How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard (Hardcover)

by Penn Jillette (Author), Mickey D. Lynn (Author)
Key Phrases: nonstandard hand, widow cards, cheat your friends, Limit Hold, New Hampshire, Big Mistake (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Jillette (the Penn of Penn & Teller) and his pseudonymous poker-cheating guru, Dickie, begin by saying that anyone who loves playing poker should "throw this book away." Readers will find no better advice. The dubious premise is that Dickie took Penn under his wing when Penn was 18, and as a favor, he has agreed to publish the card sharp's book. But calling the wit and wisdom of Dickie Richard sophomoric is far too kind. More accurate descriptions would be amoral ("Morality is what you make of it"), , scabrous and without redeeming social value. And the book is marred by obscenities, class insults and a machismo that would be comical if it weren't so vulgar ("If you are going to cheat, whip out your prick and cheat like a man"). If this was meant to be a joke, it's not funny. And if it's meant seriously, then the book itself is a cheat: when you're done with it, you still won't really know how to cheat at poker. (Oct. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description

Poker-mania is sweeping the nation, from the World Championship of Poker to internet poker and power poker. But home poker games shouldn't just be about winning: they're about stripping your opponents bare without their ever suspecting a thing. Teaming up with Mickey Lynn, Penn Jillette gives a home poker player everything he needs to know in one tidy volume. Lousy with attitude, stylish with swagger, How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker delivers a lifetime's worth of card-shark knowledge, including how to:
--pick your marks
--mark cards
--use "shiners" to keep track of other player's hands
--cut cards
--stash holdouts
This is not a book about how to play poker-the shelves are already full of those-it's about how to cheat, make money, and win big. If you're in the game, you're either a fish or a shark. How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker is the ultimate shark's playbook.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (September 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031234905X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312349059
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #654,793 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hilarious and insightful, December 19, 2005

By	Bradley Monton (Boulder, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This is a hilarious book. As Penn Jillette explains at the beginning, Penn (ostensibly) met Dickie Richard when Penn was hitchhiking as a teenager, and Dickie taught Penn everything Dickie knew about how to cheat at cards. Penn himself isn't a card cheat, doesn't condone card cheating, and feels bad about publishing this book. But Penn owed Dickie a favor, and Dickie wanted his memoirs published, so Penn agreed. The memoirs were horribly written so Penn and his co-author rewrote them. The bulk of the book, then, is a first-person narrative from Dickie about how he cheats at poker.

Dickie explains that you could cheat in a casino, but it's too hard. Instead Dickie shows up in a town, makes "friends", and then plays poker with them, takes their money, and skips town. Dickie cheats any way he can -- from bottom dealing to marking cards to simply walking out the door with the cash box. Dickie's descriptions of what he does are amusing yet appalling -- he is a sociopath and an egomaniac, and yet he manages to be so entertaining, you can't help liking him (a bit).

Is Dickie a real person? I highly doubt it. As Penn tells us at the beginning, Dickie is a "fictional" character -- that's a big clue that you shouldn't take the narrative veridically. Does this book teach you how to cheat at poker? Kind of. It doesn't actually teach you how to bottom deal, for example, but Dickie correctly says that you can learn that from any standard magic book. It doesn't teach you a system to follow for marking cards, but Dickie correctly says that you wouldn't want to follow a standard system, since that would make your cheating easier to detect.

As I see it, the point of this book isn't to teach you how to cheat -- though you might learn about how to detect cheaters (even though Dickie insists that's not a goal of the book). The book is a novel about a card cheater. Dickie epitomises an amoral, larger-than-life showman who lives life to its fullest. I get the sense that Dickie represents a somewhat darker side of Penn. Penn manipulates cards -- and people -- to entertain others and make money. That's what being a professional magician is all about. Dickie manipulates cards and people to make money -- the entertainment comes in being able to read about it.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing and entertaining in one swoop, October 17, 2005

By	Kevin Casey (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you want to learn how to palm cards, uncut a deck, deal from the bottom, the second or any other part of the deck this book is not for you. In fact, in the first chapter the book cuts through those lessons by recommending you to purchase "Expert at the card table" by Erdnase to learn all those moves as "he can teach you better than I ever could.."
The book is basically stories about a card cheat and his experiences over thirty years and if it teaches anything its how to scam people for extra money when you are already an accomplished card cheat and how to find games and not get the life kicked out of you on a daily basis. Ok so after reading the book you aren't ready to go out and take on the world as a card cheat nor do you learn much more about poker. What you do get is a pretty entertaining read about the life of a card cheat and the situations they end up in. If you are looking for a factual "how to" guide then look elsewhere. If you are a poker fan and looking for an entertaining novel this is the book for you. Do I feel cheated ? Yes :) Its not what I paid for. Would I wipe the book from my memory for a refund? Probably not.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Think before buying, March 17, 2006

By	Charles Sumner (Stoneham, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a fan of Penn & Teller's other books, I was going to buy this, but in reading parts of it in a bookstore, I discovered that it's not the fun, clever, amusing book about tricks you could use to cheat at cards or even ways to have fun with your friends at a poker night.

This book is a dark and seedy account about the life of a professional (and possibly fictional) poker cheater. There's nothing wrong with that, but it wasn't the book I thought it was going to be so I wanted to post a warning to make sure you knew what you were getting.