Hi all!

With this article, I am opening a new rubric "Cheating".

As you probably understood, it will be dedicated to tricks of card cheats. It just so happened that at one time I learned these techniques and they helped me quite well, you know where.

Cheating with training cards is a very exciting topic. Of course, you can shout that it is disgusting, dirty and immoral, but for some reason it attracts.

Although I am not a supporter of dishonest games, but when fate turns its back on you and you start to constantly lose, then it’s a sin not to intervene in the situation and do it in such a way as to win back the lost.

WARNING: I advise you to study my course on cheating "Dishonest advantage"

I personally for the time well spent. And spending the evening in good company with cards in hand is great! But there is one BUT ... This is when you play for something ... To hell with it, if you play for matches or cigarettes, but when you play for cruel clicks or money, then there is no time to think that this is just a game.

So it is, but oh, how you don’t want to lose.

Cheating with training cards is a rather touchy subject. Thoughts about morality and the appropriateness of their application begin to appear.

I personally think that it is necessary to know the tricks of cheating if you often play cards. If not in order to perform them yourself, then at least in order to know the techniques and be able to "ignite" a dishonest game at the table.

Although as one said great person"Why play cards with friends if there is no way to flip the cards"

In this article, I will show you how you can bypass the takedown, a perennial obstacle in the way of dishonest players. This cheating is performed only with a partner. One cannot do this.

Usually, when the game is on, we give the cut deck to the person sitting to our left (according to left hand). This person, roughly speaking, is the last link in a dishonest surrender. And if this person is your secret partner, then you are lucky.

I think I will help you understand the topic "Cheating with training cards", and you can find something useful here.

Perhaps someone will find this lesson useful for themselves or learn from it a lesson for the future.

I advise you to learn:

Watch video:

As soon as they began to play cards for money, all kinds of dishonest businessmen appeared who knew how to circle their comrades around their fingers. Hussars, Maidans, packers - this is how card sharpers are called, depending on their trade. A professional sharper is primarily a psychologist. He pursues the goal - to draw a person into the game, to cause excitement. Well, then - a matter of technology. And here for the master of deceit there is nothing sacred - he is ready to cheat himself close relative and soul mate, not to mention the occasional travel companion.

UNDER THE KNOCK OF THE WHEELS

Once, Senator Warren Harding, the future twenty-ninth president, was on a train from Washington to New York. A stranger approached him in the first-class club carriage. "That's the meeting!" he exclaimed, and rushed to Harding with an embrace. The senator was a well-mannered, delicate person, it seemed inconvenient for him to admit that he did not recognize this person, and he could not refuse to communicate with his “old friend”. After a while, two more passengers joined them, and soon the company decided to play a game of bridge.

The stakes were high - well, not poor people traveled first class. But the game went against Harding. After a few hours of travel, he lost to smithereens. Trying to recoup, and completely got into debt. But the "buddy" was kind: "It's okay," he said. - Here's my address in New York. You can send me a check."

Returning to Washington, Harding complained about his loss to a familiar senator, a former passionate gambler. Having found out some circumstances of the road meeting, he resolutely declared: "These were cheaters." Secret Service checked the New York address of a "random" travel companion. There was a crappy room there, rented by railroad cheats specifically in order to have a postal address to which the money of robbed passengers came.

MARKED DECK

The oldest and favorite tool of cheaters is the use of marked cards. There are many ways to crab. Cards can be rubbed, trimmed, sanded, jagged, creased, scratched, tinted, stained.

It would seem that the “back” of cards invented in 1850 (the so-called complex pattern on their back) was supposed to help hide all kinds of marks by which someone could distinguish a familiar card.

However, the deceivers began to use the pattern of the shirt for their own purposes, adding subtle signal strokes, dots or shades to it. There was a real arms race between card manufacturers and cheaters. The first developed glossing methods that prevented any marking. Others were looking for paint and ink recipes to make subtle marks on the shiniest cardboard.

In response to the issue guaranteed by the state of clean decks in sealed parcels, crooks have developed ways to replace those decks with labeled ones.

