is easy but be prepared for complaints: place three coins into two glasses and four into the third glass before stacking one of the shot glasses with three coins inside the glass with four coins.

Two glasses now contain three coins and the other contains seven (in total)!

4. Hat Trick

If you wear a hat, this is a funny bet that works but be prepared to dodge the occasional slap or punch.

Cover a filled shot glass with your hat and take a straw claiming you can drink from the glass without touching the hat.

Allow some time for your suckers to consider all the options then, once the bet is accepted, lean under the table with the straw and make noises as if drinking through the straw.

Sit upright, replace the straw on the table and say “done!”

Wait for someone to lift the hat and prove you wrong and as soon as they do, pick up the glass and drink!

True to your word, you never needed to touch the hat…

Like any investment, crypto offers varying degrees of risk and can return profits or losses depending on the perceived value of a particular brand of currency but given these crypto currencies’ relative newness as forms of money, their dependence on technology and the demographics of crypto investors; I remain extremely cautious and suspect there are many scams (old and new) waiting to take advantage of this new financial frontier.

Or, as some crypto advocates might put it: maybe I’m just too chicken.

Maybe so – but here’s why.

Cryptocurrency Basics

In 2008, a phantom forum user with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a distributed database where transactions and holdings of a new currency could be stored and verified across every node (computer or storage device) on a worldwide network with every node maintaining an encrypted copy of the same ledger, thereby agreeing by mass consensus how much currency exists, who owns it and where and when it is traded.

The goal (he claimed) was to employ this peer-to-peer network model (where multiple computers share a workload without the need for a central server) to create a decentralised currency that could not be manipulated or corrupted because it would exist on many machines with multiple, unrelated nodes required to process and verify any updates to the ledger; creating an anonymous consensus that could be trusted.

This type of currency cannot simply be added by a click of one button (or a thousand), it must be generated through work performed by randomly selected CPUs and GPUs that run hotter than boiled kettles solving massive mathematical problems in order to authenticate transactions based on large cryptographic keys.

Once these distributed processors verify a batch of transactions they are added to the ledger.

The basic idea is that these mathematical problems require so much processing power that multiple CPUs must share the workload therefore any solution must be agreed by several sources before being approved.

Critically, once a transaction is approved, the ledger can only be appended and past transactions can never be erased.

In return for performing these processing tasks, owners of these processors accrue a form of payment based on proof of work done, a process commonly known as ‘mining’.

Due to its widely (and wildly) distributed nature, it’s theoretically impossible to hack, corrupt or physically destroy this network as it’s constantly being updated on every node to create a permanent record or agreement about who owns what and how much and how that is being spent or shared.

Since every node has a duplicate copy of the (encrypted) ledger, cracking or corrupting that ledger would require copying the counterfeit version onto more than half the nodes on the network.

So, in order to beat this system, one would have to gain access to 51 percent of the nodes in order to force a consensus on any counterfeit version of the ledger and this has actually happened with forms of crypto with small enough networks that attackers could attempt to force a majority consensus and create bogus transactions.

With Bitcoin, however, the network has expanded to such a degree that locating and controlling more than half of the nodes would be almost impossible.

Almost.

In recent years, so many locations have been established to mass-process authentication and ‘mine’ more currency (requiring massive amounts of electricity for the computers being used) that some investors have grown concerned that the distributed model proposed by the mysterious Mr. Nakamoto is becoming more centralised as these mining sites are established.

There may come a point where a small number of locations might possess a majority of nodes and therefore expose the blockchain to attack.

Even so, such an attack would require an enormous physical and intellectual effort to coordinate and might quickly fail if those nodes were identified in time.

It seems complicated because it is, though the principles at work are relatively simple.

Fuel For Scammers

I could dig deeper but that’s as much as I need to know about how new Bitcoin is generated through Proof of Work, how individual holdings are maintained by a mutual ledger that’s updated whenever transactions are approved and how all of it is protected by consensus across an evolving network.

Real experts and investors can tell you a lot more about how and why it works but my focus is on how it might be targeted by scammers or used as fresh foundations for old con games.  

The casual investor need only be concerned about protecting his or her digital wallet that contains their cryptographic key and identifier and only needs to know how much crypto they own and where to trade it.

In other words, it’s like any other form of currency or holding and the simplest scams to target potential marks might be the boiler room scam or the good old ‘pump and dump’, which I’ll discuss in my next article.

The key factor in all of this is that many people are curious about cryptocurrency, yet few understand it.

If you’ve read this far and you’ve struggled to understand what ‘peer-to-peer’ means or how ‘proof of work’ somehow ‘mines’ Bitcoin you are absolutely not alone.

In fact, the vast majority of owners and buyers of Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Etherium and countless other digital currencies are just as in the dark as you or I!

Meanwhile, those with a better understanding of how blockchain works might see into the matrix and like 21st century safe crackers, formulate the next great heist with just a few lines of code.

Get Used To It

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are paving the way for future forms of money that employ similar methods based on what works today and can be improved tomorrow.

I personally expect Apple and Tesla to create their own digital currencies with the former using its entire range of devices to share the workload of a fluid verification system that could quickly become the dominant financial force on the planet.

As technology advances, batteries last longer and communications become faster and more widely available, Apple devices could include a dedicated processor to quietly perform calculations that serve a world-wide network that exists purely to verify transactions in the background (patent pending).

And if they haven’t or aren’t considering this, I’ll eat my hat.

Nothing New

Any scenario where a large number of people are tempted to take risks and commit resources to something so new is fertile territory for scams and scammers.

Equally, whenever people commit financial resources to something they don’t fully understand, they must rely on the honesty and accuracy of others or information researched or received but remember that both people and data can be easily corrupted in these days of digital deception.

The lesson here is the same as it has been for all investors entering a market they do not fully understand: Be careful who you trust, verify sources and be aware that the value of your investment can go down as well as up.

As I’ve said, I’ve allowed multiple opportunities to slide, some of which would have been highly profitable but ultimately, I based those decisions on one simple fact:

I know next to nothing about crypto currency.

How can you anticipate these future scams and protect yourself?

The Numbers Game

Be a con artist.

Okay, not really.

I don’t mean BE a con artist; what I really mean is that you should learn to think like one.

If you’re a gambler, why not look at scams from a similar perspective?

What are the chances any of us might be targeted and what are the chances we might avoid getting caught out and escape a hustler’s trap?

Pickpockets we can control by adjusting our choices of where we go, what we carry and how we carry it. Make it obvious and easy in a busy public place well-known for pocket pinchers and the odds of us getting ripped off go way up.

Take a taxi, blend into your environment and protect your belongings somewhere neither obvious or easy to access and the odds swing into your favour.

In other words: we control the conditions of the game.

But not always.

Our luggage might be stolen while in transit but even here our choice of suitcase can lower the likelihood of having it “go missing”.

A friend once told me her entire Louis Vuitton luggage set was stolen from a hotel baggage room despite holding nothing but cheap clothes and shoes.

The bags themselves, of course, were brand new and worth a fortune so even if they were filled with dirty socks, the thieves were guaranteed a score once they aired out her sweaty bags.

My friend took some satisfaction in the fact that the bags were actually fake but as I pointed out, they looked real-enough to be worth stealing and she might still have her belongings if she’d bought some genuine, less ostentatious luggage that isn’t just begging to be stolen.

There’s A Scam For That

Common theft can target anyone but each of is vulnerable to specific scams associated with our businesses or leisure activities.

Do you play the stock market? There’s a scam for that.

Do you use online banking? There’s a scam for that.

Do you carry “no-contact” credit cards? There’s a scam for that.

Do you gamble online? You guessed it— there’s a scam for that, too.

If you follow these articles, you’re probably hip to many scams that might affect you but as I recently pointed out, the COVID-19 pandemic has opened countless doors of opportunity to criminals and it’s impossible to keep abreast of every wrinkle on any swindle that’s out there.

Each of us needs to watch our own backs to some extent so while taking the time to search the internet or read articles like this one, a powerful protective strategy is to jump the fence and see your own situation from the other side of the tracks.

