How To Cheat Your Friends At Poker

Don't let the title fool you. I'm not going to tell you how to be a card cheat so don't get so damn excited. I'm referring to a book I recently read titled "How To Cheat Your Friends At Poker." When I first picked up the book to skim through it, I figured the cover was some gimmick and the book was really about playing ABC poker to beat your friends or a few cheap magic tricks or something. Nope. It's the real deal, boys. The whole thing is literally about how to be a real card cheat. My personal morals and ethics would not let me buy it for anything near that reason, but as an entertaining read, well that's another story.

The story is told through the eyes of "Dickie Richards," and no, that's not his real name. Let me tell you, this guy is dirty. I mean Duuuuurrrrttttyyy. You know that dirty relative you have. Everyone has at least one; my family has a few. The one with no shame that will tell stories of his glory days that would make a sailor blush. The stories that make you think he's full of shit 'cause no one would do anything like that, but it just might be true too. Dickie is the epitome of that person. Not just that, he's concentrate. You know that devil that you see on people's shoulders? No that's not Dickie, but he takes notes from Dickie.

"Being buddies sometimes means putting in some effort. Usually, you only have to do that work to get invited to a game.....Maybe you lend and hand when your friend is stuck in the parking lot and you stop to help fix his flat tire. He'll be grateful and want to hang with you some day, and maybe you'll wind up playing cards. He'll never know you let the air out of his tires in the first place."

You know Worm from Rounders? I'm not totally sure they didn't base that character on Dickie. There are so many similarities, like either Worm was based on Dickie or Dicked was based on Worm. If Rounders had made a spin-off book based on that character, they couldn't have done it much better than this book. The only difference is that Dickie is much meaner, dirtier, more cunning, ...and richer.

The title is a little bit misleading. I've read it, and I may know more ways people can cheat and what the slang for it is, but I'd still be no better at it than anyone else. In fact, the book only really has one dedicated chapter to it and in that chapter he says to go buy Erdnase's book if you want to figure out how actually to do it all. Dealing seconds, palming, slugs, cold decking, bottom dealing are all mentioned but he doesn't go into much detail on how to do it. Dickie didn't really want to teach people how to cheat, he just wanted an outlet to tell the world the things he had done. That's not easy to do in his line of work because the next day you might get whacked. This book should really be titled "Memoirs of a Con."

However, what the book does do is give you insight on the life of a card cheat. With each new piece of advice he gives you, he'll usually accompany it with some story that happened to him. These things are fun to read. I found myself laughing out loud at what I was reading.

"I played in a weekly game with a bunch of thirty-to-forty year olds who worked at a northeastern college. One night, three young coeds showed up shitfaced. They'd heard about the game and wanted to play some poker. They weren't beauties, but they were all fuckable. They were welcomed into our game. Somebody suggested, only half-jokingly, that we play strip poker. After a few more drinks the girls agreed, and no one had to convince the fellows.

We played for six hours. I won big. All the girls were completely naked and ready to play for "favors." The guys were down to socks and underwear. I told the table that I was taking my winnings, scooped up all the clothes and walked out of the room. Everyone had a good laugh. Besides, no one was going to chase me across campus in just their underwear, and with a raging hard-on.

I went out the back door, got into my car, and drove away. I never saw my friends again. They must have thought of it as a joke taken way too far. They were drunk and never thought to stop me; they must have forgotten that I had all their wallets in their slacks...

Subtract the $300 I'd paid the hookers to pose as coeds, and it was still a good business move. Whores can act; they almost had me believing they were shy about taking off their clothes."

That is only the tip of the iceberg.

Dickie wasn't just a card mechanic. He did quite a bit of con'ing. He was a loan shark at one time. Also, a pimp. His passion was with cards though. Throughout the book, he describes clever tricks like making an extra set of fake car keys to leave on the table when he "goes to smoke." That buys him enough for him to snatch the cash box and get the hell out of town. They think his keys are on the table, he's not going anywhere.

"Junior, the most trusting of the bunch, had told me that Ploppy - a two-faced old coot - had complained to all the other guys in that game that I was cheating. I was cheating, of course, but he didn't know that. I get pissed at being slandered about something no one really knows I'm doing."

There are other things besides cards, too. For instance, there's a chapter dedicated to screwing the host's wife. Another one describes a con he made up to pull a few hundred from strippers. There are things that are just hilarious that are just too wrong for me to put down in this blog. If a movie were made about this guy (and it would be a great movie), it would be rated R or NC-17 and Quentin Tarentino would direct it (minus some of the violence).

Like all things, there is a climax where karma catches up to him towards the end at the 50,000/100,000 stakes Judge's game and he wants to jump off of a bridge afterwards. He can't believe how stupid he was. You can feel how mad he's getting while he's building up to tell you what happened to him. I won't spoil that for you, though.

Next time you're on a road trip, have some time to kill, or just want a new book to read, pick it up. You don't even have to like poker for this guy to be hilarious.