Tricky Deliveries

In the middle of the 19th century, the Spanish sharper Bianco bought a large number of high quality Spanish decks. He did a gigantic job: he carefully marked each card in them, sealed them in their original packaging and resold them cheaply in Havana, which was then known as the capital card games for money.

Then he himself sailed to Cuba and, you guessed it, went to the casino, where he met one of "his" decks. Of course, Bianco was surprisingly lucky that day.

The swindler visited almost all gambling establishments in Havana and plucked huge banks everywhere. Having saved enough for a comfortable life, the luck hunter fled from.

There were various schemes for tossing "cunning" decks and in. The impressive thing about these methods of deception is that they are simple to the point of disgrace.

Gogol, who at one time was fond of cards, described one such example in the play The Players. One of the characters, an experienced cheater, tells how an accomplice came to a fair in a certain city under the guise of a merchant and settled in a local tavern. For several days he lived, ate, walked - and suddenly disappeared without paying. The owner found a forgotten pack in his room. Unpacked - and there are a hundred dozen decks. He immediately sold them to merchants. And soon many wealthy people from those places lost. So easily a company of cheaters flooded the city with marked cards.

MIRROR IN A SNUFFBOX

In addition to pre-prepared decks, there is great amount ways to mark cards during the game. The cards were marked with a sharp fingernail or the tip of a needle soldered to the ring, causing dots or scratches that could be felt by touch. Marks were also applied with special inks made from olive oil, camphor, stearin and aniline. If necessary, the card sharper slightly moistened his finger with this paint, a small supply of which was kept on the button of the suit or even on a special stamp pad sewn behind the lapel of the jacket. After the game, a speck of such ink was easily erased from the cards, leaving no evidence.

If the sharper failed to mark the cards, he tried to peep what cards the opponent had in his hand. The simplest, but rarely used trick is to have your partner sit with their backs to a mirror, lacquered cabinet, or other reflective surface. More subtle methods are the use of a glass table top, a polished cigarette case, or even a puddle of drink spilled on the table on purpose. In a train compartment, a teaspoon lying innocently on the table can become such a mirror.

The famous magician Jean Robert-Houdin, who studied the tricks of card cheats, described in his book a special snuffbox, on the lid of which, by pressing a hidden button, the oval portrait of a lady was replaced by a concave mirror, which allowed the person distributing cards to see who gets it.

Such mirrors were hidden in smoking snuffboxes, matchboxes, on rings and even on the tips of cigarettes and toothpicks. According to one American expert on the art of cheating, it is enough for a crook to know the place of just one card in a deck in order to make a lot of money from it.

KEPLINGER'S MECHANICAL ARM

One of the true cheating tricks is the substitution of cards. And here a variety of methods are used. In the simplest cases, everything is based only on manual dexterity. The card is hidden in the sleeve, under the knee, under the collar of the shirt - and then thrown into the game.

Things are more complicated - mechanical card feeders, devices with springs that can cope with the desired task.

The contraption was created in 1888 by San Francisco card sharper George Keplinger, nicknamed the Happy Dutchman. That would be a scam the highest level. He owns the invention of the so-called "mechanical hand". The device was placed in a double sleeve of a shirt specially made for this purpose and presented the necessary card at the right moment. Also, at the request of the player, the steel clip could instantly grab an objectionable card from his hand and hide it in his sleeve.

The whole system was powered by a cable that ran under the clothes through a series of tubes and pulleys - up to the knee of the Happy Dutchman. Sitting at the card table, the player groped for the end of the cable, brought it out through the cut in the leg seam and hooked it to the other knee. Under the table, the thin cable that connected the player's knees was not visible. Spreading his knees, the crook forced the steel clip to move forward and unclench, and bringing his knees together, he closed and pulled the clip into his sleeve. The brilliantly conceived device operated silently, imperceptibly, and without fail.

For several months, Keplinger amused himself by playing a "tough game" with professional card sharpers like himself. His "colleagues" could not help but be alerted by the fact that the lucky one constantly won.

