The Art of the Con (28 page)

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, Thompson 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.