The School for Scoundrels

Notes on Three-Card Monte

Preface

© Copyright 2001, School for Scoundrels/Tricks of the Trade, Inc.

All Rights Reserved
 Preface
The School for Scoundrels Notes are a series of three books that were designed as class
notes for a four week course taught at the Magic Castle. This course has been taught
once a year since 1996 for magician members of the Castle as part of the Magic
University. We will continue to expand, correct and update these notes from time to
time.

In the School for Scoundrels, we cover the history, psychology and application to magic
of the three major street cons—fast and loose, three-card monte, and the shell game. The
practitioners of these ancient swindles have much to teach us. They were experts not only
at fooling people with a combination of sleight-of hand and psychology, but were
entertainers who knew how draw a crowd, hook their interest, and hold them spell-bound
for the duration of their scam.

There is much we can learn from these con artists that is valuable for our own work as
entertainers. The games are covered in sufficient depth so that the student will be
knowledgeable in the history, parlance, subterfuges, and sleight-of-hand involved in each
of these swindles.

We want to cover the history of these scams as accurately as possible, even though we
are not historians or scholars in the field. We are more interested in the color that these
stories from history provide for our performances than we are in the settling of any
serious questions about how the games evolved. Still, we find the history of these short-
con swindles to be endlessly fascinating and want to encourage further study by sharing
our love for this subject with as many as possible.

The exhibition of these games holds a great deal of interest for any audience, and can be
exciting and fun for the performer as well. In each book in this series we intend to
provide as much as possible in the way of original source material which can aid in the
construction of entertaining presentations. We also provide the student with original,
audience-tested routines for each of these classic scams, complete with patter and
presentation pointers. These can be used as they are, or can become a resource for
creating new routines.

But the central focus of our course is not on learning to perform these con games for
entertainment. Our real purpose is to study the grifters’ techniques for the sake of gaining
a better understanding of our own art and improving our presentation of magic. The con
man faces many of the same challenges in the pursuit of his goals as the magician does in
his. Much more than the average magician, the grifter must analyze his performance from
a spectator’s point of view. The con man must really get inside his subject’s head. He
must manipulate both the victim’s thinking and his emotional responses.

Jean Hugard once expressed concern about what was then the new interest in Erdnase and
the techniques of the professional card cheats. He was afraid that magicians would start
thinking like card mechanics instead of like magicians. Much good has come from the
work of Vernon, Marlo, and others who have mined the rich resources of the gambling
world. This helped correct the over-dependence on broad misdirection and unnatural
actions that were common in early close-up magic.

But what Hugard saw, and we think he was prophetic, was that the interest in gambling
artifice could lead the magician into a way of thinking that was biased toward invisibility
of method, and that ignored the importance of manipulating the thinking and responses of
the spectator. The card cheat seeks to be invisible; he doesn’t want to attract attention. He
seeks to confine each and every action to the natural procedure of the game. He doesn’t
want an audience, and he doesn’t seek to engage the other people at the table
intellectually.

Much of modern close-up magic is derived from this model, and this can lead to
performances that are more a display of skill than a creation of magic. The audience may
be completely fooled, but they just don’t seem to care. This sort of art lacks the mental
engagement with the audience that is the hallmark of great magic.

The street-swindler offers us a much better model for the performance of magic than the
card mechanic. The operator of these scams has to know how to reel a crowd in and hold
its attention. He must disarm the natural defenses of its members. He uses hooks and
come-ons to keep them interested. He baits them psychologically. He engages the
audience in an intellectual contest and sets traps for them that will cost them everything
in their wallets.

In short, the con artist of the streets is a performer, an actor and an entertainer who hides
the sword of his purpose behind a cape of geniality, humor, and character. The magician
can learn a lot from the grifter’s technique and even more importantly, from his focus.

For the con man knows exactly what he is about and what he is trying to accomplish. He
knows what he wants from the spectator. Magicians must emulate this same sort of focus
in order to truly move people. Our study of street swindling can lead us into a better
understanding of what we are trying to accomplish as magicians and how best to go about
it.

In the process of writing books such as these, we must also consider the possibility that
some might use the information contained inside for purposes other than entertainment.
As a matter of fact, these three books form a practical handbook for larceny.

To those who might be considering such an idea we only have a few mild warnings.
Aside from the obvious dangers faced by the grifter—of jail time and the threat of
violence—most of the really clever con men we will study died broke. Money that was
gained so effortlessly had no meaning for these people, and it was usually thrown away
hand over fist.
The grift entails a life of rootless, stressful existence. And even worse, it is in the long run
monotonous. The same handful of scripts is played out again and again, day after day.
Others will rarely appreciate the work and craft put into this profession. What art there is
in it, is sold for whatever money can be had that day. It is ultimately a desperate and
unfulfilling way to live.

Most of the great short-con practitioners justified what they did to others by claiming that
they were teaching a lesson to dishonest people. The games were always “a case of the
biter being bitten.” It was only when the sucker sought to take unfair advantage of the
con artist that he became a potential victim.

There is more than a little truth to this, and it is hard to have much sympathy for the
mark. It is his own hidden weaknesses—his avarice, cupidity and ego—that cause him to
lose his money at one of these games. Since he has allowed himself to be drawn into a
battle of wits, he should be prepared to lose as well as win. Anyone who falls for one of
these ancient tricks should at least walk away with an expensive lesson about himself and
about the ways of the world. But that is not the way it works.

Experience has always shown that teaching a sucker a lesson is next to impossible. You
“can’t wise up a chump.” Every swindler knows the truth of this, and in his heart the
swindler knows that his “lessons” are almost always useless. He isn’t really offering a
service to the world anyway. The grifter’s true purpose is to take the mark’s money and
in the process prime his own ego—and he knows it.

We believe that we are all brothers and sisters on this planet. It is not our job to entrap
our fellow travelers and expose their weaknesses for good or for ill. Life is hard enough
as it is, and it seems to us that it is better lived sharing what we’ve learned, having fun
together and helping each other along the journey.

—Whit Haydn and Chef Anton. June 2001

The School for Scoundrels