Be Your Own Hustler

If you ever need to know how vulnerable your home is to burglars, try to break in sometime and you’ll soon find out how easy it is to get inside.

Similarly, whenever presented with new processes for business transactions, gambling scenarios or day-to-day activities, ask yourself: how would I take advantage of that if I happened to be a crook?

With so many meetings taking place over online conference providers, it’s not hard to believe that extremely sensitive corporate, personal or political conversations are happening all the time and are therefore ripe pickings for anyone who can break into those calls.

Security has been beefed up across the industry with passwords, two-factor authentication and encryption offering confidence to clients around the world.

But while those clients are talking on a perfectly secure conference platform, what other devices, apps or software is available for motivated hackers and thieves to take advantage of?

Perhaps our phones could be listening to the call we are making on our laptop.

Just a few months ago, a ubiquitous piece of software proved easy to use as a way to connect to any user and open their microphone and while that flaw may have been identified before it could be used, the chances are excellent there are plenty of other back doors or trap doors out there.

Perhaps if we know where a target might be, we could simply climb a tree, point a piece of hardware at their home-office window and listen the old-fashioned way?

Maybe we can mail them a gift with a cellular device hidden inside.

Stay Fresh

I ruminate on all of these possibilities based on any activity I find myself participating in and I recommend you do too.

And while most of us are now familiar with Zoom and Skype and FaceTime and Facebook calls, I remain hyper-aware that this new trend has opened up a buffet of opportunities for anyone seeking to do wrong for fun or profit.

In my country (Scotland) we’ve all been asked to install a Test & Trace app to help control and monitor the spread of COVID-19 and while I’m glad to comply for those reasons, I can’t help but wonder how secure these apps are in the long run or if there’s already an available method to take advantage of.

Reading through the instructions for these apps, there’s a brief warning about scams and what might happen, but I can quickly conceive of how many opportunities are now available to con artists able to weasel their own logic around new and unfamiliar procedures.

It beggars belief that governments or companies don’t take more time to consult on the feasibility of deception. 

Just as white hat hackers can help identify potential means of attack or existing weaknesses in a system, experts on deception can spot potential opportunities for those with a criminal mindset.

Only you really know your own vulnerabilities and while most of us are susceptible in similar ways, it’s worth paying attention to anything that might be particular to your own online or real-world activity and either educate yourself or assess your own weaknesses by thinking from the other side of the tracks.

Why wait to get caught out when you can be your own con artist; after all, you know more about your potential weaknesses than almost anyone.

For more tips and tricks to keep you safe from scammers, check out:

When plunged into unfamiliar circumstances, we have a natural tendency to learn quickly; making decisions or coming to conclusions based on available information and personal experience.

So it is with all forms of gambling: just as early experience can influence a lifetime of bad decisions, it can be extremely difficult (or even impossible) to unlearn conclusions made when we were least educated about the games we play.

Bad Education

This is not true of everyone.

Many successful gamblers realised at some point in their careers that they needed to stop what they were doing wrong and unlearn bad habits to stand a better chance of winning in the long run.

But not everyone has the presence of thought to reconsider their own thinking, especially if that thinking has paid off in the past.

I recall introducing a good friend to craps when we were working together in Las Vegas.

I’m a pretty crappy craps player who bets the pass line, takes odds and enjoys the atmosphere until my luck runs out, or I score a few bucks along the way.

I explained this to my friend who understood how taking the odds was a solid bet and that betting the pass line (rather than “no pass”) was a personal choice to stay with the table rather than bet against the crowd.

Pretty boring and that’s how I like it since I only buy in for what I can afford to lose and am never too deflated when I go bust.

That’s not how my friend saw it.

As his first craps game progressed, our winnings began to mount up (for a change!) and he began to experiment with other bets on the layout.

Two hours later and I was killing time at the blackjack table while he was winning big with the dice by betting every crazy combination you can imagine.

He followed other players and true gamblers and came out way in front with a sizeable profit for his first time out.

Meanwhile, I had merely eked out a tiny percentage from my conservative bets therefore late-night dinner was on him while I listened to theories on how and why he won.

I’d seen it all before, of course.

Some of us are gamblers, some of us are players and some of us are sharks in the water.

As I fought my way through a Peppermill fruit plate, I knew exactly where this was headed.

Two months later and my friend had spent many nights at many craps table with varying results but always certain he was still in front, overall. 

Truthfully, I doubt that was the case and I know he busted his own bankroll a few times following a self-determined system based on what worked that first night at Benny Binion’s place while being “coached” by “helpful” dealers.

It’s only natural to come to the wrong conclusion based on inaccurate information.

In fact, this is the secret to all magic tricks regardless of how many theories you might have read by deluded psychologists and their MRI scans.

Incorrect or incomplete information leads to distorted reasoning which results in false assumption and flawed judgement.

A good magician will tell you that allowing an audience to reach their own conclusion as to what is (or might be) happening is a much stronger deception than anything a performer might tell them, whether true or false.

As Teller puts it: “Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.”

So it is that your first time at the table might prove more expensive in the long run if it influences how you play for years to come.

The Way Of The Realist

It’s all too easy to fall into bad habits and if you learn from the wrong crowd, those habits might become dyed in the wool and impossible to unlearn if you aren’t willing to take a cold, hard look at your results.

If you can account for all your wins and losses and are in the black or even substantial profit then more power to you, I hope your luck holds out.

But if you see a hole where your money ought to be, there’s a chance you’re just not playing correctly.

There are better ways to play almost any game and while your choice of game will certainly have a substantial financial impact on your bankroll in the long run, you have a simple decision to make based on what you can afford to lose.

Ask yourself:

Do I enjoy playing?

Are my potential losses acceptable in return for my time?

Is playing more important than winning?

The first question is important since it might identify all sorts of problems if you’re not at least having a good time.

If you recognise that you’re not enjoying your playing experience, it’s time to consider other options, including seeking help if you feel compelled to play.

If you are losing more than you’re happy to lose for the experience of playing, then you may be playing poorly or have chosen a game that will only occasionally reward your style of play.

Perhaps find another game or pick up some books and try to relearn how you play.

If playing is more important than winning, this can be a good or a bad thing.

Any gambler who manages his money against games with a negative expectation should be able to adapt to highs and lows.

But if you’re breaking into your piggy bank or spending the mortgage at the tables, your priorities are out of whack and you need to stop and rethink or find professional help.

Examine Your Foundations

Whatever your long-term results as a gambler, use your hard-won experience to re-think how you play and cast your mind back to how and when you developed your style of play.

I guarantee that if you haven’t stopped to read a few books, take some lessons or observe the right examples in any game, you may be misled by that first time you won, regardless of the quality of decisions that lead to that win.

Making crazy bets might pay off once or twice but unless you’re blessed with tremendous luck, they will bite back over time and take much more than you ever won.

As my friend learned over three months at craps tables around Las Vegas, you can’t figure games of chance based on short term results or you might end up on track for a lifetime of bad decisions.

Regardless, people tend to believe whatever they like and I know much of this will fall on deaf ears.

Once we cement our ideas based on isolated experience, it’s almost impossible to talk ourselves off the ledge of our own beliefs.

For more articles by this author, check out:

Lead image: Shutterstock

Soapy evolved from being a street swindler to a full-time racketeer with dozens of bad men and ladies of negotiable affection on his payroll.

But it all started with a simple little scam that not only gave Jefferson Randolph Smith his nickname, it seeded the future of a criminal enterprise that ended, inevitably in disaster.

Soapy Who?

Before I describe the scam, a few words on who Soapy Smith was.

Between 1879 and 1898, Soapy owned several crooked gambling joints and ran a campaign of organised crime in Denver and Creede, Colorado.

He was a fiery figure and when other villains encroached on his business, Soapy’s temper often got the better of him.

As a result he was implicated in countless lawsuits and attempted prosecutions but continued to operate until the city of Denver embarked on a campaign of reforms that forced Soapy and his gang to relocate to Creede, Colorado.

There, after building a sizeable bankroll with his soap scam, Soapy immediately took over the gaming halls, scamming the local silver miners with everything from marked and stacked decks to light-fingered ladies of the night or well-informed muggers.

