Fooling houdini, p.7
Fooling Houdini, page 7
AS I BECAME MORE VERSED in card magic, I began to see my monthly poker game in an entirely different light. Temptation was everywhere, each hand an opportunity for dishonest play. It became difficult to follow the action, because all I could think about was how easy it would be to cheat. I never did, though. Well, not exactly.
I got the idea from Wes. Back when he was honing his chops, he would go to games and cheat the entire time. But he’d do so in such a way as to avoid giving himself an edge. “I lacked the larceny but not the skills,” he told me. “I just wanted to see if the moves would fly.” Like a good scientist, Wes devised a method to test out his technology of deception under fire. “The only way to know if what you’re doing works at a game with money on the table is to test it in a game with money on the table. So I came up with a solution that satisfied my ethical constraints and at the same time satisfied my intellectual curiosity.” The solution for Wes was to execute the moves merely as a means of practicing the sleights, but without profiting from them. This way, he could test his mettle without compromising his integrity or feeling like a crook.
It seemed like a good strategy, and one night, while playing poker at a friend’s house in the West Village, I decided to give it a try. There were eight players in all, mostly writers and actors. We were playing Texas Hold ’Em, and the host had a casino table in his living room, which gave a nice sense of verisimilitude to the game. Scotch was poured and, in a less androgenic vein, freshly baked cookies were served.
I lay low at first, not wanting to arouse suspicion early on in the game. I was doing well for once, catching good hands on the board and making sound position bets. I even won a couple of pots with all-in preflop raises. Before long I was up a couple hundred bucks—all the more reason not to cheat. But by then, everyone had settled in and was a little drunk, and I was feeling cocky, so I decided to make my move.
“These are mixed,” said Nathan, the curly-haired novelist to my right, as he passed me the deck. It was my turn to deal. I sailed the first two cards off the top, then switched to dealing seconds for the rest of the players. Little did they know, but they were receiving the wrong cards. Then I dealt myself the top card and went back to dealing seconds. I didn’t know what any of these cards actually were, because I hadn’t peeked at them prior to the deal, so there was no advantage to be gained from all this trickery. But, like Wes before me, I wanted to see if the moves would pass muster.
Everything was going smoothly until I dealt player number three, a successful comedian named John, his second hole card. This time my hands slipped as I executed the move, applying a bit too much pressure, and two cards came whirling out instead of one, giving John an extra card. Not only that, but I’d left a third card behind, sticking partway out of the deck, pulled loose by the excess friction. Wes had warned me about these so-called hangers. I was fairly certain that no one in the room was packing heat. Nevertheless, my heart was pounding against my rib cage as John gave me a puzzled look.
“Oops,” I said quickly, trying to cover. “Sorry about that. Don’t drink and deal, right?”
He shrugged it off, and I took a deep breath. That was a close one.
I played it safe for the next hour, letting my courage recharge. Once my confidence came back, I went for something even bolder. I copped a card off the bottom of the deck and palmed it for an entire hand, then tossed it into the muck (the discard pile) without checking what it was. Emboldened by this shade, I threw in some false shuffles when it was my turn to mix the cards. I did a Zarrow—a brilliant fake riffle shuffle invented by an accountant from New Jersey—and one of Eddie Marlo’s favorite false cuts. I played this way the entire night—cheating on and off without actually cheating—just to see if anyone would notice.
And no one did.
It’s not like I was playing for big money. Hundred-dollar buy-in, table stakes, Baby No Limit–type stuff. On a good night, the winner went home with a few hundred dollars. But when is it ever about the money? Hardcore hustlers say they’re in it for the cash, but somehow I doubt that. When you consider the risks involved and the effort it takes, there are easier ways to make a living. Like getting a job.
But it’s an incredible rush. I felt as if I were freebasing rocket fuel during the game, which made for an exciting evening. Even Texas Hold ’Em is too slow for an adult ADD case like me. I lack the patience to be any good at legit poker. Even though I wasn’t benefitting from these sneaky moves, I knew they’d be hard to explain away were I to get caught. This was at once frightening and exhilarating.
