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Hungarian Monte and Trinidad Monte

From the School for Scoundrels Notes on Three-Card Monte

Lower Broadway, NYC, August 1990. Operator stepped out of picture.

Photograph by Ronald A. Wohl.

This photo shows the layout for a variation of three-card monte called Trinidad monte. It is played with three disks of hard rubber with chalk mark on one. The hype moves are nearly identical, and the premise of the game is the same. The disk with the chalk mark accidentally becomes smudged on the back with chalk. When the money goes down, the smudge has mysteriously moved to a losing disk.

Here’s a description of the game from the photographer:

"I saw it once in the early seventies in NYC, then around 1990 for about a year. All the operators were from Trinidad. I befriended one of the mobs for a little while, but they did not want to be photographed (no three-card monte hustlers want to, except for one of those on the Paris Flea market who obviously posed for me). According to the Trinidad guy,
it was always the same guy throwing in 1990, and the same shills. This version was very common in Trinidad where he learned it (I have never been to Trinidad; also things change).

"The operator either had white pants or a white hat. He used both to remove smudges of chalk from his right middle finger when using the chalk mark as a hook. The three disks have five black surfaces that lose, and only one chalked face that wins. This allows moves in which one of the disks is turned over during a throw—something not possible with playing cards. Discs are about 2 inches in diameter and are made of three layers of hard rubber (black/red/black)."

—Ronald A. Wohl




Darwin Ortiz describes a strikingly similar version of the game in Gambling Scams. Ortiz had a friend from Hungary who told him that this version of the game had been popular there before the communist takeover, but had since been eliminated. The Hungarian monte used metal disks, one of which had a large red spot painted on the bottom, but otherwise seems identical to the Trinidad monte.

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WhitHaydn