Gambling History | Cheating | Playing Cards & Dice

As soon as men learned how to gamble, they learned how to cheat. In this article we give some examples of cheating in gambling.

Card telegraphy means to signal to a player the value of a card that is hidden from his view. The Greek gamblers were said to be very adept at this mode of cheating. To send signals, one would make use of predefined gestures and movements, each one telling the player something about the card.

For example, to glance at the player would mean a king, and to look at their opponent would signify a queen. A mouth open or shut would suggest the suit of hearts or the suit of diamonds and so on. So as the player dealt their cards, they would keep an eye on the telegrapher. Other signs were blowing the nose, tapping the fingers, nodding the head and so on.

It was also possible to combine gestures. Thus, if the opponent had an ace and a jack, one would make the gestures for these cards simultaneously. All of this was done with the utmost discretion. No untrained eye could notice them.

As gambling evolved, so did cheating methods became more advanced. Many signs were developed and sometimes the players themselves could transmit information to their conspirators in the audience. As one can see, it is very easy to cheat in card games like piquet with this method (provided, of course that others are allowed to watch the game). In piquet, only 32-36 cards were used in the Middle Ages. It was very simple for a gambler to play a winning game in this way.

Robert Houdin once wrote that it is possible to gain an advantage in playing cards with the use of memory. Cardsd generally stick together despite the most thorough shuffling. So if one of a pair of cards shows up again in the course of the game, one can be sure that the other isn't far off.

Long before cards, dice had been used in gambling. Cheating with dice is done with "loading." That is, it is so weighted to give desired results. Loaded dice have been discovered by archeologists in ancient Rome, thus proving the antiquity of cheating. In later times, more advanced cheating would use two kinds of dice, one "high" and one "low." These would be skillfully exchanged as needed, to get the needed results.

Of course, the biggest cheaters in gambling can only be the people who run it. Well, so the stories go. One of the most infamous was Madame Mustache who ran her own casino in Nevada. When her cheating ways were discovered, Madame Mustache would just move to another town and do the same thing. But her gambling luck eventually ran out, and she killed herself in the end.

Today, not only gambling houses, but also television game shows are believed to cheat players by manipulating the results. We suppose that for as long as there are rules in a game, there will always be those who try to break them. Such is human nature after all.

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