Anyone into magic and card tricks likely already knows everything there is to know about John Scarne, since he's arguably history's most important card operator.
Until I'd read Ian Fleming's Moonraker (see below), I had never even heard of this guy, and I don't care in the least about magic or cards. Yet I found this autobiography absolutely loaded with useful insights and great 20th century history. Scarne seems to rub elbows with nearly everybody: there are stories about gangsters including Al Capone and Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein (who allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series); stories about the vaudeville era, including Scarne's long friendship with Harry Houdini; all kinds of stories from the New York City Prohibition/speakeasy era, and fascinating stories from New Jersey history too, including some wonderful old-time boxing stories, as Scarne was a lifetime friend of heavyweight champion Jimmy Braddock.
And there's a tremendous chapter on the Cuban revolution: Scarne was there too, helping to run casinos, reduce cheating and establish fair gambling policies. Fidel Castro even lived next door to Scarne for a while, taking an adjacent suite in the same Hilton Scarne managed. Actually Castro took two suites, according to Scarne: one for handling government affairs, the other for banging chicks (mostly Americans).
Finally, this book gives all kinds of thoughts and insights on how not to get hustled--not just in gambling, cards or dice, but in life. What a pleasure to read!
I stumbled onto this book in Ian Fleming's Moonraker, thanks to that book's wonderful "bridge hand" chapter where Bond hustles the villain Drax by switching card decks. Fleming describes Bond preparing for this card game by going to his bookshelf and getting his copy of Scarne on Cards. And with that oblique throwaway reference I fell down the rabbit hole that is John Scarne's life.
One minor criticism: all of the book's dialogue is in "as remembered" style, and Scarne writes out his various conversations in a weirdly stilted way. People simply do not talk like this. You'll see exactly what I mean when you read the book.
Scarne comes across as a man who stays curious his whole life, who asks questions, learns constantly, and--with two prominent exceptions--remains humble. One of these exceptions was ironic: as much a success he was as a magician and card mechanic, he never could seem to learn from his constant failures marketing his various board games. The other exception, a fascinating one, was Scarne's strangely incontinent dispute with Ed Thorp. Scarne attempted to discredit Thorp's "Beat the Dealer" blackjack strategies, publicly claiming they didn't work. There were bets and lawsuits between them, and it appears to be generally agreed that Scarne emerged the loser from this conflict.
Notes:
Chapter 1: Meeting My First Card Cheats
1) Scarnecchia was his parents' surname; they emigrated from Italy's Abruzzi region (some hundred miles east of Rome) to America in the early 1900s. They came through New York, went to Steubenville, Ohio (of all places), where his father found work in a steel mill; Scarne was born in 1904; his parents and older sister fell into financial distress as coal strikes throughout the country idled the steel industry; the family relocated to New Jersey where his mother's brother lived.
2) He drops his rather Italianate name Orlando Carmelo Scarnecchia for "John." Gambling was everywhere when he was young and he dreamed of becoming a great gambler as a boy. It seemed to him like the only way to make money. The reader will see a profound evolution in Scarne over the course of his life, ultimately he recommends most everyone avoid gambling at all costs.
3) At around age ten he instantly grasps a card game that his father, uncle and their friends were playing: Scarne instinctively counted the cards, and knew that his father shouldn't have drawn a card; his uncle realizes he has more card sense than all of them put together: "Remind me not to play cards for money with him when he grows up."
4) As a kid he starts hanging around a gambler named Lucky near an amusement park in North Bergen, NJ. Lucky teaches him swindles like three card monte and the three shell game. He watches Lucky cheat at poker and win a $90 pot--equivalent to what Scarne's father would earn in three weeks of hard labor.
5) He teaches himself how to stack aces and deal himself four aces in a poker hand, practicing in front of a mirror to perfect his technique.
6) 1919: He spends time in West New York, NJ: there was a restaurant there that held card gambling games in the basement without police interference. Scarne joins in (he's around age 15), playing a game called Banker and Broker with much older men. Scarne knew he was being cheated, but wasn't sure exactly how at first: he then realizes the deck is "shaved" with uneven edges on certain cards. He exposes the card cheat to the other guys and they have a huge fight with knives and bottles.