As a result, Soapy and his gang (pictured below) made a fortune from the miners of Creede but not without making enemies on both sides of the law.

Several victims of Soapy’s schemes tried to kill him and when Soapy was himself charged with the attempted murder of a saloon manager, he was forced to abandon Creede and retreat to Skagway, Alaska.

In Skagway, Soapy’s scams and schemes flourished until his gang conned Klondike miner John Douglas Stewart out of a substantial amount of gold in a game of three card monte.

Soapy was ordered to return the gold but when he arrived at a private meeting to challenge this decision, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith was shot dead by Frank Reid in a shootout at Juneau Wharf.

I have many friends who love the intricacies of the Soapy Smith stories, his tales of crooked derring-do as he evaded capture or prosecution in Colorado before his arrival in Skagway.

They are drawn to the many scams he pulled on victims over the years or to theories about who fired the first shot (and why) in the Juneau that night.

Personally, I think the man was a dirty, low-down criminal who deserved his fate at the hands of Frank Reid but the simple con game that gave Soapy his name absolutely intrigues me.

The Soap Scam

A variation on the Purse Swindle, the soap scam works in the same way by convincing people that items they can buy for a small amount may contain large cash prizes.

It’s a lottery camouflaged as a sales pitch and it works so well that it helped fund more than three criminal empires from Colorado to Alaska.

Whenever Soapy had to skip town and start anew, his first investment was a few dozen boxes of soap, each bar wrapped in opaque wax paper.

With these bars of soap, Smith would make an enormous profit; enough to rebuild his gang and buy his way into much bigger games like monte, faro and poker.

So how does it work and why does it work so well?

As I’ve written elsewhere, street auctions can be based on several principles from sleight of hand (like the Purse Swindle) to powerful psychology (like the Jam Auction) but while victims might always end up disappointed, in the very best con games, victims have no idea they just got scammed.

Soapy’s scam was as brilliant as it was simple and depended on discipline rather than raw skill.

Here’s how a typical soap pitch might play out.

Soapy would gather a crowd and spread the word about a new formulation of soap that cleans better, lasts longer and smells just fine.

And in an attempt to spread the word about this fabulous new product, he has been authorised to offer cash prizes to anyone who cares to buy a bar of lucky soap.

While he talked and as the crowd watched, Soapy would unwrap a bar, insert a hundred-dollar bill between the soap and outer paper, re-wrap the bar and drop it into a box filled with identical blocks of wax-paper wrapped soap.

The box would then be given a shake while the crowd pushed forward to buy as many bars as they could afford.

Naturally, someone in the crowd would “find” the money and the process would begin again, this time with two or three bars containing cash and again the crowd would buy the entire box.

Thanks to the inflated price of each bar of soap and the fact that no one outside of Soapy’s gang won a dime, the soap scam was a sure-fire way to make enormous amounts of money.

The Real Work

What’s really fascinating is the simplicity of Soapy’s operation: no sleight of hand and no fake bags or boxes, yet it built the foundation of Soapy’s ongoing criminal enterprise.

Crooked soap sellers have created dozens of ways to switch out loaded bars from difficult sleights, like palming the bill as the soap is rewrapped to switching the entire wrapped block of soap before being dropped in the box or bag.

In fact, the cleverest methods required no dexterity.

Some scammers built carpet bags with secret compartments to hold back “winning” bars.

Once money was inserted under a wrapper, the bar of soap was dropped into the bag and into a secret pocket that was sealed before the bag was up-ended onto a platform and the bars of soap sold at random to the crowd.

Another method was to cut cardboard boxes to create a simple trap door.

This acted as a chute into the box below and the soap inside the box was arranged so that the bar containing the cash could drop straight to the bottom, out the pre-formed chute and into the box of soap underneath!

When the box was picked up, the flap was pushed flush and the box shaken to “shuffle” the soap.

All Too Easy

Whatever methods Soapy used in his career it seems clear that his best technique was to simply make sure his shills had first choice and that the winning bar or bars were always in the same position for them to select.

Yup – that’s probably all there was to a scam that gave one of the Wild West’s most infamous outlaws his nickname and yet, armed with this simple secret (and a ton of cheap soap), he was able to build and rebuild his own network of organised crime for two decades.

For more tales about con men, check out:

In this article, I’m going to show how an old “set-up” scam can be adapted, modernised and varied depending on the skill and audacity of the con artists.

This is at least a two-person con game, but I’ve heard of set-ups where everyone is in on it except the mark.

I’ve also heard of single-o (one person) set-ups played by scammers on large groups where the hustler actually gets some of the marks to back up his claim/story!

I’m going to describe two versions of the same scam to show how an outdated swindle can be polished off and re-worked by modern hustlers.

The Miracle Purse Con

Originally known as “The Lucky Pocketbook”, this was a clever bit of chicanery used to separate drunks and gamblers from their money about a hundred years ago.

It’s a simple con game with a relatively easy method but it ensnares its victims by forcing them into the role of would-be con artists in a less than fair (or honest) bet.

It begins after a game of poker or an evening at the bar when one of the party says his farewells and leaves the group.

Soon, another player (or drinker) notices that he has left behind a small purse and tells the others he will soon be back when he realises it’s missing.

He tells everyone: “That’s his lucky charm, he never plays a hand of cards without that on the table. Inside is a penny from the year he was born.”

Sure enough, when someone checks, they find a penny from 1880 (or whenever) and much fun is had at the expense of their absent companion.

A few minutes later, the owner of the purse returns, slightly panicked but instantly relieved when he sees his lost property waiting for him.

Excusing himself to the group, he reclaims the purse but before he can leave again, one of the group asks what is so valuable inside the purse.

At this point, he sheepishly confesses that it’s nothing more than a lucky penny from 1880, the year he was born but the group aren’t satisfied and ask to see the coin.

Before he can open the purse, however, his secret partner stops him and sews the seeds of their impending con game.

“Wait a minute,” he says.

“There were no pennies struck in 1880. I used to collect coins and I remember that was one of the years they never made any pennies due to the copper shortage. There’s no way that penny is from 1880.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” replies the purse owner, and the scene is set for the hook to be cast.

“All I’m saying is that you’re mistaken. In fact, I’ll bet a hundred dollars that that penny isn’t from 1880.”

A hundred-dollar bill hits the table and the group laughs, but the owner of the purse turns on them, brandishing his little purse.

“I’ll take that bet and any other that says this isn’t from 1880!”

This is where the two con artists manipulate the crowd by tempering their performance according to the reaction of their marks.

If no one bites quickly (though they almost always did) they might heat things up and start arguing, accusing and threatening until everyone throws down their money just to teach the purse-owner a lesson.

Once the bets are on the table, the indignant owner of the little leather purse tosses it to one of the marks to verify it contains a coin dated 1880.

Naturally the mark opening the purse is more than certain that the coin inside will have another date and when he reads “1880” on the coin, the sucker is utterly dumbstruck.

While the coin is passed around, the winner collects his cash, demands the return of his lucky penny and storms off, never to return.

Meanwhile, his partner plays the part of a good loser and cools-off the group.

If tempers flare, the remaining con artist might even accuse the person who replaced the original penny of not checking the coin he replaced it with!

A Short Con

This might not break the mark’s bank or make the con artists a fortune but it’s a simple enough ruse that once fleeced thousands of victims without too much harm or great loss, but the amount made was probably worthwhile.

In some cases, it might even have been used to set up the marks for a bigger con in the future.

Short cons like this are less common today but having pulled so many on The Real Hustle, I’m always astounded at how well they work once potential victims buy into the story they’re being told.

Think about the situation: a slightly drunk player who may have been winning all night (this might have been a lucrative “topper” for low-level card hustlers after skimming a game for hours) leaves behind the opportunity for the group to have some fun at his expense.

This then becomes an opportunity to teach him a lesson when the first bet is made.

All the purse owner has to do is switch the purse with the coin they replaced with a duplicate, identical purse containing another 1880 penny.

This might have been a feat of sleight of hand but in most cases, it was simply switched inside the hustler’s pocket before his partner asked what was in the purse.

