Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

What’s the difference between an expert cardsharp and a professional magician? One will send you home with a smile on your face for the price of an evening’s fun and entertainment; the other is a magician… Okay, you saw that coming. We all know that the tricks of both trades have overlapped ever since playing cards were invented, with the same cunning routines demonstrated for either honest or dishonest payment.

The father of modern sleight-of-hand magic, the late great Dai Vernon, spent almost his entire life scouring the USA in a neverending quest to learn the most secret and difficult card manoeuvres. Vernon didn’t seek out other magicians, though – he sought out the cardsharps, con-men and hustlers. In them, the art approached perfection because lives could depend on it. Those skills have never gone away, just our awareness of them.

The explosion in online poker has seen a whole new generation grow up without ever seeing a marked card, second-dealing, short-changing or suited Aces on the flop. Modern poker players look out for collusion, or chip dumping, or playing of multiple accounts. We think cardsharps died out with Mississippi steamboats, and Aces up sleeves only happens in spaghetti westerns. In some ways that’s true, but only because the cardsharps have become even sharper. If an Ace is required, their accomplice will just deal them one right under your nose. Or two. Or four.

Now you see it…

Picture the scene: a cardsharp is playing Lowball in a Californian casino. The Four of hearts has somehow found its way into his sweaty pocket a few minutes earlier – and now its time has come. A solitary King is spoiling an otherwise monster hand so, as the cheat retrieves a pack of cigarettes, the offending cowboy and the winning Four trade places. The pot grows and presently our devious friend is spreading the winning cards triumphantly. A stunned silence descends. ‘So somebody mailed you a Four of hearts?’ asks a little old lady.

Sure enough, a stamp is stuck on the card’s face.

Darwin Ortiz has many such stories, not necessarily because they happened to him, but because he is probably the finest sleight-of-hand card manipulator in the world today, so he gets to hear about these things. Having perfected his devilish trickery by practising six hours a day for the last 50 years, Ortiz still finds the time to teach pit bosses about the dark dealing arts and perform at exclusive private gatherings on ‘every continent but Antarctica’.

The perfect crime

If you had to pick one person to play Satan for your very soul, you might summon Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu or Doyle Brunson. But if you ask them the same question they’d summon Darwin Ortiz. In his 1984 exposé, Gambling Scams, Ortiz explained myriad techniques that highly trained (and often highly paid) trick dealers, or ‘mechanics’, are capable of employing at the card table. He would know – he perfected many of them himself. Gambling Scams is the equivalent of Sun Tzu’s Art of War – a must-read for any serious player or pit boss.

Fortunately for us minnows, true sleight-of-hand maestros are very rare and their skills can earn considerably more than our puny bankrolls. They either pick on much fatter fish or, like Darwin Ortiz, Steve Forte, Martin Nash and friends, make small fortunes as magicians – then large ones as security consultants. To give some idea of what great card manipulators are actually capable of, each of those nimblefingered gentlemen can stack a deck during a riffle-shuffle so it deals four Kings to any player… and four Aces to any other. It takes no longer than it took you to read that sentence and they don’t even have to look down while they do it. It’s all done by touch alone. Perhaps they should call the effect Four King hell. Spectators do…

Practise makes perfect

There is a cruel truth about sleight-ofhand, which every poker player should know: it can be absolutely undetectable. Even fellow cardsharps can only spot tells that may or may not be evidence of trick dealing. It cannot be seen by the naked eye (that’s the whole point) or even on video, excepting a very well-aimed camera with slow-motion replay. It’s a good job such perfection takes many years of practise.

A technique like second-dealing (the art of leaving the top card where it is, yet appearing to deal normally) allows particular cards to be dealt to – or kept from – any player. Bottomdealing, second-bottom dealing and the fiendishly tricky centre-dealing are variants of the same move. All types of shuffles can look perfect and yet leave the deck unchanged. Cuts can be reversed, cards exchanged, entire decks swapped, all in the blink of an eye. In short, if you’re ever unlucky enough to play in a game of poker with a mechanic and his friends, you will lose. Be not down-hearted though, because it isn’t going to happen. You are hundreds of times more likely to run into a professional poker player than a professional cardsharp. The common-or-garden cheat simply cannot be bothered to learn the mechanic’s trade when each and every manoeuvre takes many thousands of hours to perfect. Even magicians prefer short-cuts, gimmicks and quick fixes, so these are the sort of things that you should be looking out for. Just ask the man who sells them.

Jeff Spiller says regular poker players have nothing to fear from mechanics, and he should know. A sleight-of-hand magician with over 40 years’ experience, Spiller is one of the true elite – capable of the legendary rifflestack – and an expert in the science of card-marking. He used to practise with Darwin Ortiz in New York and still performs in Las Vegas to this day, although you’re more likely to catch him in his day job: running www. marked-cards.com. His website does what it says on the tin, because Spiller’s customers are the vast majority who cannot be bothered learning sleight-of-hand to amaze and delight. Not when technology can do it instead.