Chapter 2: A Postgraduate Course in Marked Cards and Crooked Dice
7) Scarne gets religion about being a card shark, understanding there's much more danger to it than he realized; also his mother tells him how sinful it is to cheat at cards; she persuades him to be a magician. He invents different card tricks, learns how to cut all four aces from the deck at will, he invents "the card in the wallet" trick, etc.
8) He discovers a small shop selling "belly stripper" cards, where the high value cards are trimmed about a 1/32nd of an inch off each side, and the low cards were trimmed in a convex fashion on the same side, "so that each low card was slightly wider than a high card at the center and slightly narrower at the ends." When the low and high cards were shuffled he only had to grasp the deck at the center, cut the cards, and the bottom card of the cutoff portion would always be a low card; if you grip the deck near the ends and cut, you would always cut to a high card. Scarne is on one level disgusted by the existence of such things but yet fascinated by other stuff the store sells, like different kinds of dice; the shop owner Ame teaches Scarne how loaded dice are made with a tiny copper slug drilled into the holes.
9) [One clear takeaway so far for an attentive reader: Scarne finds no shortage of people who enjoy answering his questions: people love to talk about what they do and what they know. Most of the time nobody shows interest in what people know or think. You can learn a lot (and spread a good vibe while learning!) by asking people questions about what they do and why: it's a way of showing interest in them and it helps you both.]
10) Testing a loaded die by dropping it into a glass of water gently; see also the "pivot test" to test for a load: hold the die extremely gently between two fingers by the corners and you see the die pivot if there's a load; you have to test all four combinations of the corners.
11) Six-Ace Flats dice: they are brick shaped so the six/one side has greater surface area than the other side. Also "tops and bottoms" dice that have numbers 1, 3 and 5 repeated twice, you can only see three sides of the cube at a view, so you can use these periodically in a dice game, surreptitiously switching them in and out of the game with true dice.
12) On marked cards: professional cheats call marked cards "paper"; amateur cheats call them "readers"; Ame (the store owner from above) would steam off the revenue stamp from the card deck box, mark the cards, then reseal the label.
13) Scarne: "I probably met and saw more crooked gamblers in those few months than any average cheater would meet in a lifetime."
14) Scarne also gauges his ability with cards compared to others: he sees this guy Feeney who is considered one of the best second and bottom dealers around New Jersey; Scarne was surprised: the guy seemed clumsy and obvious to him. He also learns what "steerers" are: pretty girls that steer suckers to a dice or card game.
Chapter 3: Fire Eaters, Sword Swallowers, and Carnival Gyps
15) Scarne teaches himself different types of card cutting techniques (the Pass, the Hop); he discovers false shuffles and peeks; he has no idea that these are the most difficult moves to master in card manipulation, he assumes that most everybody can do these tricks.
16) A magician from the local fair's big tent show (this was The Great Dagmar, who went on to become a top flight vaudeville magician) tells him "if you ever decide to go into show business you'd better shorten your last name. No one will be able to pronounce it, let alone remember it, as it is." He and this magician trade tricks; "This is when I first realized that a top-notch gambler cheat (the magician of the underworld) was considerably more adept at sleight of hand than a first rate magician--the magician is free to use a great deal of conversation and misdirection to fool his audience, but a card, dice or gambling cheat is limited by the game's regulations."
17) He learns fire-eating from one of the other performers, a Cherokee.
18) His mother returns home from an extended trip to Italy, during this trip his father died suddenly of a heart attack and was buried in Italy.
19) He gets a job at a local diner just by being in the right place at the right time, soon he gets paid extra to do card tricks as entertainment there; a lot of well-known people come to this diner and so his career and reputation start to get off the ground, he gets gigs, etc.
20) He keeps "reinvesting" into his career: continues to go to carnivals to learn as much as he can about "flatties" and "grifters" (operators of crooked carnival games). He develops methods for getting people to talk about their techniques. "Like most gambling cheats I have met throughout the world in my life, carnival flatties like to show off their skill in front of other members of the grift." Scarne also takes a political candidate through a carnival and explains all the rigged games. The politician takes him over to police headquarters to give a talk to the chief of police.
22) Scarne meets Henny Youngman in a business card store.