The real skill was in how the suckers were manipulated; how con artists played this was a matter of experience.

And whenever a group of marks are on the verge of taking the bait, it can be all too easy to make them “tip” and play the room like a cheap violin.

A Modern Twist

As simple as this con is, it has many variants and one of those variations is really quite brilliant.

This version was played around the 1980s by a friend – J.N. – who used it to cover losses in college poker games.

In his version, he left his wallet on the floor, which his partner would find before spinning a similar yarn about a lucky two-dollar bill that J.N. carried every time he played poker.

Just like in the old version of the scam, J.N.’s partner would convince someone to replace the two-dollar bill with two singles.

When J.N. returned, the same scene would play out with one notable difference: only after J.N.’s partner asked about the two-dollar bill did J.N. reveal that his birthday was included in the serial number on that bill.

The same bet would be made, J.N. would work the crowd until everyone was in the pot and then he’d pull back a flap on the inside of the wallet and pull out a second two-dollar bill with the correct serial number.

J.N. would make a passing comment that he had another two-dollar bill that he found a few days ago but act confused when it wasn’t in his wallet.

J.N. explained to me that the purse and penny seemed a little outdated and felt it might attract suspicion, while his wallet seemed perfectly natural in this scenario.

The flap inside the wallet was originally designed to conceal large bills and was the perfect hiding place for a single two-dollar bill.

Since two-dollar bills are so rare, the second (decoy) bill in the main compartment would be quickly found and replaced by the sucker without suspecting there might be another hidden in the wallet.

This solved two problems for J.N. and his partner: he didn’t need to switch anything and the cool-off was automatic because there was no mystery to be explained after J.N. left with everyone’s money!

What this illustrates (again) is that seemingly outdated con games can be dusted off, reshaped, adapted and reworked for a new generation of suckers.

All it takes is a little ingenuity and talent for deception.

More articles by R. Paul Wilson include:

Until that point, I was a voracious collector of cheating methods with cards, but I was beginning to take an interest in casino games and roulette in particular.

In Glasgow’s famous Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop, a gathering place for local conjurors, I remember asking Darwin how cheaters could beat the game of roulette.

Despite answering a question with a question, his answer was quite direct:

“Do you think a cheater could win if they were able to bet after the ball had landed?”

Past Posting – A Risky Roulette Cheat

Past posting is a simple idea.

After the ball lands in a number, a cheater (or team of cheaters) attempts to add a high value bet to the layout without the dealer noticing the discrepancy.

To the average player, this might seem like an excellent way to get caught and enjoy the hospitality of a casino’s back room.

In fact, it is a bold and risky strategy but can be effective if the cheater has the skill, timing and awareness to pull it off.

Dealers often balk at the idea that these moves could slide at their table but in the heat of a long shift and with countless distractions around every spin, even the most alert croupier might be vulnerable to the simplest of past-posting techniques.

Using Past Posting To Cheat At Roulette

Professional past-posters limit their activity to occasional shots taken at the right moment under appropriate misdirection.

The simplest and easiest targets to hit on the layout are the red and black bets.

With an experienced cheater sitting close to those options, a check can appear as if by magic after the ball lands.

The classic technique is to rest one’s hand on the layout with a chip hidden underneath.

With an imperceptible snap of the thumb, that chip slides quickly and quietly across the baize to settle on the red or black painted markings.

It takes practice to know how hard to push a chip – and to do so without any motion of the hand to betray the action – but timing is also essential.

As a ball drops into the rotor, players might lean over the table to get a better look and if a partner is trained to do so naturally, he or she might cover the move from the eye in the sky while the slider watches the dealers to make sure there’s no heat when he kicks the check.

A more sophisticated approach is to reach forward and slide a chip under the forearm and there are many strategies to excuse this action.

One method is to buy into the game for more money and to reach forward with some cash.

Another is to apparently begin making bets for the next round, only to be dismissed by the dealer who would instruct the player to wait until the table is cleared.

Both of these methods might be used since neither should be repeated with the same dealer or at the same table, but past posting is rarely a repeatable strategy since each shot you take risks waking up casino staff.

There’s a “Walter Mitty” shot that supposedly allowed teams of players to repeatedly place a stack of chips with a ledge over the bottom chip to disguise the lowermost check, which is a high value bet.

Supposedly, the dealer would not notice this off-colour check and if the bet lost, the player would switch out the big bet for one of the cheaper checks under some pretext.

I have every confidence this could be successful once or twice but the claim that it could be repeated constantly is pure fantasy (in my opinion) unless the dealers, the bosses and the security team upstairs are all in on it.

Tricks For Added Deception

By passing off high-value to checks to secret partners around a table, cheaters can place a high-stakes player next to the wheel then use lower-stake bets to cover past-posted bets.

Imagine you’re that high-stakes player with a stack of purple checks, each valued at $500 and you arrange these to conceal the fact that you’ve palmed away five chips and passed them to a partner who sits at the opposite end of the table.

That partner can now drop your chips onto the layout while you watch the wheel and sip your free watered-down drinks!

With the slide technique described above, an expert might be able to place your purple check across a nearby number when it comes up.

And if the team is bold and well-practiced in misdirection, you might speak to the dealer at the instant the ball drops to distract him or her from the appearing chip on (or across) that winning number.

By passing chips this way, another cheater can approach the table and buy in for a small amount of cash but use that money to cover the drop of a check onto the layout – just as the ball lands!

An even bolder (but effective) approach is to slide a late stack of chips onto the layout, so the dealer is caused to return that stack to the errant player. At the bottom of the stack is one or two high-valued purple chips that are off-set to look as if the late stack was placed onto those chips, which were supposedly already there.

Having tried this last strategy for The Takedown, there’s a perverse pleasure in watching the dealer correct a player by removing their late stack while leaving behind the big bets that were never there before the move was attempted.

The Problem With Past Posting

Each of these techniques can work in the right place and at the right time but if there’s the least suspicion on the move, then a rewind of camera footage will quickly betray the deception.

What makes these methods successful is a sense of when and where to attempt them, either by profiling weak dealers or manipulating each situation so that a discrepancy might go unnoticed.

Playing the turn (distracting the dealer) in these situations can be an art in its own right and expert scammers can play entire teams of dealers and their bosses like an orchestra whether by “charm or harm” so that the appearance of a big bet is the least concern to whoever is managing the game.

The real danger for past-posters is that modern security systems can potentially track all bets on a layout and detect if anything is added after the dealer calls “no more bets”.

So, if you’re ever tempted to kick a check across the baize, be ready to say hello to the backroom boys.

More casino-related articles from R. Paul Wilson worth your time today:

In this article, I’m going to share two excellent bar bets that will entertain your friends and send them to the bar to buy you a drink, but I’ll also discuss how to beat someone who already knows the secret.

In fact, if you are lucky enough to find someone who knows the second “betcha” described below or who proposes this bet, you will be sure to beat them at their own game.

The Method

As described previously, the way to ensure you get paid without losing friends in the process of a proposition bet is the promise that anyone who falls for these bets will be able to do the same to others once they know the secret.

More importantly, only employ these betchas with people who can afford to pay the agreed amount – and keep those amounts friendly.

A free drink or even lunch is reasonable in most cases and won’t cause bad feeling so long as you pick your mark with care.

Remember, these are not con games.

You are telling people you can do something they can’t and offering to prove it for a small wager.

In return, they learn how to do the same stunt themselves.

Bar Bet 1: Pints vs Shots

This is an all-time favourite and I’ve scored more free drinks with this game than almost any other.

Here’s the pitch:

We order three shots and three pints of beer.

The sucker is challenged to drink all three shots before I can drink all three pints while observing two simple rules:

• Only we can touch our own glasses, and with just one hand.

• I get to finish one pint before they start drinking their shots.

It’s important to be clear on these rules and not to elaborate.

Many suckers will try to get into a game of “what if” but I quickly shut that down and press for a decision on whether to take the bet, reiterating the two rules if necessary.

Naturally, whoever loses must buy all six drinks.

The secret is simple.

Place the three pints in a row, evenly spaced, with the shot glasses in front of the spectator to match the spacing of the pint glasses.

