Hello there,

I got given Gambling Scams by Darwin Ortiz as a present recently and read through it practically in one sitting. I found the whole thing absolutely fascinating.
I've always been aware of gambling routines etc and frequent this forum now and again but the stories of Carnival games, proposition bets and Set ups etc
were truly brilliant.

Now I want to read more and more about such things but Mr. Ortiz' book has already been devoured twice.

Does anybody have any recommendations for other books etc? I am not trying to learn these scams just read about them and enjoy the stories around and behind them.

Appreciate any advice.

R

A cheap book I like very much is "Dealing with cheats".
I don't like Darwin Ortiz's book, he is clearly a magician.

http://www.arnoldmcdonald.org/code/main.php?p=6700000

Take a look at:

- Book: Exposing
- Book: Technique

Thanks, I shall take a look. Darwin is a magician but I didn't feel it impacted too much on the material within, given my laymen position. I'm
sure perhaps you are more familiar with such writings are therefore were able to discern a notable difference.



Thank you Arnold.

If you want more prop bets, Todd Robbin's "Modern Con Man" and Paul Zenon's "100 Ways to Win a Ten Spot" are both alright and have a few good ones. But if you want the "real work" on con games and scams, you have to read the autobiography of Yellow Kid Weil and David Maurer's The Big Con. Neither of those have been topped by more recent work in my opinion

Thank you Mr. Quackenbush

Kind of hard to get, but worth it in my opinion is; How to Detect Crooked Gambling: Marked Cards and Loaded Dice by Frank Garcia. One of my absolute favorites to read, very entertaining and enlightening.

Kingman

If you are just looking for gambling scams (as opposed to cheating at cards and dice), you might find “The World’s Greatest Gambling Scams” by Richard Marcus to be of interest. I wrote a review of this book some time back so if you are interested, I will post it if I can find it.

As I recall, carnival game scams were covered rather thoroughly in “Scarne’s Complete Guide to Gambling” by John Scarne. If you are looking for that type material, you might want to check that out.

Depends on more specifically what you want. The term “Gambling Scams” covers a wide range of topics with many sub-categories. You might want to be a little more specific.

If you want to be entertain by good stories, you can read novels like 'Grift Sense' by James Swain. It's a detective story about gambling scams, it's a work of fiction based on some real facts (for example : blackjack tells). He has written about 15 books ! Happy reading !



It's not really about Gambling Scams, but I think you will enjoy :

'Lost Vegas' by Paul McGuire. He describes the other side of WSOP and Sin City.
'Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People: The Memoirs of the Greatest Gambler'

Road Hustler

Also, if you're in it for the stories, George Devol's 40 years a gambler is a must read. Also, Ricky Jay's Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women for a taste of the truly weird of that whole era. And if you're interested in just the general era of old timey criminality that isn't specific to gambling or grifting, I think Jack Black's You Can't Win is a wonderful read. And then finally, there's a really interesting story about Herbert Yardley tell's in his "education of a poker player" about how he saved Chiang Kai Shek's life while sitting at a poker table in Saipan, IIRC.

Ditto.

There is also the book by Simon Lovell "How to cheat at everything" that is a good read for carnival games as well as basic false deals, marked cards gaffs, and hustles.
By the way, Simon is an excellent teacher at second dealing (See his booklet Second to none).

Slim

I posted this on a thread back in June of 2010:

<<I have not seen this name come up in the Café.

Luc Sante is an extraordinary writer. He dances a phrase with rare finesse.

His book, “Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York” is one of the most erudite pieces of prose ever written about the underbelly of a New York City now long gone (circa 1840- 1920).

The entire book is a gem, a tremendous read!!!

Sante’s chapter on gambling, “Chance”, is brilliant and evocative.

The British imprint of the book is sub-titled: “Drinking, Drugging, Whoring, Murder, Corruption, Vice and Miscellaneous Mayhem in Old New York.”

How can you resist?

Trust me - you will thank me for this lead!

For further reference and to read Luc Sante speaking about games of chance and scams, look here:

http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_sante

An excerpt:

BLVR: What’s the best con you’ve come across?

LS: I’ve always loved the homespun symmetry of the cat-and-rat farm. It’s simplicity itself: You set up two sheds, one on either side of the road. One contains cats and the other contains rats. You skin the cats to make fur coats and feed their remains to the rats, and then you feed the rats to the cats. The cats and the rats reproduce passim. Presto: fur-coat trade, no overhead. It’s a perpetual-motion machine. I gather it dates from the 1910s or ‘20s, although I don’t know specifics of anyone employing it. Maybe it sounds better than it plays in the field. (Wait! Do I need to point out that no cats or rats are ever actually harmed—because such a farm is never actually established?)

BLVR: What’s the best street con you’ve ever fallen for?

LS: I’ve never actually been taken, except voluntarily. Besides giving money to people with really wild stories, I also once coughed up at least $15 or $20 to a couple of old-timers who were running a bona fide banco set-up. It was around 1988 or ‘89, when I was working on Low Life. I was breezing through SoHo, which at the time was filled with vast empty storefronts that had lately lost their art galleries and while awaiting the arrival of the corporate vermin had been fitted out as multivendor bazaars in which people sold T-shirts, junk jewelry, and personalized coffee mugs. To my astonishment, there in one of those souks were these two rascals—seventy-five if they were a day—running an operation of a sort that had last been seen in the neighborhood in the 1920s. It was like going fishing and catching a coelacanth, if you had just that day read the Britannica entry on it. A friend of mine came around later and, without the benefit of my research, was thoroughly taken by those guys, to the extent of going home for more money—they string you along by letting you think you are forever just a dice-roll away from collecting the pot, and every dice roll costs more money than the previous one. I think he dropped a couple of centuries.

BLVR: I think there’s part of us that secretly wants to fall for the con.

LS: The con is a kind of jiu-jitsu that turns the sucker’s own greed into its principal weapon. The greedier you are the more likely you are to be conned, and for the greater a sum. Since people regularly dispose of their intelligence in their rush to be swindled, and then turn right around and do it again, humans must want to be duped. Institutionalized wishful thinking—the stock market, religion, advertising—is after all a cornerstone of our system.>>

Completely missed most of these replies, apologies.

Thank you all for your help and input. I'm going to hunt down some of the books mentioned now.