23) Sidebar here on different strategy games and board games that he invented (and later pulled from the market) like Scarnee and Teeko. There will be much more discussion of this (and Scarne's persistant inability to make money selling these board games!) later in the book.
24) He takes a course in elocution, studying voice and diction; keeps trying to spot new techniques for card cheats and dice cheats, trying to find new angles.
Chapter 4: Meeting the Racket Bosses of the Roaring Twenties
25) Prohibition causes lots of law-abiding citizens to enter into various conspiracies: Prohibition laws are deeply unpopular, also interesting comments here from Scarne on low civilizational morals and implications thereof: "Bootleggers and racketeers were glorified, accepted socially and paid homage to by the millions of Americans who believed that Prohibition was a joke. ... In those days many were prouder to shake hands with Arnold Rothstein [Rothstein was nicknamed "The Brain," he's the guy who allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series], America's kingpin gambler, or Al Capone, the Chicago racket boss, than Calvin Coolidge, the President of the United States."
26) He meets Rothstein at a performance in Tammany Hall; Rothstein hires him for a private gig, just for him and his henchmen. Rothstein hired him several nights in a row, each time having Scarne do the ace-cutting trick in front of his best card cheats, all of whom claimed they could figure out his method. Nobody could figure it out.
27) He meets the Hiker (a card cheat), who tells him they could earn at least a hundred thousand dollars at a resort in Hot Springs, Arkansas, separating wealthy business tycoons from their money in high-stakes poker games using Scarne's various shuffle techniques. Scarne refuses, saying he won't cheat other players. The Hiker responds, "Johnny, I wish I thought that way when I was your age."
28) Also: note Arnold Rothstein was later gunned down in his apartment over an argument over a crooked game.
29) His childhood friend Jimmy Braddock starts off his boxing career; Scarne meets the "cauliflower set" [holy cow what a great expression!].
30) In the 20s Scarne did card tricks for Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Babe Ruth, all kinds of people in speakeasies in training camps all over New York and New Jersey; he also meets Marty "O'Brien" Sinatra's eight-year-old Frank in Hoboken.
31) He gets invited to perform in front of the "mayor" of Chicago; it turns out to be Al Capone, Scarne doesn't know until the very last minute.
32) He helps Jack "Doc" Kearns identify percentage losses in a private gambling game, then Kearns tells him some of the things he does in boxing like switching gloves to ensure his fighter gets "the best of it."
33) He does a performance in Chicago for a meeting of Al Capone's top mobsters from all over the country. The minute Scarne recognizes Al Capone his nervousness disappears completely. "And to this day I can't explain the reason." Scarne ends up getting a standing ovation from a huge room full of mobsters.
Chapter 5: Fooling America's Greatest Magicians
34) The "Miracle Man": a kooky run-down broke guy who makes dollar bills walk across the bar, can stop a clock, etc. It's interesting Scarne never gives away this guy's secrets to his tricks despite the fact that he almost certainly knew not only how he did them but learned some of them himself.
35) The problems of doing card tricks in a large theater, no one can see!
36) It's interesting also to see Scarne gradually figure out that he's really good at what he does, but it doesn't make him arrogant: he works like crazy, and also his experience entertaining Rothstein and his mobster/cardshark friends made him realize that no audience would ever be harder or harsher: this gave him still more confidence.
37) He wants to learn more traditional magic, he starts scouting the top magicians in action, seeing all the shows at the vaudeville houses in and around New York City, watching acts.
38) "The vanishing and reappearing lady trick was simple to do and could be performed by any person who had $600 with which to buy the illusion and who could secure the services of a pair of female twins."
39) He shows his card tricks to Harry Houdini, who is blown away; becomes friends with Houdini, also Scarne cites Houdini's crusade against fraudulent mediums and charlatans (more on this in the next chapter).
40) Scarne develops a reputation as the magician who fools magicians, all the other guys are talking about him.
Chapter 6: My Psychic Experiences with Harry Houdini
41) Harry Houdini's advice to Scarne: "Johnny, here's a bit of advice that I found out to be true during my lifetime--you take it for what it's worth. You'll be told by your magician friends that they want to see you get ahead. They do, but not too far ahead. The farther you get ahead the more your magician friends will turn against you."