At some point, the companions decided to take him to clean water. At a prearranged signal, three opponents grabbed Keplinger and, after searching from head to toe, found his invention. He was offered a choice: either make the same thing for each of the whistleblowers, or undergo a lynching trial. He naturally preferred to stay alive, and within a few years Keplinger's "mechanical hand" became a common tool for cheaters all over the world.

KEEPING WITH THE TIMES AND PROGRESS

Times are changing, the techniques of card sharpers are being improved. Today many
with a smile they remember the cunning card feeders. After all, now all sorts of modern gadgets have appeared in the service of scammers: high-speed video cameras, micro-earphones the size of a pinhead, special contact lenses for working with marked cards, and many other, even more incredible devices.

Cheating is the use of dishonest, fraudulent methods in gambling, most often in card games.

Manufacturers playing cards immediately began to look for ways to combat this evil. A special absolutely opaque paper was developed. Cards began to be made from two layers of thick glossy paper, gluing them with black soot-based glue - such a card is not visible under any lighting conditions and resists bending, dents, wrinkles and scuffs. The gloss that covered the cards prevented them from being marked with ink or paint. But even greater ingenuity was shown by those for whom dishonest play became a profession.



Kalganov Ivan Alexandrovich Card cheats. Late 1870s

The profession of sharper quickly became dangerous. In the 16th century, caught cheaters were sent to the gallows. American courts recognized the right of the victims of cheaters to physically deal with criminals, up to and including their murder.

In 1849, the magistrate of a French city asked the famous magician Jean Robert-Houdin to examine one hundred and fifty decks of cards confiscated from a suspiciously successful professional gambler. For two weeks, armed with a magnifying glass, an experienced magician examined card after card, but could not find anything unusual. The cards of that time did not have a back design - their reverse side was white. It was believed that on an empty pure white field, any attempt to put a spot would be noticeable.

The frustrated magician, resigned to his failure, got up from his chair and angrily threw cards on the table. “And suddenly it seemed to me that on the shiny back of one of the cards I noticed a pale spot,” Robert-Houdin wrote. I took a step closer and the stain disappeared. But then it reappeared when I retreated again. The magician realized that the card sharper was removing gloss from one place - perhaps simply by dropping a drop of water on the cardboard, and thereby making a mark visible only at a certain distance, at a certain angle and in a certain light. The place of the spot spoke of the suit and rank of the card. Robert-Houdin became interested in this problem and a few years later published a whole book on the methods of "working" card cheats.

From 1850 to reverse side cards began to apply a complex pattern. The idea was that it would allow you to hide noticeable dirt that accidentally got on the card during its use - drops of coffee or wine, abrasions, by which a dishonest or simply observant player can distinguish a familiar card.

However, the deceivers began to use the design of the back of the cards for their own purposes, adding subtle signal strokes, dots or shades to it. There was a real arms race between card manufacturers and cheaters. The first developed glossing methods that prevented any marking. Others were looking for paint and ink recipes to make subtle marks on the shiniest cardboard.

In response to the release of state-guaranteed clean decks in sealed packages, crooks have developed ways to replace those decks with labeled ones. They did not stop before large-scale operations: they sold lots of labeled cards at a cheap price to merchants from whom owners of hotel and club kiosks and restaurants bought them. Having thus prepared the ground, the crooks went to play in these establishments.


Brower Adrian. Peasant fight over a card game.

In the middle of the last century, the Spanish cheater Bianco bought a large number of high-quality Spanish decks. He carefully marked each card in them, sealed them in their original packaging and resold them cheaply in Havana, which was then known as the capital of card games for money. Then he himself sailed to Cuba to "reap the fruits of his labor."

Landing in Havana, Bianco found that everything was going as he had calculated: "his" decks were sold with a guarantee of their purity in all the best casinos. Playing in these establishments, Bianco plucked huge banks. In order not to arouse suspicion, in every place new game in the next casino or club, he complained about a big loss, allegedly just befell him in a neighboring gambling house.

