How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard
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… More >>
Price: $2.97
Rating: 2.5 (17 reviews)
How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard
Incoming search terms for the article:
- how to cheat your friends at poker torrent (1)
- How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard torrent (1)
Related posts:
- Poker Wit & Wisdom: Quotes and Writings on America’s Favorite Card Game
- Getting Lucky: The Education of a Mad Poker Player
- Poker for Dummies
Tagged with: cheat • Dickie • Friends • Poker • Richard • Wisdom
Filed under: Poker Books
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
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..”
Its not what I paid for. Would I wipe the book from my memory for a refund? Probably not.
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
Rating: 3 / 5
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.
Rating: 2 / 5
I found this book refreshing, a possibly honest book from a sociopath’s viewpoint who isn’t a business person or lawyer.
If you enjoyed “Catch Me If You Can” by Frank Abagnale, You’ll probably enjoy this book.
as for the language: I’ve heard worse on South Park. If you find a little lewd humor offensive you should probably stay away from poker in general, maybe try gardening or collecting bottle caps.
The advice given is accurate, like: Don’t be flashy, practice your moves in front of a mirror thousands of times before using them in a game, If you’re going to burn a game park a couple of blocks away with your car ready to go, etc
Rating: 4 / 5
This is an ugly book.
It purports to detail the adventures of an accomplished card mechanic, a man so practiced and skilled, that he can control the flow of cards through an evening of poker and, according to the way he tells it, win 100% of the time.
The lightest part of the story is of how Penn meets this character and the subsequent collection of a debt, a sort of debt of honor. Many years ago Penn told the card cheat ‘I owe you one’ and thus, years later, he collected. Having Penn and his co author Mickey D Lynn transpose the random notes of his life and then navigate the waters that are modern publishing on his behalf. That is if Penn is to be believed, he said the same story on NPR, but the whole thing stinks. It stinks a lot more if it is all true. The mysterious narrator, given the name Dickie Richards for the book, is a total freak. He must have been locked in the cupboard under the stairs for most of his formative years, being only let out for weekly beatings. His regard for his fellow man is best described by the heading of this review. The book details his journey through America ripping off small time, middle class poker afficianados. One very BIG time game is the exception here. He details techniques which come down to sophisticated lying. Using a moral code that resembles a pretzel he constantly berates the reader. ‘You are a dirtbag for buying this book’ ‘You are a dirtbag for using or not using the lies and deceits contained herein.’ You are basically a dirt bag for having the temerity to get up this morning and take a breath.’ Whatever your status, you remain simply ‘a bag of money with hair.’
If you enjoy reading about societies outsiders, as I do, then you will enjoy this book as long as the unending grey ribbon of a life spent cheating, weaseling and lying does not get you down. If, however you are simply caught up in the current poker revolution and think that this book will give your ‘Hold Em’ game a lift, forget it. You would be better off looking elsewhere.
Rating: 3 / 5