42) Scarne starts exposing mediums in New Jersey: Madame Olga in Jersey City, also the Egyptian fakir Rahman Bey; On using shills ("shillabers" as Scarne puts it) to find customers and learn things about them; note also the use of "good guesses": all you have to do is get one right and the client will forget all the wrong guesses. Note also the use of the "one-ahead" technique, you read the question from the sealed envelope of your known associate, and then open it to show you're correct, but you're actually opening the envelope of the next person's question so you can read that person's question in advance.
43) Interesting quote here from Houdini about people playing both sides of a scam [in this case psychic research, but see below]: "Houdini continued, 'Johnny, it's a well-known fact that a few intellectual members of psychical research societies have played both sides of the fence at the same time. Their duty is to ferret out psychic frauds, but instead they keep foisting one psychic hoax after another on the public and on their brother members. These chiselers do this in order to have a reason to ask their brother members for donations to continue their phony so-called research. The psychical crowd are not only very often duped by stage hypnotists, fraudulent mediums, and the self-styled clairvoyants, but are also made fools of by a few of their double-crossing members who are supposed to investigate psychic phenomena but instead keep endorsing hoaxes to the honest but credulous seekers of psychic phenomena.' ... 'Harry, I never thought that any scientist or doctor would stoop so low as to play two sides of the fence and betray the scientific world.'" [Note how this is an example of a sort of approved opposition/limited hangout, and one can see how this would easily be repurposed to apply to things like arbitrary pandemic policy or novel biotherapy injections just as well: you have doctors who may help expose the lack of science behind the most laughable of pandemic policy (like the made-up "6 feet of social distancing") while remaining curiously unwilling to talk about "less safe" topics (like harms from mRNA injections).]
44) On using "horses": professional subjects deliberately chosen from the audience who don't feel physical pain or can pretend to be hypnotized, etc.
45) Interesting debate here on the reality/fakery of hypnotism between Houdini and Scarne on pages 212-220. They discuss the famous hypnotist from 1870-era Paris, Dr. Charcot (Houdini actually knew his "horse," Tommy Minnock, who had an exceptionally high pain tolerance), Mesmer (examined by Lavoisier and Ben Franklin, found to be making false claims and forced to leave France); also on hypnotist's subjects' "fear to disobey."
46) Houdini starts to have trouble filling theaters as his acts become repetitive; then he died suddenly in 1926 of appendicitis.
Chapter 7: A Bet with the Secret Service and a Performance for President Roosevelt
47) Scarne starts practicing escape routines, nearly dies during a stunt in the Hackensack River.
48) He never deals cards in card games now: everyone assumes that he'll deal himself a winning hand, or if he ever happens to have a winning hand it's assumed he dealt it on purpose. (!)
49) He learns dice "bust out" moves from Con Baker, a famous dice bust out artist, in Jersey City. Baker made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of Capone's henchman, oil barons, etc., but ended up paying shakedown payments to professional killers and died penniless at age 37.
50) Discussion here of Jimmy Braddock, Scarne's childhood friend who grew up to become a famous New Jersey fighter; Braddock during one of his important fights on the way to a title, his TKO over Tuffy Griffiths in 1928. [Braddock went on to become heavyweight champion from 1935 to 1937, losing the title to Joe Louis by KO.]
51) Card tricks for President Roosevelt in Sea Girt, NJ, he blows the president away; and after this gig he gets swamped with vaudeville club bookings.
Chapter 8: My $5,000 Challenge to the Magicians of the World
52) See Scarne's public wagers for a head-to-head trick for trick magic competition: free and very effective publicity. Scarne seems to have a knack for this. It's beautiful reading his 1933 publicity brochure from that era (see p 255-6). Such innocence...
53) "I firmly believe that at the time I issued my $5,000 challenge to the magicians of the world, although I was only thirty years of age, I was at my peak of proficiency in all-round sleight-of-hand magic." Peak at age 30...
