Greatest Gambling Cheats Part 4: The Poker Light.

The Poker Light

The ‘Poker Light’ cheating move in poker is similar to card marking, and dates back to the beginning of the modern day game of poker. Poker originated, as did craps, on the riverboats of the Mississippi and the Old Wild West. When it comes to marking cards, there have been hundreds of thousands of different techniques created, from the darn-right idiotic to borderline genius. Throughout the years, card marking in poker has lead to countless imprisonments, fights and worse. But no doubt, the most ingenious poker marking scam ever undertaken (to our knowledge, there may be some exceptional techniques that no-one knows of because the individuals involved were never caught), was that created by a New York Optometrist and his partner in crime, Dawn.

In this card marking scam, the cards were all marked with a substance known as daub (as in wattle and daub), which is rather thick and gluey. This in itself was not very special, and indeed, had been around for years. However, to this substance was added a solution that made the paste luminous when viewed under certain conditions, such as a tinted lens. As an optometrist, the lenses and the luminous solution were easily obtained, but with the advent of contact lenses, this scam became even harder, if not impossible, to spot......although there would be a slightly reddish tint the players eye, but this was problematic only to people with green or blue eyes. The optometrist then started to mull over this scam, after all, he was not the only one undertaking it at that time, he wanted to improve on it, and because he was perfectly placed to understand developments in the optical industries he had his finger on the pulse as to the changes he could make to improve the scam to an almost faultless technique- and he succeeded.

Firstly, he re-designed the contact lens so that there was no tell-tale red tint to the wearer’s eye. Secondly, he began to improve on the paste, originally the paste would form small lumps on the card, as if there had been something spilt on it, so he attempted to create a substance that would not be felt as easily on the cards as the original substance, whilst at the same time making the mark easier to spot. However, his stroke of genius was to create a substance that effectively disappeared after around an hour of being applied to the cards; the genius of course consisted in the fact that if suspicions were raised and the cards were examined for tell-tale signs of marking, no such signs would be discovered- he effectively created self-destructing proof! Criminals Holy Grail by any account.

The optometrist’s girlfriend, Dawn, was the member who marked the cards. As a female, she had natural gifts in her favour; after all, people tend to trust women more easily as the nurturers of the species that it goes against the grain to cheat. Additionally, she was able to carry-out more actions at the table, checking in her handbag for a compact, taking lipstick out of her pocket; all seemingly innocent but the fact that women can do things like this without raising suspicion, gives them the edge in a way a man does not have- a man may be able to remove a handkerchief or his cigarettes, but that is about it- a woman can do both and more.

So while Dawn went about these feminine rituals, she would at the same time as removing something from her handbag, place a finger on a sponge inside the bag, a sponge covered in the self-destructing formula. Once the solution was on her fingertips, she would mark cards as she picked them up to check on their values. The optometrist did have his own means of applying the solution, he had a sponge inside a cigarette packet, but there were only a few times he would be able to do this during the course of a game.

During the five years that this couple carried-out the ‘Poker-Light’ scam, they managed to make millions of dollars. This all happened in the early 1990’s, and as we all know, technology has come a long way since, we can only guess at the sophistication of the scams that are currently, as they no doubt are, running all over the world at any given time with reference to card-marking.

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