A lot of the motivation behind cheating must come from the charge you get. To truly understand the psychology of a cheater, you need to see the world like a con artist. In this worldview, everything is rigged—the casino, politics, Wall Street, life—and there are only two types of people: grifters and suckers. (It’s a lot like in magic, where you’re either a magician or a layperson.) If you look around the table and don’t see a sucker, then, according to an old saying, the sucker is you. It’s fool or be fooled, only the stakes are higher.
One experienced hustler told me a story about a young cheater who regularly risked his life bilking dangerous men out of their hard-earned lucre in no-limit games, and who had recently done a one-year stretch in prison for trying to rig a slot machine. “The funny thing is,” the old hustler told me, “this guy has a heart of gold. You can leave your wallet full of hundred-dollar bills on the table, and he wouldn’t take anything out of it. Or, if you dropped it, he would hunt you down to give it back. But when it comes to playing in a game, there’s just something about it that is an addiction. It’s hard to resist.”
It seemed odd at the time, but I’d come face-to-face with my first magic-related ethical dilemma: to cheat or not to cheat, that was the question, and trying to answer it triggered a bizarre mix of emotions. What began as cautious curiosity had escalated into a gale-force adrenaline rush. But now, during my victory lap, moral qualms were nipping at my heels. Call it hustler’s remorse. Even though I’d stolen nothing, I couldn’t shake the lurking feeling that I’d somehow crossed a line, and what troubled me most about it was that part of me liked it. I’d fooled everyone at the table that night, and like any well-plotted deception, this sent a surge of euphoria rippling through my veins.
The next day I immediately bragged about my exploits to Wes, further potentiating the high. “Cool,” he said. “That’s the thing to do when you’re learning. You find out if your technique stands up. And you find out whether you got the cojones or not.” Afterward, I wondered if I could resist the temptation to cheat in future games. Would I ever be able to play straight again? In gaining these new skills, had I not also lost something? This much was clear: I’d tasted a powerful new drug, and I wanted more.
Chapter 4
The Touch Analyst
After working with Wes for a while, I decided to seek out the man widely regarded as the world’s greatest card cheat. I was inspired by a story I read about Wes’s own teacher, Dai Vernon. Back in 1932, Vernon had traveled to Missouri in pursuit of a grifter named Allen Kennedy who had reputedly mastered the center deal—that is, secretly dealing from the middle of the pack. At the time, many magicians, including Vernon, considered center dealing to be the holy grail of gambling sleights—the reason being that if you can deal from the middle, you never have to worry about the cut. After a lengthy search, Vernon caught up with Kennedy and traded some of his A material for the move. (Vernon was pathologically secretive, so he must have wanted the information very badly.) Years later, Vernon bequeathed the Kennedy center deal to members of his innermost tribe. The man I sought was one of them.
His name was Richard Turner, and as luck would have it, he was scheduled to give a closed-door lecture for the Society of American Magicians in New York. Though unknown outside the realm of magic and gambling, Turner was said to be a card handler without equal, a man whose prowess with a deck bordered on the supernatural. No less a technician than Vernon had singled him out as the most gifted card mechanic he’d ever encountered in his eight-decade career—better even than Kennedy himself. “Richard Turner does things with cards that nobody else in the world can do,” Vernon once said.
I wanted to know what made Turner so good, and maybe pick up a trick or two in the process. I also wanted to see if he measured up to the hype. The stories that circulated about him were far-fetched, to say the least, and as I had learned early on, the world of magic is filled with half-truths and hucksterism—or what Jeff McBride calls “fakelore.” (The word famous in a magician’s title means about as much as it does when attached to the name of a New York pizzeria.) But what most raised doubts in my mind was the astonishing fact that Richard Turner, the greatest living card cheat and quite possibly the sharpest card handler of all time, was blind.
