Fooling Houdini, page 6
On one of those cheerful white-tie-and-tails-type days at Rustico II, I flaunted a fancy one-handed cut I’d recently taught myself in the hope that it would catch Wes’s eye. When I was sure he was paying attention, I broke the cards into three even blocks with my left hand and hinged them into an equilateral triangle, grinning like an idiot. I’m sure I looked as happy as a schoolboy on a brand-new Huffy while showing off this new move, but Wes only scowled. “That’ll get you killed,” he said, turning away. Clearly he didn’t share my enthusiasm. But murder seemed a little harsh, even for Wes.
Wes went on to explain that an open show of skill, however brief, is deadly during a magic act, because it gives the audience a reason not to believe. Even if they don’t figure out the method, he explained, they’ll attribute the effect to manual dexterity and not magic. “You’re giving them the secret to everything you do,” he said. I had to admit, I’d never thought about magic in this way before. “Magic is not about selling your prowess,” he hollered at me, when I pressed him on the issue. “It’s about the effect you create—a profound violation of the natural laws of the universe. I don’t want them to think I’m skillful. I’m a magician, not a juggler. A juggler is selling skill. I want to get credit for the magic, not the skill.”
World-class jugglers know to drop at least once during a performance, Wes told me, because it makes their act appear all the more difficult, drumming up suspense for the finale and driving home the message that they’re operating at the extreme edge of human potential. This is known as juggler’s logic. But a magician has a different mission. This is not to say that technique isn’t important in magic—it’s crucial—but must remain invisible at all times. There can be no man behind the curtain. There can’t even be a curtain.
In a sense, this is true of many endeavors. The best actors and dancers and musicians toil endlessly so that, come opening night, people will say they make it look so easy. Audiences are swept away by the magic of the performance—the sublime mysteries of the muse—not the power of rote. No one applauds the ten thousand hours of practice, only the ninety-minute chef d’oeuvre that is the end product of those hours. This is especially true for magicians, because magic, by definition, must betray nothing of its cause. Only then will people give themselves over fully to the experience.
This philosophy, which Wes hammered into all his underlings, wasn’t really Wes’s to begin with, or any other magician’s, for that matter. It had originated in the world of gamblers and card cheats, where flaunting your skills can literally endanger your life. “If you blow a card trick, they don’t shoot you for that,” Wes grumbled. “Usually.” Wes, after all, was a student of Dai Vernon, who won his spurs in the underground gambling dens of Chicago’s Levee district, alongside the cardsharps and blacklegs and four-flushers of the Windy City’s thriving demimonde. The Vernon Touch, as it came to be known, arose from magic’s fruitful intersection with gambling and grift. “Vernon would look at an effect and bring something to it that would make it special,” Wes told me. “The Vernon Touch—that was real.” (“The Vernon Touch” was also the name of a column Vernon wrote for twenty-two years in Genii magazine, one of the top trade journals.)
Historically, some of the best ideas in magic were concocted out of a desire to beat the house, and many great masters honed their skills in the underground gambling world. Magic, after all, is cheating for amusement, to borrow a phrase from the nineteenth-century French watchmaker and godfather of modern magic Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (whose last name Harry Houdini, né Erik Weisz, cribbed in tribute—and later disowned). Professional card cheats are among the most gifted sleight-of-hand artists around because of the unforgiving sword-of-Damocles conditions under which they work. When you’re caught in a high-stakes underground poker game with your hands beneath the table—as I was at the Magic Olympics—you don’t just get hustled offstage.
Magic and gambling share a common language and a common lineage, and magicians—particularly those who specialize in sleight of hand—are the spiritual descendants (and, in some cases, the actual descendants) of the great cheats who thrived on the culture of speculation and greed that took hold during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when wealth and power were consolidated in the hands of tycoons and traders, and enormous fortunes were made. As America emerged as an empire and money flowed across the land with record speed, gambling quickly became the nation’s favorite pastime. Unsurprisingly, the rise of gambling in America also coincided with the widespread investment of private funds in financial markets. (The first stock ticker was introduced in 1867.) What is Wall Street, it is often asked, if not a high-stakes casino—and a rigged one at that—where every gain is yoked to another’s loss?