54) He orders too many of his new board game "Scarne," it doesn't sell; of the 5000 he orders, he ends up burning the 4700 left over that he couldn't sell. "This was not the last game-burning incident in my life. It was repeated on seven different occasions, during the next twenty-seven years, with various other games that I marketed and later improved. However, as I reflect back through the years, I am happy to state that in spite of my many game failures I had the stick-to-itiveness to continue my game experiments. These many long years of assiduous experimentation on games was motivated by my firm belief that someday I would go down in history as the inventor of a series of skill games that surpassed checkers and chess both in strategy and in world popularity." [I think it's safe to say that this did not happen, and Scarne, for all his astounding gifts, wasn't exactly the most astute businessman when it came to game design and marketing.]
55) On writing Scarne on Dice; also on Johnny Winn, who developed the modern craps game where you can bet "two ways" (the so-called Philadelphia layout, with a don't pass line).
56) Scarne stays with boxing champ Primo Carnera in 1934 at the champ's training camp [in Pompton Lakes, NJ of all places]; Carnera trusts Scarne, they speak Italian together, etc.
57) 1934: Scarne also suggests a boxing opponent for an important up-and-coming challenger fighter, Corn Griffin; he suggests to Griffin's manager that Griffin fight Jimmy Braddock, who was supposedly washed up at the time (thus an easy victory for Griffin). Scarne could see that the way Griffin fought, Braddock would be able to beat him. Within about a year Braddock ended up winning the heavyweight championship in 1935. [Interesting how Scarne was so intertwined with the New Jersey boxing world; also interesting how he thus was able to entertain so many sports writers and get so much free publicity as a result.]
58) Scarne and Braddock pull kind of a mean magic trick on a woman who runs a little restaurant in Florida outside of Miami, making her think that there are gold pieces inside boiled eggs. She ends up wasting all her egg inventory looking for more gold pieces.
59) Neat story here where he and Jimmy Braddock get pulled into a poker game as patsies to be taken advantage of, and Scarne deals all the right cards to Braddock so that he can win; later a triggerman for Al Capone, Machine Gun Jack McGurn [holy cow these names are actually real!] walks into the suite where they were all playing and mocks the scammer for not recognizing John Scarne! He then asks Scarne to show all of his friends all his tricks: "for the next hour I did tricks for about sixty of the toughest hoodlums that ever infested Miami."
Chapter 9: Gambling in the Army in World War II and What I Did About It
60) Scarne gives a demonstration at Fort Dix on crooked dealing and crooked dice. "Any average cheater with a little bit of nerve could really have cleaned up in that outfit... I realized then that all those stories of the big-money winnings some of the cheats and gamblers said they made during the First World War weren't just tall tales." It turns out that many many scammers ended up going into uniform, and the cheating was a far more prevalent and enormous operation in the armed forces than anybody realized.
61) "What a sweet racket this Army turned out to be. And just think, I was real mad when Uncle Sam first called me." A gambling operator tells Scarne how he operates.
62) Scarne then travels to all kinds of different Navy and Army training stations and bases all over the country, some of these scenes are amazing: he gets his car shot at, he has to fight a couple of dudes, there's all sorts of crooked gambling all around military bases both inside and in clip joints outside the bases. "That guy Scarne has wised up every chump in the Army and a lot of them on the outside."
63) Scarne gets smeared in the media by some different articles "brought" to different Broadway media columnists [this is an interesting example of what can happen if you fall out of favor by criminal elements who happen to have connections in the media. We see a similar phenomenon happening to the medical dissident world right now as they are skewered in the MSM by better-connected elites who are pro-narrative]. In Scarne's case, pre-written articles were presented to various columnists, allegedly were from reliable sources, and the columnists printed the information without checking. Scarne was presented as hoaxing the military into making them think he's a gambling expert; one major article actually ran in the New York Mirror (in those days an important New York City paper). [Note also that the angle this particular article takes is fascinating: claiming that the idea that "the armed services are overrun with crooked gambling" is the actual hoax, when this is neither true nor even what Scarne was even claiming! Thus the smear articles take a mistruth, amplify it, and then claim it comes from the mouth of the person they're trying to smear. It's an interesting angle, ruthless and well done. And then furthermore the article implies Scarne, as a pseudo-expert, is getting free publicity--as if this is some kind of grift for him. Oh, how very very familiar: we can see the same smears are being used against certain dissident doctors today using the same playbook!] Ultimately the Mirror ran another article correcting/refuting all the false statements.
