On a sunny summer afternoon I noticed Hakim moping in a corner of my local poker room. After I signed up for a $4-8 Hold'Em seat, I meandered over to his chair and said, "Hey, Dude, wha's up?" He told me that the player with the 'funny grip' stopped playing in his home game after he introduced a transparent dealing shoe. He was still losing in his home game, just not so much nor so often.
I asked Hakim if anyone wore sunglasses in his home poker game. "Several did," he answered, "why did I ask?" Years ago, someone discovered that by marking the cards' backs with special ink, cheats could read the marks with special sunglasses. In those days, anyone wearing sunglasses while playing cards was a cheat, prima facie. These days, amateurs see world-class poker players on television wearing sunglasses, so they wear sunglasses too. Most are just imitating the world-class players they see on TV. Some are using their sunglasses to read cards marked with special inks, called luminous readers. I told Hakim that I searched the Internet for 'marked cards.' The search engine returned 32 million hits. Some websites state that their marked cards are for magicians and "for entertainment purposes only." (Hah!) Most openly sell marked decks for use by card cheats. At about $30 per deck on eBay(TM) and other websites, you can buy luminous readers plus the red filters that adhere to the inside of ordinary, drugstore sunglasses. (For about $300, red contact lenses are also available.) Including stylish, special sunglasses, another website will sell you two decks of cobalt luminous readers for $900. The cheat figures he can win more in one session than his cost for the deck. If the home game host re-uses the decks, then the cheat will profit from those same marked cards time after time.
Bicycle(TM), Bee(TM), KEM(TM), and Copag(TM) are popular canvases for the markers' brushes. The deck doctors buy decks straight off the shelf, carefully remove them from their wrappings, mark them, and repackage them with the tax stamps intact. Only very close inspection may reveal that anyone gaffed the deck and then resealed its packaging. During the game, the filter-wearing cheat uses a diversion to substitute his luminous readers for the straight deck. He may himself create a diversion, or call the others' attention to the TV replay of a goal, touchdown, slam-dunk, home run, etc. Of course he's careful that the brand and back color match. A brazen cheat will 'donate' a gaffed deck before the game begins, as his contribution to the host's expenses.
Gamblers have used playing cards for a thousand years. (Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962, p.629.) Cheats have gaffed cards for just as long, I imagine.
Hakim was stunned. What could he do? Your next step, I told him, is to ban all sunglasses. He guessed he could do that. He was so tired of losing in his home game that he was willing to try anything.
He asked was there anything else about which he should worry. In the decades since John Scarne listed seven other types of marked cards, cheats have developed 'glimmer' and 3-D decks. There are also ways to mark cards during play; there are mechanical devices for substituting keycards; and, there are shiners. I told him we'd barely just begun.
Also, I warned, watch out for tinted contacts, and refuse player-donated decks.
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