Be prepared to drink your first pint quickly, telling the sucker that it helps line the stomach for the next two, which will be lightning fast.

According to the rules, they cannot start drinking until you finish that first pint and as soon as you do, they will race for their first shot glass.

While they are focused on that first drink, up-end your glass so it is mouth down and cover one of the remaining two shot glass, trapping it inside!

Remember, no one else can touch your glasses, so that shot glass is now out of reach until you finish the next two pints, which you can do at your leisure…

Bar Bet 2: Do As I Do

Some years ago, I presented a show throughout the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that was sponsored by Bushmills Whiskey, a brand I happened to like despite not being Scottish.

To feature my sponsor in each show, I included a simple bar bet that I’d learned during my time in the British Army; a bet that had cost me a round of drinks and shot to my ego but had since repaid me with a few free beers and lunches.

Here’s the pitch:

We each begin with a shot glass filled with our favourite tipple and two coins, both heads side up.

The challenge is for the sucker to do exactly what I do for five phases of the game.

That’s it: do exactly what I do, and you win the game and your choice of poison from the bar.

Before we start, we each lay out our glass and coins in the same fashion, with the heads up.

Let’s begin.

Without saying a word, I pick up my glass, move a coin aside and place it between the coins.

The sucker repeats this exactly.

I turn one of the coins, so it is tails-up, and place it on top of the other coin.

The sucker does the same.

I now drink the entire shot and replace the glass.

The sucker does the same.

I drop both coins into the glass.

The sucker repeats.

I then pick up the glass and spit the shot – which I never swallowed – back into the glass and replace it on the table or bar.

The sucker, having actually drunk his shot, is forced to concede and reach for his wallet.

This makes for an entertaining and surprising stunt and almost always elicits a laugh as well as a few free drinks.

How To Beat People Who Know This Trick

The first bet (pints vs shots) is very difficult to beat, even if you know the secret.

So if the sucker accepts that proposition you can be pretty sure he or she is going to lose so long as they don’t try to change the conditions.

The second, however, is the kind of bet that can kick you in the back if the sucker is already wise to it but there’s a simple way to beat someone who already knows the con.

First, let’s talk about how to deal with an overly suspicious or challenging opponent.

Many times, when making friendly wagers for low stakes (like a drink or a sandwich) you will find yourself faced with someone who tries to interrogate every detail of your proposition, which can make the whole exercise both difficult and unpleasant.

If you have the personality quirk to do so, it is possible to manipulate people in these circumstances by distracting their suspicions.

In the case of “Do As I Do”, I like to put a little extra stress on the orientation of the coins in order to distract the sucker.

I will sometimes show the head and tail of one coin while showing only the head of the other.

When I turn the second coin to show tails, I deliberately cover the tail side with my finger as I say “heads on this side, tails on this side” but it never fools a suspicious sucker who is suddenly obsessed by the missing side of that coin.

I promise they can examine everything at the end but stress that neither of us can touch each other’s glass or coins (an additional condition to distract their thinking).

If they are really suspicious about the coins, I already know they probably don’t know this trick and can continue with confidence.

If I get a sense that the mark does know this betcha than I have another trick up my sleeve.

When picking up the two coins, I palm one as I apparently drop both into the glass.

In fact, only one is dropped while the other remains in my hand.

This is a skill you’ll need to learn but if you can naturally hold one coin in your hand without cramping or looking like your hand has been trapped in time, you simply appear to pick up the coins and toss them both into the glass but only one is allowed to fall.

If done smoothly, dropping the coin into the glass and then spitting out the drink, the sucker never suspects that only one coin was dropped.

After spitting out the shot I never swallowed, if the sucker does the same, I proceed to pull the palmed coin from the bottom of the glass!

If the sucker ever does the same, I’d happily buy him or her a round of drinks and congratulate him on having read this article!*

*Unless I happen to have a third kicker not described here…

Some factors are unimportant distractions, some are difficult to notice but essential to understanding the true nature of what’s going on.

This is true of a scam, a legitimate game of poker and a worldwide pandemic.

Sorting Out The Noise

Yes, I’m well aware that there’s something redundant about the phrase “worldwide pandemic”.

The word pandemic already indicates that a pathogen has a global impact, yet I feel that the we still need that added reminder to retain the weight of our current crisis.

So it’s unnecessary information but retains clarity and underlines the seriousness of a word that has become all too familiar.

Unnecessary information can be like noise in the room while trying to engage in (or listen to) a conversation, yet human beings are actually pretty good at filtering out the background to focus on what interests us.

This is the secret to the art of magic where the term “misdirection” is a clear misnomer since the best exponents learn how to direct audience attention by structuring performances so it always seems as if we are watching the most important action; meanwhile another covert action is what makes the mundane into a miracle.

Con artists also understand how to keep their victims distracted from deception by playing those victims based on their wants or needs, while anticipating every move or challenge based on past experience.

And while playing blackjack, the vast majority of players spend all their attention on the cards they are dealt while professional card counters process all available information from that game to inform their decisions.

They take the time to collect data from what everyone is dealt and do the work to apply that data to future decisions.

Likewise, in poker, most players concentrate on their cards and the action that applies to any one round of play while experts are constantly collecting data from other players’ decisions, positions and plays.

In any situation, it is always valuable to consider what information might be available to help inform us of what’s actually going on, so I always recommend that people be aware of how narrow their focus is on any decision process they might be engaged in.

Field Of Vision

The ability to sit back and consider what’s happening around us is entirely dependent on being conscious and confident enough to survey those surroundings.

Think about your first time playing a game.

It doesn’t matter if it’s blackjack, chess or Go Fish; at the beginning, we are always consumed by learning the rules and procedures that will help us play that game.

When playing Hungry Hungry Hippos it’s a pretty shallow learning curve before we are perfectly adept at hitting those buttons so we might quickly learn to watch our opponents in order to help time our own smash-button action.

With poker it’s a much higher mountain to climb in terms of playing the game at a high level but thankfully it’s a relatively easy game to learn how to play.

After a few rounds, anyone can be a danger to their own bankroll, but a few fledgling players will keep studying and learn to make decisions while soaking up every piece of information the game allows them.

Experience allows us to act with confidence while freeing up our attention to watch our surroundings and the more we do this, the better decisions we make in the long run.

Filtering The Barrage

Inexperience or lack of knowledge can be dangerous and expensive – as any gambler will tell you.

Even if we happen to get lucky, a smart player will remember times when they were seriously out of their depth and had no idea what they were doing.

I’ve won more than my fair share of pots playing hands I didn’t understand, and I’ve lost a lot more to situations that I didn’t know how to play.

But over time, I built up enough experience to lessen those occasions where I need to play on instinct rather than knowledge.

Experience is gained by learning what was important to know or observe in any given situation.

The problem is, filtering out the garbage requires the ability to recognise the difference between good information and bad information and the current global crisis is an excellent reminder of this.

At the time of writing, the world is still in the midst of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

There are several vaccines being promised for early 2021 but governments are still trying to contain the spread of the disease through lockdowns and tiered restrictions across the globe.

We have, over the past few months, endured a period of frustrating uncertainty as experts and politicians seem to flip-flop ideas based on emerging data that becomes overwhelming for anyone who tries to understand it all.

Because you can’t understand it all.

And you don’t need to.

Taking The Time

Right now, we are in the middle of a data tornado with opinions and facts flying from every direction.

But as time passes, hard data emerges based on measurable results so as we look back we get a better picture of what was going on in the past.

In the present, the data has to be sifted, prioritised and selected based on experience learned from those past data.

The more proven information we have, the easier it is to identify as it emerges and once we have an entire cycle, it’s possible to make predictions for the next cycle or wave.

Science is about learning from mistakes, exploring ideas and discounting theories until all that remains is backed up by hard evidence.

One thing we can all learn from the coronavirus situation of 2020 is that information must drive decisions and the more and better that information is, the more effective our decisions can be over time if we adapt to that data.

This applies to games we play, business transactions we make and situations where we might be overly focused on the wrong data or where necessary information needs to be weeded out from other distractions.