Holding out for a hero

For every lazy magician – and lazy cardsharp – there will always be a device, gizmo or contraption to aid their quest. The Old West witnessed some exquisitely hand-crafted cheating devices and many still exist today, albeit much improved. The simplest were shiners or glims: tiny convex mirrors behind buttons, badges or buckles that could reflect a miniature glimpse of cards being dealt over them. Zippos, money-clips, pens, anything shiny and plausible could be a little metal Judas. Still, banning foreign objects from card tables spoiled that little game, so more ingenious feats of engineering became necessary – and were duly invented.

Holdout machines were the 19th century cardsharp’s version of Wolverine’s claws; beautifully-made, devastatingly effective… and, if uncovered, someone might die. A cardgripping metal claw would hide far up the sleeve, to be activated via pulleys and wires by innocuous movements like a deep breath or a shifted leg. On command, the silent device would telescope out and snatch a card from the cheat’s hand, or return one just as easily.

PJ Kepplinger (aka the ‘Lucky Dutchman’) perfected the concept in 1888 and made a fortune before being caught in the act and forced to share his design. Before long, Kepplinger holdouts were as common in magic shops as manly, arm-gripping handshakes in poker. Magicians still make use of holdouts today and, although they could still ruin any soft card game, they are a minor concern nowadays. Technology has moved faster elsewhere.

On January 15, 2007, Yau Yiu Lam, Fan Leung Tsang and Bit Chai Wong were convicted under the 1846 Gaming Act of ‘cheating at play’ having been caught red-handed in a scene from one of Ian Fleming’s finest. Their hi-tech, Cold War set-up had fleeced London’s three-card poker tables until, in September 2005, staff at the Mint Casino in Kensington became suspicious of their good luck coinciding once again with a white van sitting outside. Police found Lam and Wong were using miniature spy cameras (one in his sleeve, one in her purse) to glimpse cards as they were being dealt. In the white van – with blackedout windows, naturally – Tsang would replay the footage in slow motion and instruct the playing couple via tiny earpieces.

Judge Geoffrey Rivlin imposed a nine-month prison term and two suspended sentences. The police and casinos estimated the ill-gotten gains to be around £250,000, so one could perhaps understand the effort they put into their scam.

And yet, there is a still more dangerous method of hi-tech chicanery in the world, the one every poker player should know about – it is every lazy cheat’s first weapon of choice… In the 2003 straight-to-video clunker Shade, crappy SFX showed a ghostly image of an 8 on the back of a card, supposedly the result of a ‘magical’ card-marking paint called juice, which could only be seen with unfocused eyes. Incredibly, juice really does exist – Jeff Spiller has sold it for decades. Once a closely-guarded secret among the magical community, Spiller has blown the secret of juice-work wide open on www.marked-cards.com, even going so far as to demonstrate it on video. Why? Because, he says, honest players need to be protected and the best protection is knowledge.

Invisible ink

Juice is a liquid, daub or dust, which can either be pre-applied as a design or gently touched onto the backs of cards during play, leaving a slight hazy smudge. On close inspection it really is completely invisible and can only be seen at a distance with eyes properly unfocused (which takes a few days to learn). It is a far more practical amateur cheating method than learning sleightof- hand, explains Spiller. Dominic Reyes (www.magicshop.co.uk) concurs; UK cheats must be just as lazy, because juice sells just as well over here.

Juice-work comes in many guises. Shade, tint and flash work makes part of the back design very slightly darker (or lighter) than it should be. Don’t expect giant numbers and letters, instead look for faint bars of lightness or coded zones of dark and pay particular attention to Aces and Kings – if a deck is to be marked at all, they are usually first in the queue. There are differing versions of juice for each colour of back design, but using redbacked cards is recommended.

Luminous juice is trickier, as it requires special filtered sunglasses to be seen at all (unless applied clumsily – it can be noticed on non-red areas). Primitive filters were blood-red, but no longer. Now they look like any other set of shades and will pass any inspection. And as if that isn’t scary enough already, the recently developed ultraluminous and video-luminous have taken juice even further.

Ultra is almost undetectable on any background, even pure white. The corresponding filters are custom-fitted to your own sunglasses or contact lenses (or both!) making it the current state-of-the-art for invisibly marking cards during play. Video-juice really is undetectable to human eyes, on any background, and can be used to paint blatantly huge letters and numbers with gay abandon. When viewed through a special CCTV camera, videojuiced cards may as well be face up.

Final word to the wise

The bad news is that 99 percent of the population is quite happy playing friendly, informal poker with lax procedures, never-changing cards and perhaps no hope of winning. They know nothing of Zarrow shuffles, second-dealing or juice-marked decks and have no idea what to watch out for, or why. The good news is that you aren’t one of them. Knowledge is power, and simple counter-measures must be a routine part of your game from now on. Don’t permit an uncut deck ever again.

And if you are tempted to try cheating with this new and esoteric knowledge, just remember one thing: it’s not new to everyone. Casino cameras can see more than anyone realises and so can plenty of honest, yet paranoid poker players. Jeff Spiller sells more luminous juice-detecting shades than the actual substance itself but, as he cautions, there is no substitute for hands-on experience to truly appreciate the nuances of cardmarking. Jeff admits his own products can still fool him.

As Judge Rivlin pointed out while sentencing the three hi-tech casino scammers, ‘The crime of cheating at play may well be over 150 years old, but as has been demonstrated in this case, it is still alive and kicking.’

Well, now you know about it, you can kick it back.