The Art of the Con

by R. Paul Wilson

  For Moves and other hustlers like him, it’s not about who has the most skill at the table; it’s about who has the most game. His coin-toss device was a fascinating piece of work, but how he used it was of more interest to me. One-on-one, he might score a one-off bet, depending on how much the sucker threw down. In other situations he might bookie the bet for a large group and use the device to make sure he came out with a healthy profit. If more people bet on heads, he’d release tails, and so on.

  The interesting part was how he would use it to hook someone into playing for money at the pool table. If the mark wants to bet, Moves would push him to see how much he was willing to risk. This told him everything he needed to know about the person as a potential mark and if there was money to be made, Moves would use his tricked-out shoe to lose the bet! Then he would suggest a few games for the same amount as the coin toss and the real hustle would begin. Once his foot was on the coin, some bettors have tried to bully him into a huge wager, but he was prepared for that and ready to take on any amount, since he was certain to win.

  Hustling is all about keeping the mark in the game, generating false hope, manipulating expectations, and twisting the victim’s perspective about the situation they’re in. A one-off bet or proposition might make any amount of money, but a smart operator keeps his mark engaged so he comes back for more. Gamblers are addicted to action; some argue that whether they win or lose is irrelevant, but the prospect of winning is what keeps most people playing; this is the bait that a good con artist needs to keep their mark chasing. It’s a mistake to believe that hustling, whether it be at pool, golf, or even tennis, is based entirely on skill. Expert grifters can turn players with much greater skill into suckers with empty pockets. Hustling is about finding the right angle and developing the optimum strategy to beat the mark and keep them coming back for more.

  My friend Dean Dill is one of the kindest and most generous people I know. From his charming barbershop in Glendale, California, he runs a small business supplying props to magicians while ministering to fellow Christians and occasionally cutting hair. His shop is a hangout for hundreds of people, many of whom travel thousands of miles to meet one of the nicest guys in the magic community. At one time, Dean included Johnny Carson among his friends and magic students and was even a guest on The Tonight Show. But in another life, Dean was a talented tennis hustler.

  Dean’s proposition was to offer to play anyone without using a racket, catching the ball and throwing it with the same hand. To regular players, even pros, this sounded like a tough challenge and a good bet, but Dean had a simple advantage. Once he caught the ball he could throw it anywhere he liked—always to the most difficult place for the sucker to reach. He could throw it low and fast to the other side of the court or lob it gently so it just cleared the edge of the net. Catching it was the hard part, but Dean already played a decent game of straight tennis and was used to getting to the ball in time. According to Dean, getting to the ball and catching it was easier than returning it with a decent swing. After a few minutes, the sucker would be exhausted, having run all over the court to return the ball.

  Dean taught me a similar scam for golf, where the hustler plays with only a putter and must throw the ball from the tee until it gets to the green. This immediately puts the sucker at an advantage since most golfers can hit a ball much farther than it can be thrown. The scam is in how much of a handicap the hustler can negotiate. Personally, I’d play for three free throws per hole, but one is probably enough to get the money if you have a decent arm (I don’t). The secret is in developing strong putting skills on the green and reasonable accuracy when throwing a ball hard, but the most important skill is in the hustler’s “short game.” The objective is to get the ball as close to the green as possible without touching the velvet. This means that the hustler gets to throw the ball from very close to the pin and ensure it lands within an easy putting distance to the hole. The bunkers are a huge help because all I need to do is aim for those and I’m assured that the ball won’t accidentally roll onto the green.

  After learning this hustle, I bought about a hundred buckets of balls at my local driving range and practiced on weekdays, when the place was empty. I walked my local course to see how well I could play, and my score was much better than it would be when played normally! Best of all, I attracted enough attention at the range to get a game going until another player pointed out that I was the guy from TV. After that, all bets were off.

  If you can bet on a game, you can hustle it—even chess players offer opponents all sorts of starting advantages to entice them into a wager. The principle of handicapping is supposedly to level the playing field for players of varying degrees of skill, but when one player is lying about his true ability, the balance can easily be shifted in the hustler’s direction. Over the years I’ve collected a lot of methods to hustle various games and they are all based on giving the mark a perceived advantage or making a proposition that seems so unlikely (or downright impossible) that it seduces a sucker to bet.

  Proposition bets are a personal favorite of mine. There are thousands of them in existence, from simple bar bets and physical stunts to cunning setups or feats of skill. Many books have been written on the subject, often collated from old texts, or in many cases, simply pulled from a couple of Google searches. Get online now and you will find a never-ending supply of betchas, but there’s a lot more to a prop bet than just the secret.

  The all-time king of the proposition bet might have been Clarence Alvin Thomas, aka Titanic Thompson, a legendary gambler, and possibly the greatest hustler of all time. From an early age, Thompson had a knack for perfecting unusual skills that often involved throwing objects with unerring accuracy. From rocks to horseshoes, he practiced until he could not only beat a game but use the same skills in other situations. According to legend, Thompson could throw a hotel room key down a long hall and straight into the lock. He could throw a clothespin straight up and into the high ceiling of a hotel lobby (skewering a fly in the process), and he could take any walnut and throw it over a building, while others could barely get it past the first floor window. In his later years, Titanic Thompson would hang out at a local pool hall, waiting for other sharks to swim by. Despite his expertise in other areas, Thompson was an average pool player, but he used his lack of skill to attract gamblers to his table, where he would begin working them toward a lucrative side bet.

