A poker puzzle
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?
Well I think the book by Erdnase definitely would give Jake applomb for cheating in some respects though I doubt he’d be as crude as to use daub. Quite frankly it has to be the dealer - the bar tender. He daubed the card as he was dealing and threw suspicion into the game a bit like the old crossed deck. On second thoughts…haha.
My absurd answer is that they were colluding: the colonol hid the daub in his dr pepper, where he passed it via the wet towel to jake who smeared some onto the photo of the kids (could have been disguised on the glossy side), who stuck it to the bottom of the table with jimmy’s gum and natasha applied it to the card. Obviously this is very Alice in Wonderland! Haha.
It wasn’t the dealer…but I like your thinking.
I’m picking at straws here now but -
Jimmy - may have had some of the daub hidden in a peanut shell - As they are scattered on the floor the bouncers would not have thought to check them
The colonel has a rubberband and may have flicked the evidence away with it. — the other option is his moustache
The condom packets were airtight?
Ah, I remember this story; it was a very interesting case.
You see Jake wasn’t the innocent he claimed to be. Sure, he played only with his buddies before - but that was in prison. He had smeared daub on his shaven head, and then hidden it under a wig; a scratch of the head is all he needed to get a dab on his finger. On his head - that’s where you will find the evidence.
But he wasn’t the only person there with a record. The Colonel also came from the wrong side of the tracks, and had adopteda similar approach to cards. He was *also* trying to cheat, with the same cheap daub, which he cunningly used to wax his moustache, where it was only a nose-rub away - that’s where you will find the evidence.
It was, of course, a night of coincidences! Jimmy The Rat was also cheating - he hid his daub in the peanut shells - look on the floor - that’s where you will find the evidence.
You can see where this is going, next, of course. Natasha, the buxom “Russian” from New Jersey - it is pretty clear where she was hiding her daub! In a tiny dish blu-tacked to the underside of the table. She’d adjust her assets with one hand, and reach for the daub with the other, while the men were misdirected.
Despite their best efforts at cheating, that’s not where the majority of the daub on the cards came from. Each of them had only just started discreetly marking different cards, with practised hands, but getting confused by the conflicting signals. The clumsy smear of daub over most of the cards - especially the cards that were revealed by the bar-tender - was mainly coming from the container of daub sitting in the pocket of… the bar-tender - that’s where you will find the evidence.
It seems that guy was just moonlighting as a bar-tender. His main gig was running an online cheating web-site. He noticed a cluster of customers in an area of New York - customers that ignored his recommendations to purchase a more expensive daub that he was proudly hand-making, and instead went with the cheapest daub available. He arranged to have them play together, and deliberately corrupted their markings, just to teach them a lesson about paying that little extra to get quality.
Quite a remarkable story, and if I hadn’t learnt all of it from the bar-tender one night, I never would have guessed any of it from the clues provided here.
[Drats, I wrote this before I read the previous comments.]
I have so given myself multiple headaches thinking about this, and I still have no clue, ever thought I have is countered by the next aaarrrggghhhhh my brain hurts.
So a simple guess, Jake. As to how, ordered the daub online on his iPhone after reading about it in Erdnase (I think a cheat is a cheat, reading Erdnase will teach about daub so why wouldn’t the owner use it), then used the pic of his kids to get it on his finger.
I don’t care if I’m right, I just want to stop thinking about this
Jimmy The Rat. The daub is stuck under the table with gum.
Wow I didnt do too badly then. Haha thanks.
Ps. Nicholas I was wondering if you wanted a hand collating the encyclopaedia of scams. Because I have a few to add to the wiki if your interested.
Ryan is the winner. The daub was hidden in the colonel’s mustache.
It’s an old technique outlined in Scarne on Gambling.