Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Trims: A marking method used on cards whose back designs have
Trims: A marking method used on cards whose back designs have white margins. The shark removes the cards he wants to be able to recognize (say the high cards) and trims a thin 1/32-inch slice off one side edge of the card so that the margin is narrower than on the opposite edge. So that the remaining cards in the deck will be the same size and the margins will remain equal, he then trims 1/64-inch off both side edges. The net effect is that the back design on some cards seems to have been misprinted slightly off center. This can also be done on some cards which have overall back designs. Again the pattern is off center and does not run off the edge of the card in the same way on both sides. The simplest detection method is to place a suspected card on an honest card from another deck. The trimmed card will be smaller.
Pictures: A good rule to paste in your hat is never to play for money
Pictures: A good rule to paste in your hat is never to play for money with "one-way" cards, that is, cards whose backs bear pictures or designs that are not symmetrical from top to bottom. During play, a cheat can arrange such a deck so that high cards are right side up, low cards upside down. I know it sounds obvious, but card cheats know from experience that the obvious device is sometimes the one least likely to be suspected. Most players dismiss this idea, if it does occur to them, as too obvious and primitive a device to be used. Therefore the cheat, well aware of this, sometimes uses it; and a quick shuffle, after turning half the pack end for end, will destroy the arrangement and the evidence if anyone shows any sign of suspicion.