Phantoms of the Card Table (High stakes: Cards) [Hardcover]

"There isn't a card player who wouldn't cheat, if he knew how." - Walter Irving Scott, The Phantom of the Card Table

"There isn't a card player who wouldn't cheat, if he knew how." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Walter Irving Scott was the greatest man ever with a pack of cards, so said Max Holden, writing in The Sphinx magazine, an exclusive journal for magicians. This was in 1930 after Scott had bamboozled a room full of New York's finest card manipulators by dealing himself winning poker hands from a shuffled deck. He liked to say of himself that he "cheated the cheats." His skill with cards was extraordinary. He was elusive too, and soon became known as The Phantom of the Card Table. We all have a sneaking admiration for the man who can deal from the bottom of the deck and get away with it. That's why New York's finest magicians gathered to watch Walter Scott and later paid generously to learn his methods. And that's why Gazzo Macee, a magician from England, decided to track him down some sixty years later. To his utter surprise, he found him, living in a retirement home in Rhode Island. The two became friends and Scott openly discussed his work with a view to it finally being published. "I don't care what you say," said Scott, "as long as you tell the truth." This then, is the truth about Walter Irving Scott and those other phantoms of the card table who have spent years practising a craft they rarely talk about, cheating at cards.

David Britland has written books on magic for magicians and worked as a researcher, writer and producer in British television including Channel 4's alternative magic show, The Secret Cabaret and Granada's James Randi: Psychic Investigator. For HTV he developed two series of Something Strange and a long running Meridian/Anglia series The Magic & Mystery Show, this before The X-Files turned the paranormal into a bandwagon. He has also taken a more serious look at the paranormal in several science documentaries developed for Channel 4's Equinox series. These included Superpowers, The Big Sleep and Secrets of the Psychics. Later this year he'll be making a documentary for Radio 4 about mind readers, called Mystery Men. He lives in Hertfordshire and is available for interview