Thief by thief...

Meanwhile, the French card cheat Laforcade arrived in Havana. He managed to infiltrate one of the most aristocratic clubs in the Cuban capital and steal several decks of cards there in order to mark them and put them into play in the same club. But, having printed out the stolen decks in his hotel room, he found that all the cards in them were already marked. Carefully making inquiries and buying fresh decks from Havana suppliers, he realized that he had stumbled upon a giant scam.

But after a while, Bianco got tired of sharing money, and he fled from Cuba. Laforcade tried to continue the scam on his own, but the stock of marked decks introduced by the Spaniard into the Havana casinos was running out. Laforcade himself lacked the skills and experience to launch his marked "goods" into the game.

Soon he was caught cheating and arrested. But the investigation failed to prove that he marked cards or tossed marked decks into the game (and he really was innocent of this), so he was acquitted.

Other card sharpers devised ways to mark cards as the game progressed. The cards were marked with a sharp fingernail or the tip of a needle soldered to the ring, causing dots or scratches that could be felt by touch. Marks were also applied with special inks made from olive oil, camphor, stearin and aniline. If necessary, the card sharper slightly moistened his finger with this paint, a small supply of which was kept on the button of the suit or even on a special stamp pad sewn behind the lapel of the jacket. After the game, a speck of such ink was easily erased from the cards, leaving no evidence.

If the sharper failed to mark the cards, he tried to peep what cards the opponent had in his hand. The simplest, but rarely successful trick is to have your partner sit with their backs to a mirror, lacquered cabinet, or other reflective surface. More subtle methods are the use of a glass table top, a polished cigarette case, or even a puddle of drink spilled on the table on purpose.


Caravaggio. "Sharp"

Robert-Houdin described in his book a cheating snuffbox, on the lid of which, by pressing a hidden button, the oval portrait of a lady was replaced by a concave mirror, which allowed the person distributing cards to see what was getting to whom.

Such mirrors were hidden in smoking snuffboxes, matchboxes, on rings and even on the tips of cigarettes and toothpicks. According to one American expert on the art of cheating, it is enough for a crook to know the place of just one card in a deck in order to make a lot of money from it.

But there are also more interesting options, when the cheater does not just know the position of the cards, but can control it by slipping the right card at the right time or removing the unfavorable one.

Happy Dutchman

Various methods of substitution of cards were used. In the simplest cases, everything was based only on sleight of hand. The card was hidden in the sleeve, under the knee, under the collar of the shirt. Mechanical devices with springs have also appeared that can remove a card from a cheater's hand into a sleeve or bosom, and then throw it into the game. In 1888, San Francisco card-sharper P. J. Keplinger, nicknamed the Lucky Dutchman, revolutionized the game of card-shopping by developing his most ingenious mechanism on the basis of the previous achievements of anonymous inventors. A retractable steel clip was placed in the double sleeve of a specially tailored shirt, which, at the request of the player, could grab a card or several cards from his hand and pull them into the sleeve. In the same way, cards could be issued from the sleeve to the hand. The whole system was powered by a cable that ran under the clothes through a series of tubes and pulleys up to the knee of the Happy Dutchman. Sitting at the card table, the player groped for the end of the cable, brought it out through the cut in the seam of the trouser leg and hooked it to the other knee. Under the table, the thin cable that connected the player's knees was not visible. Spreading his knees, the crook forced the steel clip to move forward and unclench, and bringing his knees together, he closed and pulled the clip into his sleeve. A few hours of training, and Keplinger learned to hide and give out any card he got.


Valentin de Boulogne. Shuler.

The brilliantly conceived device operated silently, imperceptibly, and without fail. The enemy could look into the sharper's sleeve and not see anything suspicious. Slowly exploiting his invention, Keplinger could well feed on it all his life. But greed killed him. Or maybe it was already the excitement of a professional player.

He began to use his system in the most famous gambling houses in San Francisco in poker against the same inveterate crooks as himself. And he did this not from time to time, as caution required, but almost constantly. His experienced partners quickly realized that things were not clean here: they couldn’t lead from game to game like that. They devised a plan to expose the Happy Dutchman.

