World's Oldest Crossroader Dies at 102

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World's Oldest Crossroader Dies at 102

Source: LV Weekly | Thu, Jan 20, 2011 >>


In the 1970s, Ray Carson lived in Henderson. He worked as a pit boss at the Horseshoe casino and as a security supervisor at Caesars.

Oh, Carson had a third job, too: designing gambling devices for card cheaters.

Carson, who recently passed away at 102, grew famous for his prism blackjack shoe, which allowed crooked dealers to glimpse the next card to be dealt, and then deal the card beneath it. But the prism shoe was Carson’s passion project; Carson’s bread and butter was the holdout table.

A holdout table looks like a regular card table, but when you sit at just the right spot and push in just the right place, it sucks up a playing card or spits one out. You cover the sucking and spitting from the other players with your hands or with your other cards. One of Ray Carson’s most deceptive holdouts is a 32-inch-by-32-inch folding card table with a wood top, felt inlay and metal legs. It looks like the kind of thing you’d buy at Walmart or Target. It looks thin, cheap and completely nondescript. Of course, it might be the most distinctive folding card table in history.

Its secret is a springboard concealed beneath the felt inlay. When you press on the right spot, the spring pushes a card through the part where the felt center meets the wood.

According to sleight-of-hand master and cheating expert Jason England, “The Carson table was most likely used for gin. In gin, a single good card, like an ace, seven or eight, could be very useful. And if you’re playing in a big game, where $25,000 or $50,000 might change hands, a single good card could be really useful.”

Who knows how much money illicitly changed hands atop the Carson table. The one thing we know for sure about the table is this: It’s up for auction next week. The starting bid is $1,500, and it’s expected to go for $3,000-$5,000.

The table is at the Chicago-based Potter & Potter Magic Memorabilia auction house, and the man bringing it from the back rooms to the spotlight is auctioneer/magician/magic historian Gabe Fajuri.

Fajuri has been doing magic since he was 6. He’s performed at kids’ birthday parties and at restaurants like Max & Erma’s and Bennigan’s. At 17, he lectured at the Magic Collectors Weekend in Chicago, and since then he’s established himself as one of the world’s foremost magic scholars.

“Ray Carson definitely built this table for crossroaders—cheaters,” says Fajuri. “But we’re selling it for entertainment purposes only. It will probably go to a magician or to a collector who can show it off. It’s not our goal to arm Legion of the Night with tools of their trade.”

Holdout tables like Carson’s, Fajuri says, aren’t often available to the public. “This stuff trades privately,” he says. “It’s rarely available by auction. You can count the number of times these things have come to auction on one or two hands.”

But isn’t there a danger that a magician would acquire the table and then use it for evil?

Unlikely. “Most magicians,” Fajuri explains, “don’t have the balls to be card cheats, let alone use a holdout table. If you secretly palm a card or do a shift or second deal and get caught, there’s no real evidence against you. But if you get caught using a holdout table, it’d be hard to deny.”

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