He doesn’t put all his cards on table

READERS will be shocked, shocked to learn that cheating occurs in games of chance, including poker, craps and blackjack -- not to mention three-card monte, carnival contests and bar bets. Simon Lovell, whom the book describes as a “magician, former con man, and professional card cheat” explains many of the techniques the “pros” use to empty rubes’ wallets and how these con artists lure their victims into assisting in their own fleecing.

Anyone who’s walked around Manhattan knows three-card monte dealers still hustle unsuspecting tourists. And visitors to small-time carnivals and fairs shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the games are rigged with weighted milk bottles that can’t be knocked over, dull darts that can’t pop under-inflated balloons and rings that are too small to fit over the valuable prizes.

But Lovell sees crooks and con men everywhere and takes readers to task for clinging to the innocent belief that their friends aren’t cheating in penny-ante poker games: “Hopefully this book may help to change such idiotic attitudes. The cheat is a common animal (Cheatus Commonus) who infests life at every level.” The purpose of his book is to give the audience “a fighting chance of knowing how to avoid being taken.”

It’s a worthy goal, but there are problems in the execution.

Trying to live up to the word “everything” in the title, Lovell casts too broad a net. The sections devoted to online scams are superficial and don’t even cover the most notorious cyber fraud, the beleaguered “innocent” who just needs access to a U.S. bank account to move millions of dollars out of Nigeria.

The proliferation of state lotteries, tribal casinos and riverboat gaming, taken with the expansion of Las Vegas, suggests that a lot of gambling in the U.S. takes place in professional venues. This shift makes many of the bar bet cons involving cards, dice, etc. sound decades out of date. Are there still that many bars where the clients will bet hundreds of dollars on a game suggested by a stranger?

As Lovell stresses, most suckers contribute to their losses through a mixture of greed and credulity. He notes that many people use a system for roulette that “consists of waiting for red to come up six times in a row and then backing black to come up ... presumably on the assumption that the ball can ‘remember’ where it last fell.” He counsels potential marks, “Remember that your greed is the hustler’s greatest weapon. It may look like easy money but nothing in life is free.”

The biggest weakness of “How to Cheat” is Lovell’s prose, which is both too dull and too cute. The most interesting sections detail how cheaters manipulate cards and dice in their favor. But it’s not easy to hold the reader’s interest while explaining the odds against getting a specific hand at poker or how to manipulate a dice cup. More effective sequential photographs might have helped; so would more judicious editing.

Lovell couches many of the explanations as adventures recounted by his arch-cheater friend, whom he coyly refers to as Freddy the Fox. Each chapter opens with a pseudo-Will Eisner comic book cover depicting some specific escapade of Freddy’s. At the end of the book, Lovell admits that, shucks, Freddy is a composite character who doesn’t really exist, but the reader wearied of the conceit hundreds of pages earlier.

Lovell counsels his readers to avoid betting on anything that looks impossible to do, to know all the rules of a game and not to gamble when drinking -- undoubtedly sound advice. But he fails to make the message sound as compelling as he obviously wants to.

Although the comparison may seem unfair, much of the text of “How to Cheat” inevitably brings to mind the stories of that great chronicler of card, dice and horse players, Damon Runyon. Lovell devotes a lot of space to dissecting the ways in which a card can be palmed, hidden in a sleeve, sneaked in by a waiter or affixed under a table. But the reader longs for Runyon’s straightforward pizazz -- as when Kidneyfoot, a waiter at Mindy’s restaurant on Broadway, recalls, “The Lacework Kid is a rank sucker at gin until I instruct him in one maneuver that gives you a great advantage, which is to drop any one card to the floor accidentally on purpose.”

Charles Solomon is the author

of many books, including “Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation.”