64) Scarne also has a false and incorrect article run on him in the Saturday Evening Post, although it doesn't frame Scarne as a grifter; it actually frames his crusade more or less positively. [As well as Scarne used the media earlier in his career, now the media is using him. This is actually quite a brutal PR battle... Scarne eventually figures out who are some of the people who smeared him, but not all.]
65) Really good story about a performance he did in a room full of generals, at a dinner to honor Sir William Welch (Air Marshal of Great Britain); a major general got him a drink (!) and to Scarne's shocked expression said, "Think nothing of it, Mr. Scarne--orders are orders." Scarne pilfers a thick envelope from Welch during the performance and has to figure out a way to put it back without anyone noticing; it actually contains part of the Allied plans for the invasion of Japan.
66) After he wraps up his multi-year tour of the US military, the reader learns Scarne didn't accept any money over this entire time and he basically had run out of money!
Chapter 10: Beating the Blackjack and Baccarat Tables: My $100,000 Challenge
67) "Professor, the trouble with you is that you're too damn honest. That's why everybody in Fairview says you'll always be broke." Now it's 1947 and Scarne does a speaking tour of betting parlors across the US. It's astounding to see gambling in so many cities across the country in those days: Buffalo, Toledo, blackjack houses all over the country, etc.
68) He beats the blackjack tables at Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo in Las Vegas.
69) Side note here on the US Senate Kefauver Hearings on organized gambling across the country and lax enforcement.
70) And holy shit on this trick he did for Siegel, with the card appearing on the OUTSIDE of the hotel room window.
71) He walks into another Vegas casino: "I'm John Scarne. Is it all right with the bosses if I sit down and win a thousand dollars playing Black Jack?" He soon gets banned from all Vegas casinos. [Note also that these are all played with one deck shoes dealt to the end! Much easier for the player to win.]
72) Scarne explains how to use a chip stack to "case the deck," tracking the 16 ten-count cards. You keep a 20-chip stack, separate out four for the aces and the remaining sixteen for the ten counts, then run a count by moving your chips off the two stacks. This is how you track everything when the deck gets down to the last 10-20 cards. "And when enough Black Jack players learn this gimmick, one-deck Black Jack is a dead goose."
73) Scarne predicts various changes coming to casino blackjack: the emergence of card shoes [limits dealer cheating], reshuffles mid-deck or mid-shoe [limits player advantages given the "contiguous probability" aspect of blackjack], muti-deck shoes, cutting out the last several cards from play, etc.
74) Siegel is murdered some three months after Scarne meets him.
75) Note the "DDT on one side of the sugar cube" gaffe where bettors bet which of a pair of sugar cubes a fly will land on. Wow. Scarne teaches Siegel who uses it on NJ rackett boss Willie Moretti.
76) Scarne is thrilled to be openly barred from all the top casinos in the country, after he systematically wins $1,000 at blackjack in several casinos.
77) Jumping ahead to Scarne's blackjack experience later in his life, in the 1950s: Interesting how Scarne mentions how a lack of gambling knowledge by blackjack pit bosses "cost the casino operators an estimated five million in potential winnings during the next few years." The casino pit bosses didn't know the various card count methods and other techniques to give players an advantage in blackjack.
78) Scarne works for a casino in Havana in the 1950s, and sees some known Vegas "count-down artists and proposition hustlers" ("Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. J." as Scarne calls them) come in the hotel; Scarne warns the casino management that these guys will want to adjust bet sizing beyond casino rules on certain hands that a casino might consider agreeing: they will wait until the deck gets rich and then ask the house to change bet maximums; and then they'll split any hand with face cards, and then double down on the split hands afterwards. The casino sees those as sucker bets, but these are not sucker bets when, for example, the dealer shows a six! If you're running down in a deck and the deck is rich you want to immediately split as many hands as you're playing, and double down as many hands as you possibly can.
79) Discussion here on baccarat strategy and card counting in baccarat; our hustlers Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. J. reappear here, now at the baccarat table at the Habana Hilton Casino in Havana, Cuba. [Scarne doesn't give out their names but two of them appear to be the same people Ed Thorp gambles with (playing baccarat), as we see this also talked about in Thorp's own autobiography.]
