How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard

This book is SO funny! One of the few books I have laughed out loud while reading.

It begins as I'd expect from Penn Jillette: a tongue-in-cheek romp with a dash of course language, and it's funny for those not offended. But by page 20 I realized that, yea verily, this is a serious treatise on cheating techniques. Imagine all the card tricks that a career magician like Penn Jillette must know, and him focusing that expertise on cheating in a poker game. He's done us a favor in this age of unprecendented poker popularity by wising us up. I *agree* that it's disturbing, but one can take heart in something he points out: "You can't buy the practice." In other words, these techniques take a long time to perfect. This is useful for vigilance. One can acknowledge that, yes Virginia, there ARE such things as "card mechanics" however rare, or one can hide one's head in the sand. When Barry Greenstein (BG) mentioned "a false shuffle and cut" I wondered how anyone could get away with such a thing! Well folks, here's how it's done. BG recommends being aware of losing when you think you should be winning. Penn actually gets into the nuts and bolts of how the cheater does it. This also got me thinking about other ways cheating could occur in a casino (such as a modified ShuffleMaster). Disturbing, but good to have tucked away somewhere in one's awareness. There is a section on cheat-proofing your own home game, and the thickest (and crudest) glossary of poker slang I've seen to date.

This is a hilarious book. As Penn Jillette explains at the beginning, Penn (ostensibly) met Dickie Richard when Penn was hitchhiking as a teenager, and Dickie taught Penn everything Dickie knew about how to cheat at cards. Penn himself isn't a card cheat, doesn't condone card cheating, and feels bad about publishing this book. But Penn owed Dickie a favor, and Dickie wanted his memoirs published, so Penn agreed. The memoirs were horribly written so Penn and his co-author rewrote them. The bulk of the book, then, is a first-person narrative from Dickie about how he cheats at poker. Dickie explains that you could cheat in a casino, but it's too hard. Instead Dickie shows up in a town, makes "friends", and then plays poker with them, takes their money, and skips town. Dickie cheats any way he can -- from bottom dealing to marking cards to simply walking out the door with the cash box. Dickie's descriptions of what he does are amusing yet appalling -- he is a sociopath and an egomaniac, and yet he manages to be so entertaining, you can't help liking him (a bit). Is Dickie a real person? I highly doubt it. As Penn tells us at the beginning, Dickie is a "fictional" character -- that's a big clue that you shouldn't take the narrative veridically. Does this book teach you how to cheat at poker? Kind of. It doesn't actually teach you how to bottom deal, for example, but Dickie correctly says that you can learn that from any standard magic book. It doesn't teach you a system to follow for marking cards, but Dickie correctly says that you wouldn't want to follow a standard system, since that would make your cheating easier to detect. As I see it, the point of this book isn't to teach you how to cheat -- though you might learn about how to detect cheaters (even though Dickie insists that's not a goal of the book). The book is a novel about a card cheater. Dickie epitomises an amoral, larger-than-life showman who lives life to its fullest. I get the sense that Dickie represents a somewhat darker side of Penn. Penn manipulates cards -- and people -- to entertain others and make money. That's what being a professional magician is all about. Dickie manipulates cards and people to make money -- the entertainment comes in being able to read about it.

I found this book refreshing, a possibly honest book from a sociopath's viewpoint who isn't a business person or lawyer. If you enjoyed "Catch Me If You Can" by Frank Abagnale, You'll probably enjoy this book. as for the language: I've heard worse on South Park. If you find a little lewd humor offensive you should probably stay away from poker in general, maybe try gardening or collecting bottle caps. The advice given is accurate, like: Don't be flashy, practice your moves in front of a mirror thousands of times before using them in a game, If you're going to burn a game park a couple of blocks away with your car ready to go, etc