WHO has not heard of him?-yet how many men are there who can say that ever in the course of their lives they absolutely met one who really deserved the title of a sharper? Very few, and those would be probably old men; for what is generally understood by the regular billiard-sharper belongs to an age gone by, and exists now in name but not in reality. For, be it understood, we do not consider a man a sharper who simply tries to make all the money he can by his good play. There seems in the minds especially of country {people some unaccountable misapprehension on this point. In many small country towns, where the best hotel boasts a billiard-room, and the billiard-room its best player, the fixed idea in the minds of all the frequenters is this-any stranger who beats their best player is a shaper. It will be found that whenever any new-comer arrives among them who seems anything of a player, their best player is always, so to speak, put on to him, the rest in the room invariably backing their own champion. If they win, they consider themselves very sharp and clever fellows; if, on the contrary, the stranger turns out to be too good, they set him down as a sharper, whereas they more justly deserve the title themselves. Again, after it gets known that a player in a certain room what is called"fancies himself "-he is probably a good player, fond of a little gambling; there are many such in London at the present time- some first-rate pyramid-player, perhaps semi-professional, with a good address, will go to the room on purpose to meet this man, in order, if possible, to win some money; still this, strictly speaking, cannot be called sharping: it is simply a trial of skill between two good players, both of whom probably know how to take care of themselves. Sharping, to be properly so called, implies a certain amount of foul play or trickery, by means of confederates. The billiard-sharper of the present day, or rather the sharper without the word"billiard"attached, owes his success to deliberate cheating; but we will come to him by-and-by. The immorality of the well-known three-card trick does not consist in the man backing the quickness of his fingers against the quickness of your eyesight, but in the fact of his being surrounded by a gang of confederates, who, by pretending to win money, entice foolish young men to bet; and also too often, if by chance the said sharp does lose a sovereign, raise a false alarm of police, and the novice gets simply welshed out of his stake.
Apropos of billiard-sharpers, a good instance of the biter bit to a small amount occurred not long back. A certain man, notorious for never betting unless he had at least 2 to 1 the best of it, entered a billiard-room where another man, who was really a first-rate player, was knocking about the balls, the proprietor of the room, also a first-rate player, looking on, and now and then saying approvingly," Ah, that's better. "he fact was that the conversation a few minutes previous had been on the importance of learning to play simple strokes with the left hand. The good player was trying, and consequently playing at least 70 in 100 under his game. The newcomer, however, did not know this, and though as a rule exceedingly shy of strangers, thought to himself that at any rate he was safe with a duffer like this, and consequently proposed a game of pyramids, 6d. balls. The offer was accepted in all innocence, it never occurring to the man that the fact of his having played so badly with his left hand was the reason of his being challenged. The result, which was exceedingly amusing, may be guessed. What made it the more ridiculous was the fact that the biter who was bit thought all along that he had been purposely taken in.
There is, however, an exceedingly dangerous class of well-bred sharpers about, though, fortunately for the youth of the present day, they are by no means so numerous or successful as they were some years back. Some of these men have made large sums of money by cheating, but not at billiards. Their only connection with the game is that they frequent billiard-rooms for the purpose of picking up their prey. The way in which they pick up their money is simply- aheating at tossing. Now, there is, and more especially has been, far more of this sort of thing than many men who know London well are aware of. For instance, the card-sharpers confine their cards, as a rule, to the racecourse, but they do a little quiet tossing in the public-houses, and many is the poor man who has been swindled out of his hard-earned wages. We will take an imaginary case, say a city billiard-room. There has been a pool on during the afternoon, and the sharp, who we will call our agreeable friend, casually asks someone what he is going to do this evening. This leads to an offer of his eventually to toss who pays for a cab to, say the Alhambra, or some well-known music-hall. They toss first time fairly enough. The Alhambra is reached; they toss again for drinks. The agreeable stranger almost invariably wins. They eventually toss for supper, which he is certain to win, and then during or after supper the young pigeon, whoever he may be, flushed with wine, and irritated at his bad luck, as he calls it, responds to the offer to toss, commencing with half-a-crown; loses whenever he goes double or quits, and probably goes home with barely a shilling in his pocket, yet all the time quite unconscious that he has been swindled.
The next point is, how is it done? Unfortunately there are many young men, fairly sharp too, who have an idea that cheating at tossing is all nonsense. That it is not particularly easy, is true; but that it is possible, and is done so as almost to defy detection, is simply a fact. There are several different methods. We will describe two, premising that the second method is by far the cleverest and most dangerous, as discovery is almost impossible.
The first method is the"cap, "hich consists of a small hollow case which fits over a shilling and looks exactly like one. Suppose the top of the cap is the head, of course the shilling is put down tail uppermost. Should head be called, the cap is taken up off the shilling by the pressure of the two fingers, and the real shilling is left down tail uppermost. On the other hand, should tails be called, the cap is left on, when it appears a head. This is, however, a clumsy method rarely resorted to. A much more common plan for our agreeable friend is to take a small handful of coin out of his pocket at random, put them down on the table with a bang, and say "Cry to these!" It seems so fair, that not one in a hundred would suspect anything, and cheating is apparently impossible. It is done as follows: suppose our agreeable friend has in his waistcoat pocket five coins ready sorted, i.e.-say three heads pointing away from him and] two pointing towards him-it is evident that by simply taking them out and keeping them as they are without turning, five coins could be placed on the table, three of which would be head and two tail. Now, previous to putting his hand in his waistcoat pocket, he conceals in his hand, either between his two outer fingers, or, still better, by palming, two coins, say florins, having the tail uppermost when placed down. Those who have watched a clever juggler will know how easily this may be done. Consequently our agreeable friend can make heads or tails appear at his pleasure. Should tails be called, he simply refrains from relaxing the muscles of his right hand, and takes up the two coins ready fixed, thereby leaving five coins down on the table, three of which are heads. On the other hand, should heads be called, he lets the two coins remain on the table, withdraws his hand, and out of the seven coins down, four are tails.
Many have been the victims to this ingenious stratagem. The class of men who used to practise it were, in every sense of the word, men about town. The night-house keeper's watchdog used to touch his hat to him as he passed his newly-found young friend into a haunt where gold itself would have failed to have gained admittance without him. Many a young man fresh from Oxford and Cambridge has thought his evening's amusement cheap at a tenner when he can see life like this, and, as he says afterwards, if it had not been for his confounded bad luck tossing, it would have cost him next to nothing. Ah! not very many years ago, there was a story of a sum of money lost and paid at tossing-fortunately by a man more than able to afford it-that took four figures to write, and those not very small ones either. The moral to all this is, do not toss with agreeable strangers.