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What I love about this scam is the element of theatre created by the scammers to stimulate a predictable response from the patrons of a bar, then sucker them into taking advantage of the con artist with a predictably disappointing outcome.

It reminds me of the George C. Scott movie originally-titled The Flim-Flam Man and the con games he pulled on small businesses filled with locals around America.

If I were a traveling con man in the 1950s, this would be in my repertoire.

Who Loves Card Tricks?

“Do you like card tricks?”

“No, I hate card tricks,” I answered.

“Well, I’ll just show you this one.”

He showed me three.

– W. Sommerset Maugham

Many years ago, I was in a car with my best friend since childhood, who had suffered through my early years of obsession with playing cards.

As a result, he was quite done with card tricks having received a lifetime’s supply during our youth so whenever we got together, magic was never to be mentioned.

Driving to lunch, we stopped at a traffic light and without warning, the back door opened and someone got into the back of my car.

Thankfully, this was another friend of mine from the magic fraternity who just happened to be waiting to cross the street when my car pulled up and by the time the light changed, we were all on our way to lunch together.

For me, this was the collision of two very different worlds and when my magician friend asked my other friend if he liked magic, he bluntly replied: “Actually, no, I don’t” to which my magician friend said, “Okay, just these two—”.

Imagine my surprise when I found almost this exact situation described in a short story by W. Sommerset Maugham less than week later!

In fact, while the Maugham story features a boorish lout who somewhat redeems himself in the context of the story, my magician friend was simply too enthused to take no for an answer.

But the idea of card tricks being the reserve of loud know-it-alls is not unique to the pages of short fiction and in the 1940s, Eddie Fields and his partner used this idea to concoct a devilishly simple con game that they played all over Chicago.

The Set Up

Eddie would set the scene by entering a bar and establishing himself as a loud, friendly character who would try to get a little (gambling) action going with a few bar bets.

Over the course of a few hours, Eddie would hustle free drinks by performing stunts with olives, forks, drinking glasses and sugar cubes until he was firmly recognised as the bar big-mouth.

During all of this, Eddie’s partner would arrive and settle somewhere close to Eddie while he worked the crowd.

If Eddie’s partner felt the room was ripe, he’d give a signal; Eddie would produce a pack of cards and go to work regaling fellow drinkers with simple miracles.

Once the crowd was ready, Eddie would pull The Circus Card Trick, an ingenious sucker trick designed to win money in the right circumstances.

But for this con, Eddie didn’t pick a stranger to swindle.

He pointed to his secret partner, had him choose a card and by the end of the trick, Eddie’s partner had taken the bait and lost a lot of cash.

The Play

Now Eddie’s partner was apparently upset and accused Eddie of cheating and by this point, several others joined the call to kick Eddie out.

To calm the crowd, Eddie offers to teach how the trick works.

He hands the deck to an onlooker and asks them to take out two black aces.

To illustrate the principle used, Eddie cuts the deck, shows one black ace and places it on top of the lower half, then shows the second black ace and places that onto the first ace.

The top half is replaced, and Eddie gives the deck a single cut as he explains that no matter how many times you cut the deck, those two black aces will be together.

Eddie hands the deck to someone to give a couple of cuts then begins dealing cards onto a face-up pile until the first black ace appears – then states that the next card is guaranteed to be the other black ace.

Shamelessly, Eddie tries to work the crowd for more bets, but no one is calling so he reveals the second black ace in his hand.

Now, his partner takes control and asks Eddie to demonstrate the principle one more time – pretending to be confused about how it works.

Eddie repeats the same actions, placing the first ace onto the face-down half and showing the second ace to the crowd.

As Eddie is apparently distracted with the second ace, his secret partner reaches over and cuts a small packet from the upper pile and places those onto the ace pile, burying the first black ace.

Seemingly oblivious, Eddie now places the second ace face down onto the first but everyone now knows that there are a few cards between the aces and as Eddie places the top half onto the lower half, losing the aces in the middle, it seems obvious that he is about to get taken for a ride.

Eddie has the deck cut several times and begins dealing cards face up until the first ace appears.

He takes the next card and holds it out, repeating his claim that no matter how many cuts you make, the next card must be the other ace.

But now his partner stops him and asks:

“How much will YOU bet?”

The Sting

This is what they have both been working towards.

From playing the part of a blowhard barfly to betting against each other, Eddie and his partner have been working the crowd toward this moment, where Eddie seems about to get his just reward for being such an asshole.

Eddie hands the card he is holding to an onlooker so no one can see it, then pulls a thick wad of cash from his sock.

“Can you cover that?” Eddie asks. But his partner backs down, unable to match Eddie’s bet…

And this is where the suckers are given the chance to bite.

Sure enough, several people in the crowd offer to match Eddie’s bankroll, certain they will win since they saw the other guy place several cards between the black aces.

There should be no way the next card could be a black ace but once the bet is made, the card is shown. And guess what?

It’s a black ace!

When the smoke clears and the bet is lost, the crowd’s money is gone along with Eddie and the other stranger, never to return.

The Secret

The real secret is in how Eddie worked the crowd, spotted the best marks and played them like a piano but the actual card trick is simplicity itself (with 25 years of practice).

In Eddie’s book, he described a very simple card sleight called ‘The Glide’ to bring both aces back together but on The Real Hustle, I employed a second deal to accomplish the same effect.

Here’s how a second deal works:

When Alex “secretly” placed a few cards onto my first ace, I was busy showing the second ace to the suckers, while they all watched Alex apparently screw me over with his covert cut.

Meanwhile, I put a tiny bend in the second ace as I replaced it on lower half of the deck – supposedly on top of the first black ace – then completed the cut and had the deck cut a few times by people at the bar.

When the deck was returned, I looked for that bent corner and dealt cards face up until I reached that card but without hesitating, continued dealing the SECOND card each time until the other black ace turned up.

In other words, once I reached the first black ace (which I had marked with a bend), I used the second deal to deal cards face up until I reached the ace that had been buried by Alex.

Put simply, the second deal removed the cards from between the two black aces right under the suckers’ noses.

Once I dealt that second ace, the other black ace was already waiting on top; but to the suckers, there was no way the aces could still be together!

All we had to do now was follow Eddie’s lead, press the crowd’s buttons and wait for someone cover my bet, which they did every time.

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It is a way to manipulate large crowds into falling for a sudden bait and switch that leaves almost everyone disappointed.

But not all jam auctions are created equal.

Some – perhaps many – leave buyers wanting more, despite using the same psychological techniques employed by outright scammers. And, as I learned on an early episode of The Real Hustle, some Jam Auctions are not even a scam!

The Bouncer

“The Bouncer” was a nickname coined in the book Rich Uncle From Fiji, which described a novel twist on the jam auction where the crowd was played from the back of wagon, hooked up to a full complement of horses.

The items sold in this auction were a variety of common and fancy goods, all secured at very low price (or stolen for the ultimate discount).

These items were sold in a series of auction “rounds” where buyers would be passed their purchases along with a bag to encourage them to buy more but what fascinated me was the ingenious “hook” that kept people buying until the final sting.

I first read this scam as a kid and was excited when we decided to test it on The Real Hustle but despite having described this scam for years in my public shows and speeches, it turned out that I had no idea how the con game was going to end.

Who’s Happy?

Here’s how it plays out.

From the back of a truck I pitched until we had a small crowd, peppering them with promises of bargains they can only find at the market; deals no high street store could afford and so on.

Once I had enough interested onlookers, Alex (acting as my assistant) slid a box of grooming kits, which I showed to the crowd, unzipping the case to show the combs and clippers inside.

This kit, I claimed, would cost ￡20 in any store but from the back of the truck we were offering it for just ￡1!

Hands were raised and Alex distributed grooming kits, each in a plastic shopping bag to hold more items.

This is where the con began.

I told the crowd that we promise satisfaction and promised they would be happy.

To confirm this, I asked: “Who’s happy?”

A few hands crept upward, and I asked again, “WHO’S HAPPY?”

This time, more hands were raised, and a few people called out to confirm their happiness.

Then I said, “If you’re happy, raise your hand! Alex, give them their money back!”

