Card Cheating Exposed
by unknown

In introducing this little book to the public it is my intention and desire to expose the multiplicity of ways by which cheating at cards is accomplished. The average honest player is little suspicious of the enormous amount of cheating that is done, but what would astonish him still more would be to learn the simple tricks used by even the best of professional cheats, and the slightness of the knowledge required to “separate a mug from his money.” He will wonder how it was that he was never able to detect trickery during the number of times when he was unquestionably defrauded; but after all it is the old story of Columbus and the egg:—very easy once you see it done.

In no branch of criminal industry in recent years has greater progress been made than in the polite practice of card-sharping. The methods and manners of the last decade are out-of-date to-day; a new race of cheats, aristocrats of their trade, has sprung up, and you rarely find one of them in the long roll of swindlers who pass yearly through the docks of our criminal courts. I except, of course, the professors of the “three-card trick,” a low trade to which no really talented card “grafter” would stoop.