Professional Card Bluff

Various Types of Gin Rummy Bluff

The underworld has many names for various types of Gin Rummy card bluff. In the western part of the United States, Nevada included, a professional card cheat who travels over the country seeking card games where he can ply his trade is called a crossroad. A cheat who specializes in palming cards is referred to in the trade as a hand-mocker or holdout man; one who deals from the bottom of the deck is a base or subway dealer.
The surreptitious manipulation of cards by card mechanics, hand mockers, holdout men, crossroad, card sharks, base dealers or other bluff requires considerable skill and practice, plus the courage of a thief. A top-notch card mechanic must be considerably more adept with a deck of cards than a first-rate magician. The magician is free to use a great deal of conversation and misdirection to fool his audience, but the card cheat is limited by the game's regulations. As a matter of fact, most present-day magicians-including most of those who advertise their act as an expose of crooked gambling tricks-know little about the operation of the modem card sharper. They themselves are as easily fleeced by a good card mechanic as the average layman. Much of the sleight of hand and nearly all of the mechanical gadgets they expose were discarded by the bluff decades ago.

The Popular Image of Gin Rummy Online

Gin Rummy Online is a popular delusion that card bluff and magicians can take a well-mixed deck of cards, riffle and shuffle the pack several times and then deal each player in the game a good hand-in Poker, for example, four jacks to one player, four kings to another and four aces to himself. The truth of the matter is that no card sharper or magician can take a deck honestly shuffled by someone else, shuffle it two or three times and arrange more than a couple of cards in two different hands without previous sight of or prearrangement of the deck. Whenever you see any sleight-of-hand expert claim to do this and deal out a perfect Bridge hand of 13 cards of one suit, or four or five pat Poker hands, you can be sure that the cards were previously stacked.
Actually the cheating doesn't need to do anything so spectacular. It doesn't matter whether the game is Gin Rummy in some gin mill or the most recondite Contract Bridge at a Park Avenue club-a cheater can take all the chumps in the game simply by knowing the approximate location of very few cards. If he knows the exact position of only one of the 52 cards he will eventually win all the money in sight.

Never Overestimate a Card Bluff

Don't expect him to work miracles. Just expect him to win the money. If luck favors him, he may not make a crooked move all night, or he may make only one crooked move in the whole card session. But that one move always comes at just the right time to get the money. In most games the move can even be executed clumsily and get by; the average player almost never spots it because he seldom suspects the people with whom he plays and because, even if he did, he lacks the necessary knowledge to know what to look for and wouldn't recognize it if he did happen to be looking in the right place at the right time.
Believe it or not, sharper are poor card partnership players on the square (playing honestly). A good card mechanic spends so much of his time practicing cheating moves and concentrating on card rules, in play, on watching for the right opportunity to use his skill that he seldom develops a good sense of card strategy. During one of my recent gambling lectures at a Chicago club a member of the audience asked me, "Isn't the old rule, 'never play cards with strangers: about the best protection one can have against cheaters?"