  After losing a few games for small beer (low amounts that barely scratched his bankroll), the old man would point out an open window at the other end of the hall and comment that he once threw a playing card straight out that window from the far wall. This often got someone’s attention, and before the marks knew what hit them, they had hundreds of dollars riding on a single playing card, hoping that this old-timer couldn’t even get close to the window. With a sharp sweep of his arm and a snap of the wrist, Thompson sent a card sailing over a dozen pool tables and out the window into the cold night air.

  And he wasn’t finished. With his suckers still feeling the sting, Thompson would offer to do it again, to prove it wasn’t just luck; this was usually turned down until Thompson yelled for someone to close the window halfway. Now the marks were back in the game, and sure enough, Titanic did it again. All of this was just an appetizer. Thompson was about to take his pigeons for everything they had, with a proposition that sounded so crazy it almost never failed to get the money.

  With his marks still sore from two large losses, Thompson would have the window lowered again, until there was no more than a ten-inch gap at the bottom. Even with such a small opening, people weren’t interested until, seemingly without thinking, Thompson claimed he could make the card fly back and stick to the outside of the window. Seizing on this comment, Titanic Thompson’s victims were suddenly keen to win back all their money and more. Thompson was ready to cover any size of bet and, by now, the whole pool hall was watching as thousands of dollars were laid out. Despite the seemingly impossible nature of the bet, Tho
mpson threw his last card out of the tiny gap and the crowd gasped as they saw the same card catch the wind and fly back onto the outside of the window, where it stayed.

  Thompson’s career is filled with stories of how he secured an unbeatable advantage for these bets. He once hired a dwarf with huge feet to sleep in a long tent on the beach, with his feet sticking out. Thompson would walk by with a few fellow gamblers and offer to bet on the height of the man in the tent. Based on the size of those feet, most would guess over six feet and all Thompson had to do was bet just under the lowest estimate and he was sure to win. He moved road signs several miles closer to a destination so he could gamble on how long it would take to get there. He would propose bets on how many watermelons were in the back of a truck, which he had already paid to unload and count the day before. As a child, he bet that his dog could jump into a muddy river and collect a marked rock that had been thrown there minutes before. His victim had no idea that this kid had spent a whole week marking every rock on the river bed (at that location) with the same “X.”

  Titanic Thompson was a successful gambler, but his real skill was in these proposition bets that were easy to make around people with large amounts of money and a willingness to bet on anything. While some of his feats were genuine, the best stories feature cunning tricks that were used to guarantee a win. He hired a kid to climb a ladder and pin a fly to the ceiling of his hotel. That kid was a seventeen-year-old Moves, who spent several years learning from the elderly Thompson. The pin bet worked because the ceiling was so high you had to climb a ladder to even see if one was stuck there. Thompson would wander around the lobby, followed by a crowd as he tossed pins skyward while people ducked to avoid the falling pins. With ten chances, Thompson simply had to take only nine pins and merely pretend to throw one of them. When nothing came back down after that throw, Ty would indicate a tiny black speck on the ceiling. Climbing a ladder, his mark would have to confirm that a fly was indeed pinned there.

  Moves also helped Thompson win a simple golf bet. Titanic was an exceptional golfer and once commented that he could never be a professional because he couldn’t accept the pay cut. He played left-handed but spent years developing a decent right-handed game so he could beat people as a righty, then offer to play left-handed for much higher stakes. Afterward, Thompson would take the losers out for dinner and bet that he could hit a forty-foot putt on the eighteenth green, and once the bets were in, he’d meet his marks early the next morning, drop his ball far from the pin, then make a miracle shot that curved along the green and straight into the hole! This was partly thanks to Thompson’s skill as a golfer but mostly due to the garden hose, filled with water, that Moves had laid on the green overnight to create an invisible track that led straight to victory. All Thompson had to do was get the speed and direction right and the ball would follow the track and sink every time.

  For a great proposition bet, the hook is baited with a challenge that seems to put the odds in the victim’s favor, but there is usually an unknown factor, whether it be skill, a secret, or overnight preparation. For a few drinks or to decide who picks up the check in a restaurant, these bets are mostly harmless, but in the company of serious gamblers, an expert hustler can score thousands of dollars. As stunts, prop bets are little more than interesting tricks, but when there’s real money on the line, they can be devastating. More money might be won and lost on a post-game betcha than was ever risked on a poker hand or game of pool.

  How did a seventy-year-old Titanic Thompson make a card fly out of a window, then back again to stick on the outside? Thompson could throw cards much farther and with even greater accuracy and could close the window until the gap was just a couple of inches wide, but this doesn’t explain how he could guarantee the card would return and stick to the glass. That was up to Moves, who sprayed the window with a clear, sticky substance and waited outside with a huge fan aimed right at the window! As soon as the card flew out, the air from the fan caught it, sent it straight back, and the spray-on glue did the rest.