WITH HIS BLACK STETSON HAT, lizard-skin boots, and wide Doc Holliday moustache the texture of dried tumbleweed, Richard Turner looks like a saloonkeeper from the Badlands, a Victorian-era cowboy, or a ghost town tour guide. When I first saw this apparition the night of the lecture, as he came striding into a sterile auditorium in the back of the Mount Sinai Medical Center on Madison Avenue—the SAM’s new bat cave—I checked his hip for the holster and six-shooter, seemingly the only things missing from his getup. Nope, no holster, just a solid gold belt buckle in the shape of a five-card poker hand—three aces and two eights, the so-called dead man’s hand.
Still, Turner is licensed to carry a firearm. Nearly three decades ago, when the top organized crime families in New York and overseas were pursuing him relentlessly, offering him millions to work for them and threatening to kill him if he declined, he was armed for his own protection by the head of the San Diego SWAT team.
What the mob wanted so badly—what they were willing to kill for—was Richard Turner’s sense of touch. It’s an underappreciated sense, really, in this audiovisual age, but within the rarified domain of the professional cardsharp, a finely tuned sense of touch is everything. In Turner’s case it almost got him killed, and after witnessing a demonstration of his Midas-like abilities the night of the SAM lecture, along with a dozen or so other local magicians who’d come to watch him perform, I understood why.
“Do as I do,” Turner opened, in a warm antebellum drawl, flashing a bandit’s grin as he offered a deck to the volunteer he’d chosen from the crowd, a blonde woman in her mid-thirties with light, freckled skin. “When you play poker, blackjack, bridge—whatever your game—you wanna make sure the cards are very evenly mixed. Let’s start with some simple cuts. Takes no skill to do this.” Turner started to cut the cards, gradually speeding up as he spoke while his volunteer did her best to keep up. “Now alternate it. Now try a flying three-way. Now try a one-two-three-four-five-six-seven way. Or strip cutting, as in the casino.” The audience chuckled as Turner’s hands moved in a blur and his volunteer tried in vain to follow. “No skill at all,” she cracked wryly, as Turner moved on to a series of shuffles, each one more intricate than the last. The woman stood haplessly by, no longer trying, a portrait of defeat. Ignoring her and addressing himself to the audience, Turner went on.
“Aaaright,” he said. “Now you’re ready for the way they shuffle in a casino. Just give it a closed riffle shuffle. Perfect. Now how ’bout the faro shuffle? Break ’em in half and lace ’em up every other card, then bridge ’em down.” There was more laughter as Turner split the deck exactly in half and zippered the two stacks with one hand, then executed an acrobatic one-handed flip-around cut. He paused. “Well, I’ve shown you half a dozen ways of shuffling and cutting,” he said. “The deck should be pretty evenly mixed, right?” He smiled triumphantly and spread the deck face up on the table to reveal the cards in pristine numerical order. “Does that look even?” Everyone in the room shrieked and clapped, a boisterous uproar that lasted close to a minute. As he waited for the clamor to subside, Turner fished a toothpick from his pocket, leaned back in his chair, and calmly began picking at his teeth.
This was only the beginning. Turner could do simultaneous perfect one-handed shuffles with a deck in each hand. His crooked deals—seconds, middles, bottoms—were the most deceptive I’d ever seen. His one-handed middle deal—the hardest of all the shady deals—looked legit from every angle. He even did an impossible Greek deal—a second-from-the-bottom deal used to circumvent the cut card placed underneath decks at casinos. He dealt blackjacks to another volunteer, the only other woman present, from a deck she’d shuffled and cut, his hands moving in slow motion so we could study his every move.
But the effect that destroyed every magician in the house that night may well have been the simplest. A spectator picked a card, replaced it in the deck, and shuffled, and yet somehow Turner was able to locate the card and control it to the top—a feat nobody in the world can explain, I have heard, and one that has baffled card experts, magicians, and casino personnel alike.
Not bad for a guy who’s legally blind.
Actually, Turner’s vision is six grades below the cutoff for blindness, the result of a rare degenerative tissue disease (called birdshot chorioretinopathy) that began ravaging his retinas at age nine. “The macula is pretty much dissolved,” he told me later, referring to the oval cluster of nerve cells near the center of the eye. “And the rest of the retina looks like someone took a shotgun with birdshot and blew it full of holes.” (Hence the disease’s evocative name.)
