Behind the Scenes of the Carnal Carnival
by Jeff Booth

The Games

Section 4 of 5
Go to section 1: Carnal Carnival Introduction
 

Another way carnivals traditionally extracted money from customers was through dishonest games. Nowadays that has been pretty much eliminated, but when we traveled through Texas, almost every game on the Midway was rigged.

Of course, the games in the Carnal Carnival are not rigged, unless you happen to come across Grifter Dan. He is a composite of the Three Card Monte thrower I got to watch on a carnival lot in Texas, and Doc Monte, a professional con man I got to know through my involvement with magic while I was still in my early teens. Sometimes known as Father Monte, complete with collar, he taught me a lot about basic cons and how con artists think. He was an older man who claimed to be in his 80’s (although he looked sixtyish), and who also claimed to have a twenty year old wife (whom I actually met). Just as Doc Monte taught me, if you approach Grifter Dan in the right way, he’ll teach you a few sexy cons.

Getting back to the rigged games in Texas, this was a very eye-opening experience for me. I got to see things that I had only been told about or read about in books on cons and scams. An old timer on the lot took a liking to me, so he gave me the grand tour of the lot, pointing out all of the gyp joints and the various techniques used to lighten the wallets of the marks. I saw first hand just how much money people were fleeced out of.

There are several different types of dishonest games, which are now illegal pretty much everywhere. An alibi joint was the most interesting, since whether you win or lose is completely under control of the operator. Flat joints are simply impossible to win ever, and lack a lot of the artistry of the controlled games.

A good example of a flat joint is the old pendulum game in which you swing a pendulum out and back to knock down a pin. The pin is at the very center of the fulcrum of the pendulum, and it is based on the fact that most people lack even the most basic knowledge of physics. I saw quite a few of these, and it amazed me that the players had no inkling that it was physically impossible to win. It could be played as an alibi joint just by setting the pin slightly off center, but I never saw a mark win ever.

Another example would be the ring toss onto a block in which the only way to win would be to repeal the laws of gravity and momentum and cause the ring to hover directly above the block and then drop straight down. The other common version was one in which the block could only be ringed from behind, the side the jointee demonstrated from. The way it was cut at an angle made it impossible for a mark to ring it tossing from the front. On the gaffed blocks were the expensive prizes. The honest blocks had only cheap slum on them. Most flat joints were based on similarly simple principles of physics.

Alibi joints were much more clever, and because you could let the mark win sometimes, you could really play him for all he was worth. The bushel basket toss is one example. You must toss a softball into the basket three times in a row without it bouncing out to win. The basket had a concealed double bottom. When the second bottom was raised, the basketball would hit a fairly hard surface and stay in most times. Lower the extra bottom and it acted like a drum, bouncing the ball out every time.

Although players would start out merely trying to win a stuffed toy or some other slum, a good operator would quickly escalate the game into a cash proposition when he found a well-heeled sucker. I watched a gyp joint operator take all the money in a man's wallet, along with his ring and his watch. The man then went home to get his t.v. to win it all back on a double or nothing bet.

The way the operator got the sucker hooked was by letting the man win a little at first, then make him lose when real money came into play. Pretending to feel sorry for him, the operator would give the mark a chance to win all of his money back, as long as the game owner did not find out. When they put something more up to try and win it all back, they'd lose. He’d even give them practice tries, in which they would inevitably do very, very well.

Sometimes the gaff would be surprisingly simple. One dart game operator explained to me that most people would lean against the thin rail when they got ready to toss the dart. The operator knew just the right time to hit the rail so that the thrower would not notice it but still have his aim knocked off. I watched him do it a few times and the marks never had a clue.

I saw milk bottles with weighted bottoms so that they could be placed on top of a stack and they'd all come down, or at the bottom of a stack so that only the top ones would fall over. Rifles in the shooting galleries had the sights removed or offset. I saw six cat games with rods that would secretly come up behind the cats to keep them from falling off the racks.

One of my favorite gambits had to do with the large stuffed toys that you often see people carrying around the midway. These stuffed toys are expensive, and operators can’t afford to give many of them out. On some lots, the gyp joints would let a couple of people win a big stuffed toy in the morning, knowing that they would probably carry it around all day and give the joint some good publicity.

The common attitude on the lots I was on, though, was that you should never give a mark a thing. In that case, it was carnies posing as marks who roamed the midway with the stuffed toys during their breaks.

The games on our virtual lot are much easier on the pocketbook, since you only need the virtual money we give you, and the people running them are a tad more attractive. You can try your luck at the water balloon tossing booth, where a little aim lets you make a splash and get a t-shirt very wet. Spin the Wheel of Fortune, or test your aim at our very unusual target shooting booth,   Whatever game you play, there are no losers at the Carnal Carnival.
 

Next section: The Rides