About Marking Cards:

Marking cards is one of the most known ways to cheat in card games. Although marking cards is quite difficult to perform in big casinos, it is still can be done in clubs or private games.

Marked cards are printed or altered the way the cheater can know their values looking at the back side of the card. There are far too many methods of marking cards to describe them all at this page; hence we have chosen only the most common ones.

How Cards are Marked?

Card marking is usually read as a clock. Marks are located on a circle with an ace placed at the upper position, 2 to Queen shifted clockwise according to the value and King not marked at all. For example, a mark placed at the location of digit 3 on a clock face means that the card is 4; digit 10 means Jack and so on.

One of the ways to mark cards is to shade them, put them in the sun or scratch them with a razor. More sophisticated technologies can be involved in marking cards. One of them is color readering. Marks are printed on the cards the way they can only be seen through color filtered glasses or contact lenses. This kind of card marking is hard, but not impossible to detect. Many experts claim that a player wearing color filtered contact lenses can be recognized by a red crescent visible on the sclera around the iris.

Another way to mark cards is to paint them with a substance called juice. These marks are barely visible and difficult to detect. Juice colored patterns require special skills to be read, but once learnt, this method is quite effective and hardly detectable.

The classical way to detect marked cards is to flip the deck rapidly as if it was a movie flip-book. If there are any differences between printed patterns, they will become visible. Cheaters call this method Go to the Movies.

Detecting marked cards before the game starts is a good preventive measure, but card marking can also be done during the game itself. The cheater can mark the cards he holds blending or bulging with his hand, nail or an assistive object. So, it is quite difficult to prevent any kind of card marking, therefore every player must remember that its his right to request the deck changed at any moment.