Cheating gambler technology roundup from 1933

This Popular Science expose on crooked gambling technology from November, 1933 is a maker's dream — these con artists were genius tinkerers, it seems:

Even so simple a gambling proposition as spinning or flipping a coin is made crooked by relatively common alterations now being made in underworld workshops. There are on the market coins with beveled edges sure to stop spinning and fall with the high side uppermost. Again, dollars are sometimes sawed in half and the two heads and the two tails sweated together in such a way that the line of joining is practically invisible. They are substituted for genuine coins by the cheaters during play. Whichever side comes up, the result is the same.

Not long ago, in a western city, police raided a gambling joint and confiscated, among other thmgs, a crap stick that had won thousands of dollars for the house. Such sticks, made of rattan and curved at the end, are used to rake the dice back after they have been thrown upon the table. When an officer accidentally twisted the handle of this stick, the secret of the players' ill luck at this table became apparent and very simple to explain to the victims.

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