Card marking

Pronged cards are playing cards, where the card value of a real face-down card by unobtrusive markers for the initiated is revealed. The term comes from the slang of the tramps and traveling artisans, marked by certain characters ( tines ) houses to give the followers information about the residents. U.S. players call pronged cards as readers, papers or doctored decks.

Pronged cards are used in many card games for fraudulent con game. But modern magician use these cards to present to their audience amazing card tricks.

Marking

There are countless methods to highlight cards. Commercial cards can be marked on the back with a variety of options, such as light pencil marks, scratches or machine-made cards by slight changes in the pattern. If your card is lower quality the backs can vary, for example with an asymmetric center the back pattern. The major U.S. producers cards print since 1830 and for the cheater needs pronged cards. Refined are arisen in the 60's so-called luminous readers, which are characterized by a specific color code, which requires a polarized spectacles or contact lenses or rotfilternde to recognize the card values ​​. Occasionally, the 3D effect is harnessed. In this effect, the card value is visible through a particular focus of the card. In the 19th century cheaters honed from the fingertips to the lowest skin to sense marked by small stitches cards.

Strategy

The use of dovetailed cards is particularly convincing when they were apparently not brought into play by the cheaters. If a dovetail discovered, the offender can draw from the elegant affair in this way. Often be prepared cards in places where the gambling frequently, apparently "forgotten". Another method is to hosts low card in bulk packaging for sale by apparent representatives. A third way is to highlight interesting cards in the course of a match for the next rounds. It is possible for cards common brands, the exchange with a prepared game.

Contrary to popular belief pronged cards hardly used for spying alien leaves, but betrayed especially the donor, whom he hands out interesting cards or which card is on a stack, where you can swap cards. Therefore, the identified position of a card already offers a statistically significant advantage because you can exclude them in the Journal of appearance.

Countermeasures

Pronged Card can not only be convincing launched, but marked in the course of a match or exchanged, so that you do not even playing with your cards has the guarantee to play with clean cards. No serious player who plays for significant amounts of money will, however, raise objections, if in the course of the evening several times a new card game is required (which of course can also be dovetailed ). Running the games only once in casinos to be replaced or used as in baccarat. A limited way to identify pronged cards, is to initiate noise ( " ripples " ) of the card, where you can discover irregularities as in the flipbook. With a professionally selected game but one has even with several minutes of comparison, no chance to identify a marker. There's also plenty of alternative methods to spy card values ​​without marked cards.

By far the most efficient strategy to avoid marked cards, is the renunciation of playing for money with strangers. Conversely, the probability that a professional player does not know any tricks or would apply, be neglected.

Terms of Use

The use of marked cards realized the money game to constitute fraud. Manufacture and sale of marked cards are allowed, but may give rise to charges of aiding and abetting fraud under certain circumstances.

Curiosities

  • The Magicians and scientists Jean Eugène Robert -Houdin, who wrote in particular the first systematic book on cheating, needed in one case over a week to discover the secret of an obviously marked cards game.
  • The " Reformed Gambler " Green claimed in the 19th century in his explanation shows, all of the cards are dovetailed, he could prove - through a clever hidden mirror. Gambling expert John Scarne exaggerated in the Second World War, the spread of jointed playing cards also intemperate, which earned him a secure income with cheating demonstrations at military bases.
  • New York's first major crime boss Arnold Rothstein, among other things, Baseball games rigged, was shot in 1928 in the dispute over a game of winning the dice game organizer George McManus, after the cards had been found to be dovetailed.
  • In the United States existed until the 60s the curiosity that although the trade with marked cards was legal, but not the shipment by the U.S. federal mail due to the special postal laws.
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