Michael MacDougall - Gamblers Don't Gamble

Who better to regale you with tales from the card table and explain all manner of gambling deceptions than Michael “The Card Detective” MacDougall? This is a delightful book that will interest not only would-be mechanics, but also historians of magic, as MacDougall recounts his youthful experiences touring with Horace Goldin and his time spent studying the methods of card cheats the world over. Clear photographs accompany the author’s vivid explanations of a variety of deceptive pasteboard-based practices, but it’s the prose here that really stands out. Raymond Chandler himself couldn’t have dreamed up a more exciting collection of stories, and Gamblers Don’t Gamble will have you gripped right from its opening lines: “I’m in a crazy racket. It’s so crazy that, as far as I know — and I get around a lot — I’m the only living practitioner. Considering how dangerous it is, I’ll probably be the only dead practitioner one of these days. But meanwhile it’s a living.”