- [Narrator] The day the first card game was invented,
so was cheating.
This is unusual.
- You know what cheers me up when I'm feeling shitty?
- What?
- Rolled up aces over kings.
- [Narrator] Throughout the last few centuries,
gambling has attracted the most clever and nimble thieves
to ever sit at a card table.
- three tens.
(laughing)
- [Narrator] In fact, there's a story of a cheat
who had threatened everyone at the table with a knife
if he caught them cheating, only to use the reflection
in the knife to see the cards he was dealing.
From slight of hand to stripper cards.
Shiners to card punches.
The techniques and apparatus used by professionals
have constantly improved in effectiveness.
One piece of gambling memorabilia that I've always
been fascinated with is the gambler's holdout.
A holdout is an item used by the cheat to hold out
or withhold something that would give him an edge
and help him win.
Kind of like the term, keeping an ace up your sleeve.
These contraptions can be very simple,
but also extremely complex, and more often than not
very silly looking.
I recently found one at an old gambling auction
and this particular holdout was used in the 1930s.
A long string which is attached to a lever mechanism
is fed through the shirt or jacket, and when pulled,
would feed the playing card directly
into the cheater's hands.
It's still unclear to me whether this
steampunk cheating device was actually used
in a game of poker.
I find it hard to believe that anyone would be brazen enough
to not only use this, but to keep it on for hours at a time.
It started to bug me after just about
three minutes of wearing it.
But knowing that this technology existed
almost 100 years ago, I wonder how far we've come
at the card table.
Are the days of card cheats over,
or are they just undetected?
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(dramatic music)