A hip black guy wonders up to you on the streets of San Fransisco and says
“I bet you five bucks I can tell you were you got you shoes.”
You’re in a strange city, hundreds miles from home and you KNOW that he can’t possibly have any idea where you got your footwear.
So you take him up on the offer.
“You got them on your feet.”
Here is an old riddle for you from my previous blog.
Google is cheating.
Imagine you just purchased a Rolex off ebay. It is identical in every way to a Rolex watch. You test the metal content and the gold is real gold, the silver is real silver and the stainless steel is real steel. Unlike the fakes, it weighs exactly the same as a Rolex, down to the gram. The second hand ticks once a second, every second and is perfectly in time with the atomic clock. The watch comes with papers individually certified by the Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètresand. The box is sealed with an official Rolex seal.
Is the watch real?
Who wins in this transaction? Me? The woman? Neither of us?
Me: What sort of gum do you have.
Her: Just the ones on the counter. Peppermint, spearmint, cinnamon…
Me: Cinnamon! Who buys cinnamon?
Her: Lot’s of people. People who like the zing but don’t like the coolness of mint buy it.
Me: I don’t know, that sounds dodgy to me.
Her: That’s nothing, the distributor was pushing liquorice the other week.
Me: Liquorice gum?
Her: It’s pitch black. Looks like tar.
Me: I think I’ll just stick with peppermint.
Her: That’s 50 cents.
Me: I’ve only got a 50 dollar note or a 100 dollar note. Is that cool?
Her: I suppose. It’s almost closing time anyway. I’ll just have to go to the bank for more change in the morning.
Me: Thanks, sorry to be a pain.
Her: I’ll take the lower of the two.
Me: Of course
Her: And here is your exact change.
Me: Hang on, I think I’ve got a bunch of change in my bag.
Her: That would be better…
Me: Man, I’ve got 50 bucks here in coins!
Her: I only need 50 cents.
Me: Ok, well if you give me my fifty bucks back I’ll give you the 50 cents.
Her: Here is the fifty…
Me: Hang on, why don’t I give you the change back plus all my loose change and you give me a hundred dollar note. Then you have some spare change.
Her: I’m not sure that adds up…
Me: Oh yeah, you’re right. That only adds up to $99.50.
Her: And…
Me: …and I need to pay for the gum too so here is another dollar. $100 in change for the $100 note plus 50 cents for the gum.
Her: Let me count that up again.
Me: Sure. It’s exactly hundred plus 50 cents.
Her: All adds up. Here’s your $100.
Me: You can’t be too careful.
Four men sit down to play a game of poker in the dingy backroom of New York club. Each player is a walking cliche.
Jimmy The Rat is a scum bag, a nervous little man in hawiaan shirt and brown leather jacket two sizes two big. He eats peanuts constantly, scattering the shells on the floor.
The Colonel is a six foot high southern gent dressed in a white suit and a big mustache. His southern accent slips when he gets drunk.
Jake is a bedroom player, a middle aged, middle class, middle of the road player whose learnt the game online and playing his buddies. He says this is first game outside his hometown.
Natasha is a buxom Russian on the wrong side of forty. She only knows a few words of English: “Check” “Raise” and “I See You.”
The games been running for an hour when the dealer, the bartender, notices that the cards have been marked.
Someone has crudely smeared daub on the back of the high cards. Daub is a greasy substance used to mark cards in play. Often eye make up or cigarette ash is used. In this case, the cheat has used a commercial daub they purchased from a online cheating website.
Unfortunately, like most commercial cheating products, this daub is poor quality and very easy to spot.
The bartender calls over the bouncers who search the players. No daub is found but they do find:
Jimmy The Rat: A betting slip from a horse race, a packet of gum and a broken cigarette.
Natasha: Three condoms still sealed in their packets, an AA chip and a fake passport.
Jake: An Iphone, a copy of Erdnase at the Card Table and picture of his kids.
The Colonel: A rubberband, a dried out moist towelette and a can of Dr Pepper.
Who cheated and how did they do it?
And where is the evidence?
I posted this scam on my previous blog over a year ago. While I had a lot of guesses, no one found the answer. Let’s see if the new year has some new answers…
The con man and his victim each put five coins of varying amounts into a pile. The victim then lines the ten coins up in a row, in any order he likes. The two players each take turns taking a coin from either end of the row until they have five coins each. Whoever gets the most money, wins the kitty.
The con man picks first and ends up winning.
The con artist, keen to make more money, asks the victim if he’d like to play again. This time, to sweeten the deal, the con artist puts in six coins to the victim’s five. This time, the con artist lines up the coins and let’s the victim go first. Since the victim is going first he gets more choices and will always end up with one more coin than the con man.
The con man still wins.
Why does the con man always win?
John Scarne had an encyclopedic knowledge of gaming and cheating as well as an incredible brain for figuring out odds and percentages.
His books on dice, cards, three card monte and gaming are in the libraries of all good card cheats and gambling aficionados.
Throughout his career he was often hired by casinos and betting agents to spot cheats and break down scams.
On one occasion he was hired by a bookie who had set up a closed shop book making operation in a penthouse apartment.
His regular customers would spend an afternoon locked in his horse room, plied with drinks and encouraged to bet on horse races with the results of each race would coming in through a single phone line.
The bookie was concerned because a young blonde woman had won over $100,000 in six weeks and he believed she was cheating.
He asked Scarne to figure out how this woman was able to pick the winnings in a locked room. Particularly since this was the 1950s with none of the fancy modern communications technology we could have used today.
Scarne spent the afternoon with the bookie and soon cracked the scam. See if you can figure it out too. Here are the factors:
1) The only way to communicate with people in the room was via a single phone line.
2) Only the bookie would used the phone for taking phone bets and getting results.
3) The announcement of race winners came around five minutes after the race had run. 3) People bet right up until the announcement was made.
4) No one left or entered the windowless room.
If you can figure out the answer, post it below. If you’ve heard the story before, keep mum until others have had a guess.