80) Now a number of discussions on Ed Thorp and his various "systems" for gambling: First Scarne tackles Thorp's roulette system that Scarne doesn't think works. [I think anyone who read The Eudemonic Pie as well as Thorp's autobiography will be familiar with both the "Eudaemonic" shoe-based computer system as well Thorp's analog proto-computer shoe-based system, both of which predicted quadrants where the ball would land, producing a small player advantage: it sounds like Scarne may not know much about this specific gambling system subdomain.]
81) Holy cow, see here how Scarne tells a completely different version of Thorp's 1960's era gambling stories: per Scarne they're nowhere near as impressive as the famous Life Magazine profile (and Thorp's book) makes them sound. Scarne writes here that he talked to all the people that saw Thorp play as Scarne knew everyone at the casinos Thorp played at; also Scarne's allegations on Thorp's baccarat playing are the most damning: Scarne relates what one casino manager asked him, "Scarne, why didn't Life Magazine mention the fact that Thorp and his two buddies lost fifteen thousand dollars trying to hustle our baccarat game?"
82) Scarne and Thorp also disagree totally about whether casinos in Nevada cheat or not: Scarne says he only found two major cases of casino cheating, which he immediately reported to Nevada's Gaming Control Board, while Thorp writes in his book that he thought the Gaming Control Board was completely corrupt and that most casinos cheated players who won consistently. Scarne also points out something [that I also noticed] about Thorp's famous trip to Reno and Lake Tahoe casinos where he and his backers made $11,000 off of a $10,000 bankroll: note that these are 1958-era dollars, but this return didn't seem all that significant to me either, especially when, as Scarne cites, Thorp's backers supposedly won $59,000 at a casino in Cuba around the same time. Thus the $11k shouldn't be seen as that significant given the bankroll size.
83) Scarne also argues that Thorp's card counting method was already obsolete long before Beat the Dealer came out [it is certainly obsolete now]. Scarne also puts his previously published blackjack betting rules up next to Thorp's rules and they are nearly identical; it's also interesting to note that Thorp used an IBM 704 computer (state of the art in those days), doing calculations with "brute force" while Scarne used math plus intuition to arrive at nearly the same rules.
84) Scarne then goes through passages of Thorp's book Beat the Dealer, citing errors, mis-citations, incorrect figures, etc.
85) Scarne then takes aim at other systems: "System Smitty"; also Alan N. Wilson's book The Casino Gambler's Guide, which misquotes and misunderstands Scarne's book.
Chapter 11: Adviser to Conrad Hilton on Gambling at the Caribe Hilton Casino in Puerto Rico
86) Scarne gets a call from Conrad Hilton himself in 1948 for help running Hilton's casino in Puerto Rico, this would be Hilton's first effort at running a hotel outside of the continental United States. (!) Scarne is also asked to help the government of Puerto Rico draft their casino laws.
87) A team of roulette players start winning and Scarne discovers one of the tables is rigged/magnetized.
88) He builds a factory to sell his Teeko game, selling over 100,000 copies between 1952 and 1955, but because he didn't manage the business well, losing money on every game sold. (!)
89) Scarne hired in as general manager of a casino in Havana while Hilton builds a hotel there; the hotel is scheduled to open in 1958, note that of course Cuba falls to Castro the following year.
90) 1956: Scarne married his longtime assistant, Steffi Storm, she was 31, he was 53. They have a son nine months later and Scarne names him John Teeko, after his game. (!)
Chapter 12: Gambling in More Ways Than One in the Cuban Revolution
91) [This chapter is excellent, really fascinating on a lot of levels.] Cuba's general strike; sabotage acts by Castro and his partisans; Life is somewhat dangerous in Havana, but Scarne still goes there to oversee the new Hilton in Havana, this is in April, 1958. The general strike turns out to be a failure.
92) Interesting to note here that Havana was starting to become so dominant in gambling that Nevada state officials ruled that anyone holding a gambling interest in Cuba would not be permitted to hold an interest in any Nevada Casino. The ultimate result here was many of the key US companies who owned Cuban casinos ended up selling their Cuban interests--just barely in time before the Castro regime confiscated everything. Holy cow, how lucky can you get?