To everyone’s surprise, Alex now returned money to any buyers who raised their hand.

Next, I presented a package of pens worth ￡30 (or so I claimed) and repeated this procedure for ￡5 from each member of the crowd before asking who was happy and instructing Alex to “give them their money back!”.

By this time, we had a large crowd and more people were buying, all of whom received the grooming kit and bag along with their lifetime supply of pens.

Next up was a glass vase, which I presented as “Italian Crystal” while flicking the rim to create a resounding chime as if this proved anything.

This was a ￡10 purchase but with everyone confident they would receive a full refund, money was soon handed to Alex in return for cheap glassware. This cash was also returned once the crowd shouted that they were “happy”.

It’s important to point out that behind me, inside the truck, were dozens of boxes marked with big brand names promising that high end electronics might be up next.

In fact, Alex reached for one of those boxes next before I openly corrected him to hand me a different box instead.

Inside this box were some impressive-looking watches in presentation cases designed to sell rather than use.

By this, I mean that they were classic “flash” designed to look as if they were worth much more than they actually cost and to barely function once removed from the impressive (but cheap) packaging.

This kind of product is made purely to over-sell and actually costs a fraction of what anyone would suspect.

In fact, everything we were selling had been secured for less than ￡3 for all four items (watch included) and this was without buying bulk!

So now I showed the watch and impressed upon people what a fantastic gift this would be and that clearly, these watches should sell for over ￡100 but today, thanks to our special promotion, we can sell these for just ￡20!

Alex could barely keep up with the demand as ￡20 notes were thrust into the air to be exchanged for deceptively cheap watches.

Once the watches were gone (we only had enough for half the demand – if we were real scammers, the truck would have been filled with them) I stood at the tailgate and promised the crowd again that we guaranteed satisfaction and guaranteed everyone would be happy.

“Who’s happy?”

Everyone shouted: “I’m happy!”

This time, instead of returning their cash I said: “If you’re all happy, we’re all happy!”

Then I pulled down the shutter, sealing us inside; the driver popped into gear and we drove away.

From inside the truck, I could hear the crowd’s disappointment, but it wasn’t until we returned their money and interviewed the buyers that we realised the genius of this particular scam.

The No-Sting Sting

Had you asked me in advance what I thought the crowd might do when the truck drove away, I might have said they would be angry or would perhaps attempt to chase after the truck.

In fact, we learned a lesson that many pitch-artists already knew: that everyone loves a bargain.

The Bouncer is based on the jam auction scam but unlike the jam auction, people are generally satisfied with what they receive and once the sale is finished, rarely do they feel conned in any way.

It’s true that the crowd was manipulated to buy ￡3 worth of crap for ￡20 and it’s also true that I could have re-scaled or extended the scam to take people for a lot more.

In this variation of the jam auction, people didn’t lose too much and ended up with a bag filled with items they thought they got for free (they didn’t if you think about it) and their only complaint was that the auction finished too soon.

No one wanted to return their goods and nearly everyone was happy with their purchase, even when we told them how little it cost us.

We were blinded by our own psychological trick into believing it was automatically a con game, when in fact it’s actually a system that’s been adapted and employed by hawkers and pitch men for decades!

Speaking to members of the crowd, I later learned how important the big name boxes behind me had been to attract people and hold them with the promise of even better bargains and that when we shut up shop and drove away, the crowd was not duped – they were merely disappointed it ended so soon!

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Corporations, institutions and politicians seem able to lie with impunity; new forms of technology open the door to potential threats, and we are targeted from all sides by a constant flow of information that’s designed to influence or manipulate us.

Worst of all, it’s become so familiar to us that most people can be manipulated easily by aligning with their biases or beliefs, opening the door to a new generation of con artists.

This may sound like a bleak outlook but if you want to protect yourself, your loved ones and your interests you need to adopt a defensive outlook.

In life, you need to be a poker player.

Trust No One

Just like poker, in life you can’t believe everything or you’ll soon go broke and become an easy mark for anyone at the table.

Imagine if modern life was like a game of deception and you’re a step closer to what I’m about to propose; a way of interpreting the world around us in the same manner we would a poker game; where many types of player with all sorts of experience and all kinds of luck will sit down and play.

Life is a little different from poker, which is a game where friends must become enemies across the felt in the name of competition.

I believe life is (and should be) more cooperative and we should help and guide others when appropriate so I’m not advocating you act in life as you would at poker, where kindness can be weakness.

Instead, I am suggesting you regard everything you see, are told and learn as you would regard information available to you in a poker game.

Don’t Believe Stuff Just Because It Aligns With Your Beliefs

We all play with our own nuances but for the most part, at the card table our type we can be identified with a handful of labels and life is the same, though harder to read.

In life, how we interact with others is determined by levels of trust that are dictated by society and social norms and these mechanisms have been imported into the relatively new forum of social media and online communication.

Unfortunately, human interactions online have been “gamed” and the result is a form of ideological magnetism that leads people to self-sort based on biases that can be used to predict how people might act or react based on their residing categories.

As we have seen from firms like Cambridge Analytica, by manipulating the billions of people using services like Facebook, information-based campaigns can be used to turn the tide of opinion, challenge seemingly obvious truths and effectively influence elections or world events. 

And with traditional media sources clearly tainted by bias on all sides, the result is a canvas awash with shades of grey.

The strange outcome of this constant flow of influence in what we watch and see and hear is that our outlook becomes more polarised and less nuanced than ever before, causing people to choose a side then fight themselves deeper into the furthest corner from anyone who opposes them.

I don’t care if you swing left or right, the truth is that we all need to stop letting the forces of influence affect us or we will become familiar and comfortable with being manipulated by our own preferences.

This article is not about your political or religious beliefs one way or another, it is a warning that if you allow your own bias to filter the information you accept, it becomes all too easy to deny data you don’t like and embrace lies that fit your current perspective.

This builds a powerful muscle that can be manipulated by anyone for any agenda – especially by those who seek to deceive and defraud.

To protect yourself, you need to think like a poker player.

Why You Need To Question Everything

Imagine that during a poker game, a player almost splashes the pot as they eagerly check-raise you in a large pot.

What is he or she trying to tell you with that move and their attitude?

Are they trying to deceive you with nothing in their hand, or are they exactly as over-excited as they look and really do have a big hand?

The smart move is not to act right away but to think things through and consider all the possibilities.

Instead of reacting to the bet or the way it was made, we consider how they played each round, their position, what type of player they are, what they’ve done in other hands, what cards they’ve shown in the past and how you both got to this particular showdown.

Now you can make a decision based on information, rather than potential manipulation.

That’s how we should interpret everything we learn from any and all forms of media in the modern world.

In terms of media influence, most of us call or fold almost immediately and do the same for thousands of interactions a day, responding to influence according to pre-conceived notions about the world we live in.

Predicted by our own bias, we constantly get nudged by blatant subtle signals designed to attract tribal instincts and preferred choices.

This is not a new idea but what is relatively new is that thanks to social media, we have each created a powerful database of our own particular personalities complete with a roadmap of what we like to believe.

Imagine how easy it might be to manipulate someone if that information fell into the wrong hands.

Think Critically, Like A Poker Player Would

I promise, this is not about politics though it would certainly be a lot better for all of us if we could discuss and debate more than we argue and fight.

The only way to do that is to find a middle ground where compromises can be proposed and progress might be made.

It’s frustrating and takes time and patience and no one gets everything they want but in the big scheme of things, thought and consideration can lead to slow but effective improvement.

As David Mamet wrote, “In a committee, the meeting’s not over until everyone is unhappy.”

It’s important to consider politics since the western world has dissolved into a mess of misinformed opinions and biases fuelled by misinformation and manipulation.

For years, I have said that if I know what you want, I can take everything you have. And the polarisation of politics and ideology has made it much easier to identify how people think and feel.

If a con artist can align themselves with a particular worldview, they can build instant rapport with millions of people and use that shared perspective as the foundation for deception.

It’s my firm belief that if we all (myself included) questioned everything we see and hear just for a second, the result might be a trend to clearer critical thinking in all interactions.