This connection did not escape Erdnase. “[T]he vagaries of luck, or chance,” he wrote, long before the financial shenanigans we’ve witnessed in the last few years, “have impressed the professional card player with a certain knowledge that his more respected brother of the stock exchange possesses, viz.—manipulation is more profitable than speculation; so to make both ends meet, and incidentally a good living, he also performs his part with the shears when the lambs come to market.”
Nor was Erdnase the only person to make this connection. Volumes have been written on the kinship between gambling (especially poker) and finance. Both require nerves of steel and a deep understanding of, and tolerance for, risk. Both encourage bluffing and the occasional random ploy designed to throw your opponents off balance. Both are guided as much by luck as by skill—with people frequently confusing the two—and fueled by greed. Both favor those with privileged information. Both tend to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Both can mint you a fortune overnight and bankrupt you twice as fast.
“Almost anything that’s used at the card table can be used in magic,” Wes had me know. “The amount of overlap is tremendous.” What’s more, because gambling sleights are some of the most demanding moves in magic, mastering them means you can pretty much do anything. So my first assignment in those early days with Wes was all about learning to think and act like a cheat.
“The first thing I’m gonna have you do is try and learn this false cut,” Wes said during one of our early meetings, as he broke the deck into three stacks and shifted them around in a way that looked chaotic but was carefully orchestrated to bring the cards back to their original order. Erdnase called this move Fancy Blind Cut to Retain Complete Stock. (Erdnase was bad with names.) After demonstrating the move, Wes coached me. “Cut the top. Okay. Cut the third. When you do it, you want to come to a point where the deck is seemingly square.” I reversed the top card so I could keep track of what I was doing—if the faceup card isn’t on top after the move, you know you’ve done something wrong. Meanwhile, Wes continued to spout suggestions.
“Try to get a cleaner release,” he said. “It’ll take some work to become smooth. You want the thing to be smooth, but sloppy. If you do this right it seems like you don’t care, and the less you seem to care the less likely you’re trying to do something.”
“Is this right?” I asked.
“Again,” he barked. “A little crisper.”
I worked on this one move for a good thirty minutes. Eventually Wes looked over at my hands and nodded. “You’re lifting before you come out with that third, and to me that looks too studied,” he said. “But other than that you seem to be doing okay.”
Wes showed me a dozen other false cuts: the Cooper cut (invented by a hermit in North Carolina), the Slydini cut (after the great Tony Slydini), a bluff cut, and several by Wes himself. “You’ll still see cheats all over use it,” he said of another. “This will fly in almost any situation. It’s an optical illusion that has to do with the continuity of motion.”
“Didn’t Frank Garcia have a thing like that?” asked one of the old guys sitting at the table.
Wes grunted. “I’ll show you that in a minute.”
After false cuts came a lesson in how to rig the shuffle—an essential skill for any card cheat. A rigged shuffle is a move that preserves the order of the cards or arranges them in a particular sequence under the guise of shuffling. Wes showed me a number of diabolical false shuffles, one of which he’d pieced together from two separate slices of Erdnase, and which turned out to be incredibly useful for my Ambitious Card routine.
Once the deck has been shuffled and cut, it’s time to deal the cards, and this is where crooked deals come into play. A crooked deal is one in which you pretend to deal cards off the top of the deck while actually dealing from somewhere farther down in the pack. Wes taught me to deal seconds (that is, to deal the second card from the top), bottoms (i.e., the bottom card instead of the top), and, toughest of all, middles (in which a card from the center of the deck is secretly dealt down)—although the only one I was able to master was the so-called strike second deal. The others were just too tough.
