Card-Sharpers: Their Tricks Exposed

Robert-Houdin turns his eye on the gambling tables and explains how cheats work, from the pass and the stock to prepared packs.

What’s inside

1. A dangerous teacher — Robert-Houdin’s visit to a card cheat as a young man
2. The modern Greeks — the card cheat, or “Greek”, in society
3. The Greek of the fashionable world
4. The Greek of the middle class
5. The Greek of the gambling hell
6. A Greek caught in the act
7. The gambler Raymond and his infallible system
8. Instructive history of a Greek
9. Illegal gambling hells: robbers and robbed
10. Secret gambling hells
11. Bleeding the doctor
12. The paste ring
13. An infamous ambush
14. The method: cutting and shuffling — the false cut, destroying the cut, the pass, the jump, false shuffles
15. The method: sleights at the table — the big card, the bridge, drawing, withdrawing and placing cards
16. Seeing the card and changing the packs — also the box under the cuff
17. Prepared cards — cut, marked, pricked, edge-marked and bent-corner cards; spotted backs
18. The sharper’s accessories — the chaplet, the marking ring, the snuff-box
19. Cheating at piquet and écarté
20. Lansquenet, baccarat, whist, bouillotte and bezique — games for four players
21. Amusing trickeries — also little tricks “innocent through use”
22. Last words

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, 1863 · Spencer Blackett. Complete 296-page PDF. Free to download: check out at $0 and the file arrives by email and on your order page.

This classic is in the public domain. Scans come from library copies, so expect the odd stain or stamp of an old book.