On a prearranged signal, three opponents grabbed Keplinger and, methodically searching him from head to toe, found his invention. He was offered a choice: either make the same thing for each of the whistleblowers, or undergo a lynching trial. He, of course, preferred to stay alive, and after a few years, Keplinger's "mechanical hand" became a common tool for cheaters all over the world. At the end of the century, specialized companies sold his "San Francisco apparatus" for a hundred dollars - a very considerable amount in those years, but the magical device was worth it.

Since then, there have been many innovations in this area. One of the variants of the "mechanical arm" is attached to chest and is activated by deep inhalation or exhalation. In the United States, cards are freely sold, marked with a pigment that is noticeable only to those who wear contact lenses of a certain color. The police cannot confiscate such a product as a means of committing a crime because these cards are sold in joke and practical joke stores.

Professional sharpers also use special gunners armed with binoculars and a walkie-talkie. In 1949, the famous American cheat Nick Dandolos, nicknamed the Greek, won half a million dollars with the help of such a gunner.

Opposite the building of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, where the game was going on, a room was filmed in which a man was sitting, armed with strong binoculars and a walkie-talkie. Grek's partners were seated with their backs to the window. What followed was a matter of technique.

How about us?

In Russia, the first mention of card games dates back to the beginning of the 17th century. Most likely, the cards came to us in Time of Troubles from the Poles. And then there were people who wanted to forcibly turn luck to their face. But the surviving documents do not now allow us to judge how many cheaters were then and how they were punished. The fact is that very soon after the appearance of cards in Russia, they were banned by a royal decree. In the Code of Alexei Mikhailovich, gamblers are mentioned in the same phrase as murderers and thieves. Both honest and dishonest players were equally punished.


Latour (La Typ) (La Tour) Georges de Card sharper

However, the inventory of palace property that has come down to us, compiled after the death of the king, where the presence of several dozen decks is noted, shows that the strict ban did not apply to the court, they played cards in the palace. But cards became a legitimate way of spending leisure time only under Peter the Great.

The novel by the notorious Thaddeus Bulgarin "Ivan Vyzhigin" (1829) describes some of the methods of card fraud used at that time in Russia. Here is how one of the card sharpers initiates the hero of the novel into the secrets of his craft:

Zarezin took out a snuffbox from a drawer in the table and handed it to me.

Do you see anything in her? - he asked.

“Nothing, except that it is heavy and very well made,” I replied.

- It is heavy because the middle is golden, and the top is platinum, and that this heaviness is very necessary. Do you see that this lower bottom is outlined with a scar or a frame, and in the very middle of the bottom there is a flower trimmed with a mat? Now, if you please, look: here I am, for example, a banker (the one who distributes cards and against whom the partners called punters play. - Auth.).

At this, Zarezin sat down at the table, took the cards in his hands and continued:

- Now I see that the second card should win a big jackpot. I put the cards on the table, I cover the deck with a snuffbox, as if from a precaution so that the punters do not see the cards; I take out my handkerchief, wipe my nose, then open the snuffbox, take some tobacco, take off the snuffbox, continue throwing, and you see: the seven, which should have been to the left, is tossed to the right.

— How does it work?

- That's how. There are two bottoms in the snuffbox. This flower is inserted, on a spring, and smeared on the mat with wax or glue. When I take tobacco, I press the middle with my finger. The top card sticks to the flower and is framed. The second one stays on top. Now there is another card that I need to put to the right. I put the snuffbox on the cards in exactly the same order, press the bottom and the card lags behind the flower and lies on top, and the one that should have won at the first distribution loses to the punter at the second.


Frame from the film "Stagecoach". Characters typical of the Wild West travel in a mail coach: a cowboy, a card sharper, a whiskey merchant, a woman of easy virtue, a banker who stole depositors' savings, and an officer's wife.