Most other people with this disease would probably have given up on the dream of becoming a world-class card manipulator, a goal Turner had set his mind on at age seven after watching an episode of the TV show Maverick. But Turner kept at it. He practiced day and night. He ate and drank and slept with cards in his hand. He still sleeps with his cards, and five years ago, when forced to undergo hernia surgery, Turner clutched a deck while on the operating table. To hear Turner tell it, his abilities are not something he developed in spite of his disability, but rather because of it. “I have to do it all by touch,” he says. “Which is a real blessing.”
Watching Turner baffle a roomful of experts put me in mind of what is often said about people who lose one or more of their primary senses: that their surviving senses compensate by becoming sharper. We now know that this compensatory response is rooted in a phenomenon known as brain plasticity, whereby neurons regenerate and reorganize themselves in response to trauma or a change in the environment. Once viewed as a calcified mass of unalterable circuitry, the human brain turns out to be surprisingly supple, even in adulthood, and the study of brain plasticity has become a central theme of modern neuroscience.
Indeed, what Turner lost in vision he seems to have recouped in an almost superhuman tactile ability. It’s as though he sees with his fingers. Give him a pile of cards, and he can tell you exactly how many there are by running his index finger along the edges. Turner is so good, in fact, that he consults for numerous casinos as well as for the United States Playing Card Company, the world’s largest card manufacturer.
His title: Touch Analyst.
THE NOTION THAT BLIND PEOPLE develop enhanced nonvisual abilities to make up for their lack of sight goes way back, to a time long before we knew anything about neuroplasticity. In the realm of semimyth, Homer was said to be blind, as was the prophet Tiresias. The Talmud references the memory feats of the blind and the trust placed in them by rabbinic scholars as reliable authorities on obscure passages. In his eighteenth-century Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, the French philosopher Denis Diderot describes a blind man capable of recognizing voices with astounding accuracy. Throughout history, blind musicians have been mythologized as miracles of sensory adaptation, a view that is still common today, and which is given credence by the likes of Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Andrea Bocelli.
Until recently, however, the evidence was mostly anecdotal. Only in the last decade or so have scientists systematically matched up the blind and the nonblind in head-to-head tests, peering into their brains to see what, if anything, is different. The results, even after discounting for the accumulated wisdom of history, have revolutionized the way neuroscientists think about the human mind.
Consider, for starters, how much better blind people can hear compared to most. As has now been shown in dozens of studies, the blind beat the nonblind on virtually every measure of acoustic ability. Blind people are better at speech recognition, sound identification, and auditory localization, even with one ear plugged. They hear changes in pitch that are ten times smaller than anything a seeing person can manage. (This is why some of the best piano tuners are blind.) Perfect pitch—the ability to identify notes without external reference tones—is three times more common among blind musicians than among those who can see, and this is true even for blind musicians who begin their musical training later in life. And when it comes to memory, the Talmud is right. People who lose their vision early on have exceptional short- and long-term memories, for words as well as for sounds. Studies have also shown that their brains are unusually immune to false memories.
Where tactile sensations are concerned, the blind not only read with their fingers—using the Braille alphabet—but they can recognize and remember raised letters and embossed pictures by feel with remarkable precision. They are able to sense minute differences in texture that are imperceptible to most people. Their fingers can feel, for instance, the difference between a single groove and a pair of parallel grooves, even when the two grooves are separated by a fraction of a millimeter. Such extraordinary sensitivity to size, gradations of shape, and texture has allowed the blind paleontologist Geerat Vermeij, one of the world’s foremost experts on mollusks, to trace the evolution of several new species that had gone overlooked by his colleagues, simply by turning the shells over in his hands and feeling subtle differences in their forms. Turner has the same kind of hypersensitivity. “When I feel a card, it’s like those cards are a quarter of an inch thick,” he tells people. “The cards multiply in size.” He says a similar thing about typing on his BlackBerry. “It’s like I’m looking at something that’s about two and a half feet across.” And when he types, he moves his head from side to side, because the letters appear on a giant screen in his mind.