  The hustle is not in the way Thompson tricked his way to success. It’s in how he worked his marks into a corner and forced them to think they had the upper hand.

  Listen Up

  In a classic hustle, stakes can be raised as the conditions appear to improve in the mark’s favor. The victim then becomes so focused on these conditions that he can be more easily manipulated.

  A simple betcha that illustrates how easy it is to be fooled this way is the Ben’s Mother puzzle. To begin, I take a penny, a nickel, and a dime and I pass them one at a time into someone’s hand, giving each of the first two coins a name. Then I ask my victim to name the last coin correctly. With the proper timing and inflection, this can turn into a baffling and frustrating guessing game where the stakes can keep going up to create more pressure.

  Here’s the wording:

  “Ben’s mother has three children.”

  I hold up the penny. “Penny.”

  I pass the penny to their hand and hold up the nickel. “Nicky.”

  I pass them the nickel and hold up the dime. “And . . . ?”

  Almost no one gets this the first time.

  “You owe me a drink,” I say. “Let’s do it again.”

  Now I repeat the above sequence and, again, they don’t get it.

  I repeat several times, each costing the mark a drink. Now I say, “Okay, I’ll tell you the answer for ten dollars or we can keep going, but if you think I’ve cheated you in any way, or if after I tell you, you think the answer wasn’t completely fair, you don’t have to buy me anything. Agreed?”

  No one ever wants to buy their way out, so we continue.

  They lose again and again, and the more they lose and the more they owe, the harder it becomes for them to hear the answer. Without the pressure of the situation or the visual distraction of the coins and with no money on the line, it’s very easy to figure this out. Ben’s mother has three children—Penny, Nicky, and Ben.

  This bet will either fail in the first couple of rounds or will keep going until the victim has had enough. It clearly illustrates how the conditions of the bet and the amount being risked distract a mark from the solution while misdirecting their attention with the procedure.

  While this is little more than a gag, it could be a profitable one if I really took people’s money (I don’t). But it clearly illustrates how a good hustler operates. It’s all about keeping your mind on the challenge while concealing the solution. Hustling is about maximizing the victim’s losses, and while a quick hit can be profitable, the real art is in keeping the mark at the table. Personally, I’m a lousy pool player, but I have a passion for prop bets that can be built up or repeated. There’s one feat I spent several years mastering that builds to an unforgettable and profitable conclusion, and it’s a perfect example of how a simple stunt can become a profitable hustle.

  The Snatch

  In my shows and seminars, I invite someone to hold a coin in their outstretched hand, with their palm open and flat.* I stand a couple of feet away, with one hand raised like a chubby cobra, and propose to reach down and grab the coin before they can close their hand. The mark can only close their fingers as quickly as possible and is not allowed to move their hand down or away. If you’ve ever seen the old TV show Kung Fu starring David Carradine, you’ll remember a similar challenge from the opening of every show.

  Coin snatching is a simple, genuine physical proposition—either I get the coin or I don’t. I could use this to win a couple of drinks, but to make this into a hustle, I need to work the mark and the crowd to a point where they believe they have the upper hand and want to take my money. To do this I need to gradually build to a point where I appear to have gone too far and made the challenge too impossible, so that it attracts more suckers into the action.

  Let’s start with my limitations. I can do this from a considerable distance, especially if I pick the right person to work with. My experience is that players of certain sports, like baske
tball and squash, can be a lot more difficult because they have developed a much faster physical response than most. I’ve developed an eye for people I can beat easily and have much greater latitude with the proposition. The slower an opponent’s reaction time, the farther away I can be and still reach the coin.

  To some extent, distance actually helps, and I can play all sorts of tricks to make it seem like I’m too far to reach. An effective ruse is to reach forward, then step back so that my hand is apparently too far to get the coin but my shoulders are actually square-onto the mark and by simply rotating my upper torso very slightly, my reach is greatly extended. This move is covered as I tell them to make sure I don’t move my feet. When they look down, my shoulders turn but my arm retracts to compensate, so that when they look back, my hand occupies the same point in space but is now more than capable of getting to the coin.

  Once I’m at the maximum distance and they’ve already lost once, it’s relatively easy to convince the mark to try again. This time I wait until I’m ready and remind the mark to keep his hand flat. As soon as I see them respond to this, I go for the coin and success is all but guaranteed.

  The secret to this game is easily illustrated with another simple bar bet. Ask someone to hand you a crisp, flat ten-dollar bill. Have him extend his hand, closed into a fist, then extend his first finger and thumb, ready to pinch the bill, which you hold from above by one of the short ends. The challenge is for your opponent to catch the bill after you release it, but this is almost impossible because, once he sees the bill fall, the message from the brain to the finger and thumb arrives too late to catch it. Begin with his fingers about halfway down the bill, ready to close. You can later repeat this and raise the bill so there’s more time for them to react once it’s released, but be careful because eventually, your opponent will become attuned and more focused (depending on how many drinks they’ve had) or will get lucky and try to anticipate when you are going to release the bill, rather than waiting for you to actually drop it.