Do not allow yourself to be instantly swayed or convinced because you encounter someone or something that aligns with your own world view, or you might become easy prey for a master of deception.

Take the time to shift gears occasionally and look at any kind of proposition critically, whether that be a supposed fact or a business opportunity.

Decide what you think and how you feel based on available information rather than emotional reaction.

In short, polarisation of beliefs and ideology opens the door to easier and more profitable manipulation for those willing to deceive.

The best defence in all walks of life is to take a moment to think like a poker player before you call or fold any kind of proposition.

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IMHO

What follows is strictly my own opinion but I’ve sat down with many of the principle players in the Phil Ivey affair (including Mr. Ivey) and been privy to discussions before and after the court case in London, which failed to recognise who should be responsible for protecting the Baccarat game at Crockfords casino.

Briefly, here’s what happened:

Phil Ivey, arguably the greatest living poker player, contacted Crockfords in London offering to deposit one million pounds to play high-stakes Baccarat on the proviso that the casino adjusted their normal table procedure to accommodate Mr. Ivey’s “superstitions”.

In other words: “Change how your game is played and I’ll make large bets from a large bankroll.”

The casino agreed to this then got their ass handed to them thanks to the aforementioned card trick.

To make matters worse, the casino reneged on their promise to wire over seven million pounds in winnings to Mr. Ivey, cried foul and accused him of cheating.

In other words, they welched (in my opinion).

The Rules Of Engagement

Here’s the problem, as I see it:

A casino is required to establish rules and procedures to protect itself and its players.

Any action by a player to break those rules or procedures might be considered cheating if it affects the outcome of the game, but only if the player intended to do so and/or attempted to conceal their actions.

There are slight exceptions to this like “excuse me” scams where a player “accidentally” does something that can be quickly denied should the dealer realise what happened but in essence, player cheating can be defined as covert actions that change or influence the outcome of a game of chance.

This is not what happened in the Phil Ivey case.

Mr. Ivey and his playing partner, Cheung Yin Sun, identified a flaw in Crockfords’ game then negotiated with the club to change how that game was dealt in order to gain an advantage.

And the casino agreed to this request.

As far as I’m concerned, that should have been game over since it’s not Mr. Ivey’s responsibility to protect any table game he chooses to play.

Since it’s his money he plans to invest on any kind of strategy, he should naturally want the very best possible return for that investment.

Think of it like this: imagine you have a million pounds and you call a casino and say, “Hey, I’d be happy to risk this money at your club so long as the dealer shuffles how I tell them and deals cards according to my instructions.”

Now imagine the casino says yes, takes your money then refuses to pay your winnings and accuses you of cheating!

That’s exactly what happened to Phil Ivey.

The Details

The flaw Ivey intended to use is something inherent to almost all playing card back designs: that when rotated, it is possible to distinguish which cards were turned thanks to inconsistencies in the back design.

This principle is taught in beginners card magic books like The Royal Road to Card Magic and has been used by card cheaters to sort cards during play. The cards are then secretly manipulated accordingly.

For example, a simple way to mark a deck is to buy two identical decks then exchange the high cards in each deck. In most cases you will notice slight differences in how the cards are cut, how the borders are aligned or even in the finish or quality of card stock if you know what to look for.

Phil Ivey did not trade cards between decks or manipulate the outcome.

Instead, he asked the casino to shuffle their own cards without rotating them and flip the cards according to his instructions.

Ivey and his playing partner told the dealer how to turn each card dealt according to value. One method of turning rotated cards end-for-end while the other method kept the same orientation.

This meant that Ivey could identify a range of values before the cards were revealed and make bets accordingly.

Ivey also dictated how the cards should be discarded to protect how they’d been turned, and the agreed shuffling procedure merely mixed the order of the cards but did not rotate them.

This meant that after one shoe, Phil Ivey and his partner had invaluable information about the cards being dealt.

Remember, he did none of this secretly; Mr. Ivey asked the casino in advance to do it for him in return for risking a large amount of money on the game.

The reason he gave for this request was “superstition” and the casino seemed to accept that on face value.

It’s Just Not Cricket, Old Chap

The casino might argue that he lied about why he wanted to make these changes but that’s not against the rules and anyone suggesting that this is not in the spirit of the game doesn’t understand how gambling works.

The player is responsible for making bets that have the best chance of winning over time and the house is responsible for protecting its own game.

If a casino employs clumsy dealers who flash their hole cards or play with old cards where aces can be identified thanks to wear and tear, an observant player is entitled to use that information.

“The spirit of the game” argument is a one-way street; the casino is equally entitled to offer terrible odds, change procedures, ply players with drinks or refuse service any time they choose.

It’s their house and their game, so players can take it or leave it or negotiate for better conditions.

Phil Ivey negotiated.

Imagine you found out that all the aces in all the decks used by a casino could be identified thanks to a glitch at the factory.

Should you call and warn them, or offer to play five hundred dollars a hand so long as you can sit in third spot wearing your lucky reading glasses!

If the casino can’t work out what’s going on after five minutes of play, it’s their fault entirely for not being able to recognise their own problem.

The Blame Game

What’s really irritating about this is how ignorant the law seems to be about who is responsible for deciding how the game would be played.

You, me and Phil Ivey can ask for anything we want to secure a better chance of winning.

If Ivey had asked for the cards to be dealt face up before placing his bets and the casino did so, would it really be his fault that the game was compromised?

Surely it’s the casino’s responsibility to decide how any game is dealt and whether or not it chooses to ignore its own procedures?

Surely a player is free to take any advantage being offered, knowingly or otherwise?

Phil Ivey is one of the smartest gamblers on Earth and if he asks for a game to be changed, perhaps the casino might take a closer look at what he’s asking for and why.

Being superstitious is a perfectly good rationale and while it was a lie, try to remember that Mr. Ivey is a master of deception at the poker table and in his world, pretence can be a powerful, legitimate strategy.

But this casino (and others) didn’t merely fail to question the reason for Ivey’s request, they completely failed to recognise what that request did to the cards being played.

Playing the turn is a well-known artifice but worse still; as a simple magic trick, the method being used to rotate cards should be obvious to any eight year old magician with a YouTube account.

Yet these casinos allowed the world’s best poker player to keep hammering them without recognising the all-too simple secret of his success.

Just a little training on the art of deception, divorced from game procedure or in-house regulations might have better prepared staff to address these issues.

In Plain Sight

Some years ago, when representing a major playing card manufacturer at a Las Vegas gaming conference, a casino manager approached me with a deck of cards he’d taken from a game that was losing too much money.

The deck in question bore the casino’s logo but the balance of the back design was supposed to defend against sleight of hand techniques like second or bottom dealing (it didn’t) so it seemed unlikely the cards were to blame.

I quickly looked through the deck then with the cards face down, spread them on the table before extracting about 20 cards from the spread – all high cards!

He was blown away but so was I. How could neither he nor his staff not have spotted this themselves?

These cards were so poorly printed that the white borders were thicker at one end than the other so thick white lines and thin white lines could easily be identified as turned cards.

Someone had clearly sorted the deck but what amazed me was that this was not a subtle difference in thickness between white borders.

Yet, because these cards were sold as “cheater proof”, the casino had failed to properly consider the back design.

The cards being played at Crockfords were nowhere near as obvious but like most cards, if the design flaw can be identified and the game procedure adjusted, a powerful player advantage might be possible.

A One Way Street

My assertion is that the casino should have protected its own game properly by not compromising their own procedures, or should have had the training required to recognise such a simple marking system.

If so, the game would have been stopped in a matter of minutes or (preferably) as soon as they received Mr. Ivey’s request.

Reading the results of the court case in London and the subsequent appeal, I’m dismayed at the lack of insight from British courts.

They blurred the line between cheating, advantage play and luck by suggesting cheating is not dependent on intent and failed to hold the casino responsible for its own actions regarding game procedure.

Phil Ivey knew what he was doing but the casinos he targeted should have known better than to accept any request that might compromise their own safety measures.

At the very least it should have been an expensive mistake on their part rather than an attack on Phil Ivey for merely doing what he does best: playing to win.