This is a great book on the secrets of how to cheat with cards and dice at many popular games – a guide to dishonest gambling. It offers a good overview of the various methods from mechanical cheating methods to sleight of hand.

1st edition 1970, original 128 pages; PDF 82 pages.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Cheating at cards
3. Mechanical Methods: marking cards, sorts, deck switches, edge marking, daub, punch/nail marks
4. Strippers: types of strippers, Vernon’s “Bathroom Strippers”
5. Locaters: short, corner shorts, thick cards, long cards, ridge/breather crimps
6. Holdouts: Kepplinger type, bug, card index, magnetic cards, ring holdouts
7. Shiners
8. Confederates: signals, hand signals, other body signals, electronic communication
9. Card Handling
10. Palming: 3 top palms, gamblers flat palm, 3 bottom palms
11. False Shuffling: strip-out riffle shuffle, gamblers false shuffle, to retain a top stock, faro
12. False Cutting: a false cut, slip cut, Vernons “The Cold Deck Cut”
13. Crooked Dealing: seconds, bottoms
14. Miscellaneous Swindles: double lift peek, restoring a cut, top change, locaters, confederates
15. The Greatest Swindles
16. Dice: loads, caps, shaved dice, beveled dice, mis-spotted dice, magnets
17. Detecting Fake Dice
18. Crooked Dice Handling: 3 controls, blanket roll, switching
19. Find the Lady (three card Monte)
20. The Three Shell game
21. The Endless Belt (this is the chain loop swindle)
22. Elusive Aces: a brief discussion of mis-indexed gaff cards, for use in the three card Monte or other card-based scams
23. Roulette
24. Safe Bets: several mathematical and proposition type wagers
25. The Odds
26. Dice (odds)
27. Bingo (odds)
28. Blackjack (odds)
29. Poker (odds)
30. Postscript

word count: 23254 which is equivalent to 93 standard pages of text