Then Zarezin demonstrates another miracle of technology, the so-called guillotine, “... a French word,” he says, “but a Russian invention, and not as terrible as the French mechanism of the same name.” The guillotine was a card whose suit and points could be changed with the flick of a finger. Any card (only not a curly one, but with glasses) was carefully split in the middle into two leaves, between which a mechanism for changing glasses was inserted: a thin steel spring from a watch, one tip of which barely protruded from the side of the card, and glasses cut from other cards were glued to the other . Sometimes they used not a spring, but a flat lever made by flattening a thin sewing needle on an anvil. Then, in the front sheet of the split card, windows were cut out in place of the points, and the whole card was glued again. In the wrong light of the candles, the partners could not notice that the cheater, moving the protruding tip of the clock spring with his fingernail, puts the glasses he needs into the cut windows.

Russian cheaters were honored not only technical means, but also marked decks, cunningly thrown to future victims. The impressive thing about these methods of deception is that they are simple to the point of disgrace.

Gogol, who at one time was fond of cards, described one such example in the play The Players. One of the characters, an experienced cheater, tells how an accomplice came to a fair in a certain city under the guise of a merchant and settled in a local tavern.

For several days he lived, ate, walked - and suddenly disappeared without paying. The owner found a forgotten pack in his room. Unpacked - and there are a hundred dozen decks. The cards immediately went under the hammer to cover debts: the merchants willingly bought everything.

Only four days passed - and the whole city lost. So easily a company of cheaters flooded this city with marked cards. And now real story. A troika flies past the yard of a rich gentleman, on whom the visiting cheaters have "laid their eyes".

Fun, walking with songs drunk company. Suddenly a suitcase falls out of there. The servant waves, shouts, but where is there - the troika disappeared from sight. They opened the suitcase - and there were dresses, some underwear and several dozen decks of cards. The cards immediately went to the master's tables, and the very next day the owner and his guests were robbed by those very cheaters.

Or here's another trick. A troika flies at full speed past the yard of a wealthy landowner, whom a group of visiting cheaters intends to beat. The carriage is filled with drunken passengers singing songs. A suitcase falls out of the trio. The servant waves, shouts, but the troika has already sped away. They untied the suitcase - there was some dress, underwear and a pack of forty cards. The cards, of course, went to the master's tables, and the next day everyone, both the owner and his guests, were left without a penny in their pocket! They were robbed by cheaters, who planted a suitcase with cards appropriately “processed” by them.

Havana in the Shklov estate

In the anonymous book "The life of a player, described by himself, or the discovery of the tricks of a card game", published in 1826, a case is told when a passionate gambler and, moreover, a music lover was beaten at cards with the help of a violin. Two sat down to play Boston, and the third, a virtuoso violinist, began to walk around the room, playing improvisations, as if for the entertainment of the players. Walking around the table, he saw the cards of both players, and with his game he transmitted to his accomplice, who participated in the game, information about the suits of the cards in the hands of his partner. For example, if a violinist started playing on the bass strings, this meant spades, on high tones - clubs, and so on. Another way of transmitting information is code words. Knowing what cards the partner had in his hands, the cheat turned to the assistant: “What do you think? Go!" Or: “My friend, how lucky you are!” If the first word of the phrase began with the letter "H" - it was an instruction to walk with worms, for "B" - with a tambourine, and so on.

International adventurers who owned cheating tricks also came to Russia. A short-term favorite of Catherine, Second Lieutenant General S. G. Zorich, was known as a passionate gambler who introduced a game at court for such amounts that no one had thought of before him. It is he who is mentioned in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. For the scandalous passion for cards, the queen removed Zorich from the court. He settled on his estate in Shklov, Ukraine, where he took up big game and related adventures. Very soon, Shklov became something like European Havana - an international center for card games, where adventurers from all over Europe gathered.

Among them were well-known cheats of that time - the Austrian counts, the Zanovichi brothers (they really were counts, the title helped them in scams), close friends of the famous Casanova. Knowing that fresh decks were delivered to Zorich with carts, the dexterous counts slipped a mass of marked decks into one of the carts and began to win invariably.

