The WSOP cards are marked.

[*TT*]

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By the way, just for an update, Jeffrey Pollack has ordered a ton of new cards so there will be much more fresh setups in the future and card marking should (hopefully) no longer be a problem.

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It wasn't a problem at all last weekend, I didn't find a single marked card... and I know what to look for. Looks like the floor cleaned up its act, they started to remove marked cards from play. And if there was any game that it would have been prevelent in it was the games I was playing since I played lowball.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

[cardshark]

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...The dealer spread the whole deck and showed me... that almost every card had at least one corner "marked"... He said the shuffling machine does it, they all have it, all decks, and it really is nothing to worry about.

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I'm sure the dealer has nothing to worry about. He wasn't putting his money into the pot, was he?

If the shuffling machine was putting dents of the cards then they should return it to ShuffleMaster and ask for a replacement. If a shuffling machine is putting any dents on the cards that would be the result of a mechanical misalignment. Since all the cards end up through the same system of wheels and pistons then any bends produced by the shuffler would end up in the same spot on every card. This would be reminiscent to the way a malfunctioning photocopier may be reproducing a dot or a scratch on every page of paper, at (more or less) the same place as on any other page that came out of the same photocopier.

However, if the bends and nicks were all over the place then they were not the result of a mechanical malfunction. The question is: were they put there on purpose or accidentally? Now, if all the Aces had the bens in the same place and all the Kings had the bends in another place, and so on, then it is very unlikely that such bends ended up on those cards by accident, conveniently organized to facilitate easy identification of the cards by grouping the bends into several categories.

When cards are marked during a game they could be marked in any number of ways, depending who is marking them and for what purpose (what cheating strategy) and for what game. In lowball (since it is mentioned above) it is very useful to mark all the high cards one way. This way it makes it easier to put someone on a bluff it you know he caught a king. Sometimes this type of minimal information is all that is needed to put get a "good read" on an opponent. In general, when it comes to marked cards, less is more and the simpler the better.

It also greatly depends what kind of cards are in use. For example, some playing card brands (or better say back designs) are very well suited for reading shade work. Those cards are also very well suited for daubing. A small crew of daub players can put the work on a deck in a relatively short time (depending what dame is being played, i.e. How many cards are dealt to each player). Once the work is put on the cards a couple of take-off men sit down an play the work (but there is no evidence of them putting the work on, since they obviously were not the ones who did it). If you are interested in more details feel free to visit the Marked Cards page on my site. But just to mention one more detail, daub can be very powerful because a trained eye can see the work from across the table.

A lot of people handle cards very roughly, so whenever you see kinks and bends you can't know right away if they are there on purpose or totally by accident. The obvious giveaway would be if all the cards of the same value bear the same "accidental" kinks and bends.

Another common method to put work on the cards, during play, is by means of sanding the edges. This work was more popular in times before plastic cards became so widely used. The player would actually come equipped with a small strip of fine sandpaper glued to the inside of a finger. Then he would rub the edge of a card against the sandpaper. This procedure would remove some of the dark dirt that naturally builds up at the edges of paper cards so the marked cards would appear to have lighter spots on their edges. Cards marked in such way can be identified while they are still in the deck (good to know if it will hit the flop, he!) or even if the card lays on the table. This method was widely used to cheat a single-deck blackjack, but it was also used to cheat at poker.

The latest method of marking cards during play is something that I can barely mention but unfortunately I am not at liberty to share any details. However, the work is completely invisible to anyone, but the person who is prepared to read it. The interesting part is that it is also completely invisible even if one told you exactly where to look and what to look for. As I just said, this is actually very new, and there is a detail that I cannot divulge because it would give away clues. But I am not talking about the old contact lenses or any of the other old methods. This is new. And it is definitely a visual method of reading marked cards. Perhaps at some time in the future I will be able to say a little bit more about it.

[Spook]

FYI This thread is over a year old and the post above this bumped it.

Not sure if it happened again this year or not.

[ibluffoldladies]

cardshark, I read about your super secret new card marking method. I googled it.

[Slow Play Ray]

it's this one, isn't it??

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Microchips embedded in the cards that say the card's name out loud when activated, but say it in such a high pitch that it can't be heard by humans but is easily identified by the magician's dog.

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