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Casinos> Gambling Articles > The Fourflusher Poker Scam
The Fourflusher Poker Scam
Have you ever heard someone called a fourflusher? You hear it often in old black and white
movies since it qualified both as a colorful insult and was a way to do this
without resorting to profanity that wasn’t allowed back them. To call someone a fourflusher was the same
thing as calling them a cheat. A
fourflusher is someone deemed dishonest and unworthy of trust. Like most insults, fourflusher actually goes
back to a very specific kind of cheating, however. In this case, it was someone conducting a very
specific kind of poker cheat.
A fourflusher did not get that term by accident. A fourflusher is someone who was trying to
pass off a four card flush as a full hand.
How could anyone possibly hope to accomplish such a thing? Consider this possibility. You have one player at a table who was lucky
enough to draw four spades in pursuit of a flush, but how ran into the wall on
the fifth card. However, he was lucky
enough to draw a club. This player
proceeds to hold his cards in such a way that the four spades are prominent,
but the club is situated so that only part of it is showing. If the lighting isn’t good and the liquor has
been flowing freely, it’s very easy to mistake a club for a spade in the heat
of a game. But that’s only one way to
conduct the fourflusher cheat and the components in the game have to be just
right.
Otherwise, successfully pulling off the fourflusher poker
cheat requires two players. The player
with the non-flush hand still attempts to hide the non-flush card when he lays
his hand down, which his partner quickly grabs off the table, replacing the
club with the spade, in this particular example. In order for this to work, of course, it must
be done quickly and with a little bit of acting tossed into the mix. As soon as the fourflusher lays down his
cards, his partner—vocally expressing disgust—must roughly toss his cards down
right on top of his partner’s cards.
It’s also nice if the second cheater perhaps vocally curses his partner’s
good luck, or else his own bad luck.
Typically, this seemingly outrageous scam works best when the other
players are down and looking to get to the next hand in order to attempt to win
back some of their losses. Another way
to make the fourflusher cheat more palatable to the losers is for the second
guy to announce that he was holding a straight.
This works well because the straight would have been the next highest
winning hand and unless another player was really holding a straight the losing
players are more accepting of the scam because they feel like they would have
lost to the straight anyway.
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