In the same place, in Ukraine, the Zanovichi were engaged in forging not only cards, but also banknotes, which they caught on - in Shklov they found fake Russian banknotes worth 700,000 rubles. The counts were sent out of Russia in disgrace.

Apparently, not without the help of such partners, General Zorich left behind gambling debts of two million rubles.

Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin played cards all his life, and for some time, due to his youth and by coincidence, he raised money by cheating.

In the 20th century, binoculars and walkie-talkies replaced the mirrors behind the back and built-in mirrors in snuff boxes. In 1949, the legendary Nick Dandolos, known as Nick the Greek, together with accomplices managed to win about half a million dollars in a short time.

It was at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Grek's partners were seated with their backs to the window. A room was rented in a neighboring building, from which an accomplice with powerful binoculars watched the game.

He examined the cards of the victim and communicated by radio with a colleague impersonating a spectator. Transferring information to the player was already a matter of technology.

Also in the United States, cards appeared on free sale, the speck on which was applied with a special pigment, visible only to the owner of contact lenses of a certain color.

The police would be happy to confiscate such goods, but they cannot: the decks are sold through shops of jokes and practical jokes, i.e. formally there is no corpus delicti.

Yuri FROLOV, InterPOLICE No. 7

Cheating in cards is very difficult topic for a conversation. On the one hand, cheating is not very good, especially when playing for money, especially with people who absolutely do not understand what is happening. On the other hand, you can't help but admire the way a professional makes fake shuffles, dealt second or deal bottom. It is not for nothing that such shows are very common in the West, when a professional in card mechanics or cheating tricks sits down at the table and, for an hour or two, shows how he can deceive people at the card table.

"Kataly" in the Soviet Union earned tens of thousands of rubles per season, in the modern sense they were millionaires. Moreover, there were women among the Soviet card cheats.

Unwind Barbacaru

Anatoly Barbakara is called the most famous "catalogue" of the USSR. The status of Anatoly Ivanovich, replicated by numerous print and electronic media, was created largely thanks to him himself - a hypocrite by character (and one of the professions - an actor in a theater studio), Barbakaru knows how to work on his own image. From the mass of interviews given by the card cheat, it is known that he began this "career" as a student, he mastered cheating quickly. Like all "katals", he worked on the beaches of all-Union resorts, on long-distance trains.

Barbacaru wrote about his experience of cheating "suckers" when playing cards, based on which a series was released on federal TV. Anatoly Ivanovich is a chansonnier with a "rolling" repertoire, a regular participant in the TV show.

Red-haired beast

Among the Soviet "rolled" there were many original personalities. Tatyana Vermenich was called a thin-haired beast, male players were considered with her skill. Vermenich took the ability to psychologically process her victim and a good memory. In her arsenal there were such tricks for calculating the card position of an opponent: an “accidentally” overturned glass, yawns, changing the ashtray and many others. Most often, Vermenich's company was made up of an accomplice who looked at the cards and gave Tatyana conventional signs.

Vermenich gained notoriety after an incident that occurred in 1979. She and her dummy "husband" "rolled" in a compartment of one of the trains and "undressed" the wealthy Soviet engineer Stanislav Kupriyanov. Kupriyanov eventually realized that he was cheated by cheaters. and refused to give the money, took out a knife. The criminal couple took away this “feather” and plunged it into the chest of the obstinate loser.

ABOUT future fate Vermenich little is known. There is a version that some Moscow millionaire took her under his wing.

Uncle hoisted, and the nephew "suckers" bred

The famous Soviet "katala" Ashot Kantaria is the nephew of the famous Meliton Kantaria, one of the members of the group of Soviet military personnel who hoisted the red flag over the Berlin Reichstag in 1945. A participant in the most high-profile trial of card cheats in the USSR, held in Moscow in 1970. The heroic uncle, by the way, was also present at it.