93) He gets shot at during an assassination attempt on Santiago Rey, the Batista regime's former minister of the interior: "...that shooting is a reminder to me that everything around here is not as serene as it's made to appear."
94) He meets Jack Paar and his NBC television show entourage at The Habana Hilton; Paar tells him how two Cuban policemen pulled his driver from his car and started beating him up; it was likely a kidnapping/ransom attempt on Paar.
95) There's also a bombing in the Hilton hotel shopping area, badly damaging a bunch of stores in the lobby, although no one was hurt. The pit bosses and some of the major employees of the hotel in Hilton Casino start to go back to the United States.
96) There's a remarkable story here about a high stakes craps game where the hotel runs the craps table with $100 bills stacked into packets of $10k, $5k, $2,500 and $1,000, as if they were like ultra-high value chips; it moved the game along faster. [It really makes you think about all that "bearer currency" back then, and also sums of money that, inflation-adjusted, would be much higher today; also all of this money today would be tracked electronically, with tax reporting and AML filings and reports now! Scarne adds up the sum of money sitting on the craps table at one point and it's $480,000. Remember this is 1958! You could see why Nevada was concerned about Havana taking over the gambling world.]
97) Scarne describes examples of corruption among the owners of the casino; there's a remarkable story about Cuban senator Rolando Masferrer, chairman of Batista's armed services committee, who gambled big, he had his own private army (some 5,000 men) and he would bring armed accomplices in with him when he gambled; he would never pay his losses but he would always collect his winnings. What a total wild west this place was.
98) New Year's Eve 1958 into January 1st of 1959: Batista flees Cuba and Castro takes power. His wife says "Isn't that wonderful?" but Scarne knows his history: he knows all about the reckless violence that engulfed the country when Gerardo Machado lost control of Cuba to Batista in 1933. Scarne expects the same this time too: a coming period of vengeance killings and partisan violence. He gets his wife and kid out of Cuba. All of a sudden, everyone (including waiters, bartenders, all sorts of different workers in the hotel) starts wearing armbands, carrying guns and looking for Batista sympathizers to round up and execute. Also Scarne's wife had to take a ferry boat to Key West as Cuba's airports were shut down.
99) Then a whole bunch of looting happened: a bunch of different casinos and hotels were looted by "a howling mob" (Scarne's words) smashing store windows and slot machines.
100) Castro ultimately ends up staying at the Habana Hilton in the suite next to Scarne and later Scarne shows him some card tricks. A few months later Castro insisted he do the same card trick for the deputy premiere of the Soviet Union who was in Havana at the time. Castro took over two suites: in one suite he conducted military and political business; the other suite is where he banged chicks, mostly Americans.
101) Interesting comments also about Scarne observing Castro fool most American journalists into believing that he was a "liberator," that he would give up power and hold free elections, etc. The media was well-fooled, journalists loved Castro, they saw him as the second Simon Bolivar.
102) Communist/Castro regime secret police then moved into the Hilton hotel, armed with machine guns, confiscating the hotel and casino; this is when Scarne decides there and then to leave Havana. He is held and even strip-searched by soldiers at the airport before he gets out.
Chapter 13: My Gambling Mission to Panama and my Senate Appearance
103) He's hired by the government of Panama to advise the country on its government-owned casino, why it wasn't making any money. Scarne identifies theft across the entire institution: no internal controls, dealer cheats, dealers colluding with players, etc.
104) He sits at a hearing with the US Senate; shows them crooked dice, gets a ton of positive publicity from it.
105) Fascinating also to see him conclude the book with the admonition to readers "don't gamble."
Appendix:
106) This part of the book is a (harmless) ten-page advertisement for his board games Teeko, Scarney and Follow the Arrow.
To Read:
Jack "Doc" Kearns and Oscar Freely: Million Dollar Gate
***The short stories of Damon Runyon
Harold S. Smith: I Want to Quit Winners
Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling
The Amazing World of John Scarne
Scarne's Magic Tricks
Scarne on Dice
Scarne on Cards
Scarne on Card Tricks
Scarne on Teeko