But player’s marks … no.

For years, there was a daily ritual when I ran a poker game. We’d show new decks of diamond-backed Bees around for inspection. We’d smell of the bottom seal for a glue smell to see if they had been opened. Then we’d do the mark checks above.

With Bees, the edges were different. A cheater could get five decks and make a deck of “sorts” where the low cards had a different pattern on the edges.

I am not surprised that someone would try to mark cards at the table. No one but me checks for marks. It is impossible to prove who did it, unless you catch them with a little daub thingy that looks like the thumb print pads when you cash checks.

It looks to me like those Bicycles above might have the pattern slighly off center sometimes. This would allow a casino employee to make decks of sorts, since the cards are used over and over.

I’ve seen finger waves, cards that are warped differently than the others.

In any poker joint, in any country in the whole wide world, someone is trying to cheat.

Johnny Moss said, “I know about all those things because they were done to me. Being on the road is the best education the world.”

Another way to check for marks is to hold a card toward the overhead light and move it back and forth until the shine removes the pattern and you see only a shiny surface. The marks will stick out.

Folks use an ink or a daub to make spots like those. It can be done accidentally with ball point pen ink on your hands.

With plastic cards, daubers would use a blue on blue, with a slightly darker blue for the marks. or red on red.

Paper players, folks using marked cards, will be wearing a hat, and looking really hard, usually when they are dealing.

Those marks, black on white, obvious from a distance are either: 1. an accident or 2. an idiot. It is eleven to ten pick ‘em.