Ashot headed, as it is now customary to say, an organized crime group of card cheats. They worked unconventionally and creatively. One of the members of an organized criminal group was looking for a victim, luring her to a secluded place, offering to buy a deficit. Then there was an offer to play "once" in cards. The client warmed up over time, went into a rage, and eventually lowered everything he had.

The Kantaria group was quickly figured out by the police, as its members were chic, without hesitation - they bought houses and apartments, littered with money in bars ...

Crimean intellectual Khavich

Yevgeny Khavich, who operated in the 80s in the Crimea, had a penchant for works of art, patronized. I “sprinkled” the cards with a needle, and then calculated them using these marks when swindling the “suckers”. Khavich played on trust: in order to assure a potential victim of his honesty, he went with a client to Soyuzpechat and bought a new deck of cards at a kiosk. The trick was that the sellers of Soyuzpechat at Khavich were also “marked”: they released decks previously marked by a card sharper.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Havich was an artist from fraud - he liked the process itself as such. “In the trash” for the losers, he paid for tickets home, tossed money for food. The resourceful cheater organized the work of several underground Crimean card clubs. When it became possible by law, he opened a casino there. In the thieves' world, Khavich was respected. But he did not survive the “dashing” 90s: the authority was shot in a showdown, which the cheater preferred to avoid, shunning dirty deeds in the redistribution of spheres of influence. The killer, caught at the scene of the crime, by the way, did not live to see the trial - he was found hanged in a cell.

Hello friends.

This article will talk about favorite method all cheaters and card swindlers of the world. But first things first. Let's start from the beginning...

As you know, cards appeared in Europe at the end of the 14th century and at the same time people appeared who began to put subtle marks on cards in order to identify them during the game. This, as you understand, was the first card sharpers.

These people became the first cheaters and card swindlers of that time!

Yes, they turned around so cool that in England at the end of the 16th century, a book was even published, which describes in detail the methods of marking cards!

Card manufacturers of that time immediately began their fight against this evil. Cards began to be issued from absolutely opaque paper. The cards themselves consisted of two pieces of glossy paper glued together.

They were glued together with a special black glue based on soot. Now the cards did not shine through under any light, they better resisted scuffs, dents and wrinkles. The gloss that now covered the cards resisted ink marks very well. BUT…

Even greater ingenuity was shown by those for whom dishonest play became a job and a means of subsistence. The sharper profession quickly turned into a dangerous game with fire. They did not stand on ceremony with the caught cheaters and immediately sent them to the gallows.

American justice recognized for the victims of cheaters the right to deal with them without trial or investigation. The card sharper stood on a par with the murderer and the thief.

Lynchings swept across young America. Card cheats were ruthlessly physically exterminated, and only the deaf have not heard about card cheats.

How the magician saw through the cheaters

In 1849, the magistrate of one of the French cities asked the then-famous card magician Jean Robert-Houdin to check 150 decks of cards seized from one suspiciously lucky player. For two weeks the magician sat with a magnifying glass over each card, but could not find anything.

The fact is that in those days the back of the cards was pure white. Therefore, applying a maroon on it was a very problematic task.

Frustrated, the magician threw the cards on the table with force and got up from his chair. Here is how he describes what happened next: “And suddenly it seemed to me that on the shiny back of one of the cards I noticed a pale spot. I took a step closer and the stain disappeared. But then it appeared again when I retreated.

An experienced magician immediately realized that the card sharper was simply removing the gloss from one place of the shirt. Perhaps he did this simply by dropping a drop of water on his shirt and thereby leaving a mark visible only at a certain distance, a certain angle of view and a certain lighting.

As usual, the location of this net testified to the suit of the card and its dignity. Jean Robert-Houdin got carried away with this problem and a few years later wrote a book on the methods of "working" card tables.

Changes in cheating life

Since 1850, various designs on the shirt began to appear on the cards. This was done in order to slightly mask the stains from coffee or wine on the back of the cards, by which the player could remember this card. But it only worked for the cheaters.

They began to add to these drawings their little noticeable strokes, dots or play of shadows in the drawing. A real card arms race has begun between card manufacturers and card cheats.