To do a strike second, you push the top card over a hair with your thumb, pivoting it to the right and back, exposing the top right edge of the card beneath it. This exposed edge is called a brief. The right hand swoops in as if it is about to peel off the top card, but instead the ball of the right thumb contacts (“strikes”) the exposed brief and deals down the second card. When done smoothly and at speed, the strike second is almost undetectable. Expert hustlers like Wes can catch a very fine brief of about a sixteenth of an inch. But Wes prefers an even more deceptive move known as the New Theory second deal. Here the top card is pushed far off to the side and then pulled back just before the (second) card is taken. It’s all in the timing. Wes showed me his one-handed version, wrist bobbing gracefully up and down as cards fell gently to the table—a perfect subterfuge. The room echoed with murmurs of admiration. “That’s New Theory,” said Wes.
Wes also taught me how to secretly glimpse cards in the deck, the equivalent of inside information, which, when combined with false shuffles and crooked deals, gives you a frightening advantage over other players. You might, for instance, glimpse an ace or two and control them to the top of the deck, then secretly deal seconds to everyone except yourself, although this is likely to arouse suspicion—it looks bad if you get too many aces when you’re the one dealing—so it’s best to have a partner you can deal the aces to instead.
Finally, I learned about switching cards, the least common category of gambling maneuvers, because of the risks involved. There are dozens of methods for improving your hand by replacing it with a better one—including the hand-mucking technique I’d seen Wes showing Jack Diamond on the day we met. “Guy I taught this to made a hundred thousand a year in Puerto Rico with just this one move,” Wes said with a satisfied look on his face. Wes showed me several ingenious methods for palming cards off the top and bottom of the deck, and he engaged the table in a lengthy diatribe on the proper action of the thumb during the top palm. “Vernon preached that you should not move your thumb,” he said, weighing his words, “and Vernon was wrong.” A hush fell over the table.
“Are you sure you’re allowed to say that?” asked one guy. There was a rustle of laughter.
Wes glared at him. “Yes,” he said gravely. “I was one of his direct students, and I argued with him about it. So I have the right to say it.”
You don’t mess with Wes when it comes to Dai Vernon—or anything else for that matter, as Doug Edwards will tell you.
Like Vernon, Wes had devoted years to mastering the weapons of the cardsharp. He could quote The Expert at the Card Table chapter and verse, and when he did, his voice took on an almost ecclesiastical tone. As with all things, Wes had strong opinions about the book. I’d learned this the first time we spoke, when he informed me of all the errors in Erdnase. Looking back, I realized how foolish I’d been trying to impress him with my brand-new, unworn copy. I’d brought a knife—nay, a red plastic water pistol—to a gunfight.
A century after the book was published in 1902, magicians are still mining The Expert at the Card Table for material. When David Blaine riffles through the faces of the cards and says, “Just remember one,” he’s doing Erdnase. The hardcore card guys pore over the book much in the way that rabbinical scholars study the Talmud, arguing over every phrase, unpacking every word.
And just as no one knows who wrote the Talmud, no one knows who Erdnase was, despite intense effort on the part of many magicians to ascertain his identity. One theory is that Erdnase was a small-time swindler surnamed Andrews (S. W. Erdnase spelled backward is E. S. Andrews) who was wanted for murder and shot himself when the long arm of the law finally caught up with him. Others have suggested that the author was a well-educated man of high social standing, a pillar of the community who hid behind an alias to shield his reputation. (This would explain the inkhorn prose.) Spanish maestro Juan Tamariz, leader of the Madrid School, is of the view that the nineteenth-century Peruvian magician L’Homme Masqué, a shadowy figure who lived by his wits and never performed without a mask, wrote the book. In the absence of any definitive evidence, the hunt continues.
Inspired by Wes’s own obsession with the book, I began reading my leatherette-bound pocket edition of Erdnase on the subway and at school. The dense descriptions and highly technical passages were tough to follow, like a physics book, and the gilt edges and ribbon placeholder often led people to mistake it for the Bible. “Bless you,” an old woman said on the train one morning, eyeing the little tome. “It’s so nice to see a young boy reading the good book.” Stifling the urge to stand up and start preaching from the legerdemain section, I flashed her an innocent altar boy look. Hallelujah.
REFINED OVER DECADES, THE MOVES I learned from Wes are behind the high-stakes hustles run by top card mechanics all around the world, professional thieves who earn a living by robbing other players blind in dimly lit rooms rank with the smell of cigar smoke, scotch, and testosterone. More often than not, these men are freelancers for hire. Some rich heel will decide to rig his home game, so he rings in a mechanic to cheat for his team. The buy-ins will range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a hundred grand.
Wes had spent a good deal of time in this shady milieu, and our conversations often consisted of my listening to him reminisce about the many cheats he’d known. One such story concerned a Brooklyn man who played with a group of loan sharks in the back room of a pizzeria not unlike Rustico II. “These guys would hurt you because they didn’t think twice about hurting people,” Wes explained. This particular hustler worked the game all by himself, without a partner, and he wore a safari jacket loaded with zippered compartments. In one of these compartments he would hide a prearranged deck, called a cooler. All night he’d play clean, no moves, until finally, after he’d put in the hours and it was time to get paid, he’d point at the wall clock and yell, “Holy shit! Look at the time! This has gotta be the last one, guys!” While everyone turned to look at the clock, he’d reach in his pocket and switch in the cooler. “It was one move,” Wes snorted. “And that was a week’s pay.”
A more popular scam these days, although the idea is at least a century old, is something known as the dealback. In a dealback scam, the dealer and one or more of the players conspire to steal the pot by secretly recycling hands back into play. A prearranged signaling system is used to orchestrate the moves. Let’s say you’re playing Texas Hold ’Em. The hands are dealt, a pair of cards to each player. You look at your hand and commit it to memory—then you fold. The dealer casually scoops up your cards, controls them to the bottom of the deck, and in the next round deals those cards off the bottom to one of the other players—usually the person with the biggest chip stack. As a result, you now know their hole cards. Over the course of an evening, this is a crushing advantage.
The same technique can be used to recycle a good hand after a bad flop—the first three faceup community cards. Say you’ve got black pocket aces—normally a premium hand, except that the flop is all hearts. This is a dicey situation. Another heart, and your aces are toilet paper next to a flush draw on the board. So instead of playing your hand, you fold while covertly signaling the dealer to give you back your aces in the next round. In a single cycle of betting, this gives you a slight edge, but over the long haul, it’s devastating.
A similar set of principles is behind the sophisticated scams used to cheat in real casinos, although it’s much more difficult to cheat at a casino than in a private game because of the many countermeasures in place designed to thwart illicit play. For one, casinos have expensive security systems and paid personnel who monitor the games closely. Furthermore, casinos keep mathematically precise tabs on how much money each table gives out. Any anomalies trigger alarm bells and prompt a phalanx of bull-necked men with earpieces to crack their knuckles and flex their guns. Gambling is all about statistical certainty. “Luck may be a fickle mistress,” observes gaming expert David Britland, in his book Phantoms of the Card Table, “but probability is a firm friend, at least if you are a casino owner.” From a large number of random events—each spin of the wheel, each roll of the dice, each turn of the card—a predictable pattern emerges, like the image in a pointillist painting. In physics, this is the essence of the second law of thermodynamics, which governs, among others things, the flow of heat, the decay of order into chaos, and perhaps even the directionality of time. Unlike Newton’s equations, the second law is not a deterministic set of rules that governs the behavior of the universe, but rather a statement about what’s most likely to happen over time when your sample size is extremely large—the so-called thermodynamic limit. That said, you wouldn’t want to bet against it, because the same probabilistic laws also prevail at the casino. Which is why, when one blackjack table is paying out more than the rest, the evidence points to cheating. Crooked dealers know this, and in order to evade suspicion, they’ll take in as much as they give out. In the casino universe, luck is conserved. When a shady dealer engineers a bit of good fortune here, by delivering good cards to his confederate, he has to eliminate it elsewhere by dealing bad cards to another player. If a cheater wins big thanks to the dealer’s largesse, you can be fairly certain the cards will fall cruelly for the unsuspecting businessman who sits down at the same table a few moments later. Like the stock market, it’s a zero sum game, and someone has to foot the bill.
