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The Strap or Fast and Loose
The street swindle known as Fast and Loose dates at least to the early Renaissance, and probably back into the Middle Ages. This makes it much older than either of its nefarious cousins—the Shell Game or Three Card Monte. In all three scams, the intent of the operator is the same.
In the marketplace, a friendly man sets up a table. He takes a thin strap of leather, the type that the men of the period would use in a garter to hold up their stockings. He folds the strap in half, and then winds it into a coil, forming two identical loops in the center of the coil—one the folded center of the strap, and the other its first fold. These loops look identical.
The fast-talking stranger challenges a spectator to place a stick in the true center loop—the one that holds Fast to the stick when the two ends of the strap are pulled. If the operator pulled and the strap came Loose, the spectator lost his bet. Since the operator could secretly change how the two ends are pulled away, he could always win. Fast and Loose was also called Pricking the Garter.
‘To play fast and loose’ has come down into our language as a slang phrase meaning ‘to act foolishly or recklessly’:
‘To play fast and loose’ is a phrase that appears both in Love’s Labor’s Lost and in King John and is attributed to Shakespeare as often as ‘It’s Greek to me.’ But the OED finds the phrase in 1557 as the title of an epigram in a popular miscellany (what we would now call an ‘anthology’). The phrase originally referred to a sleight-of-hand trick.
--Michael Macrone, Brush Up Your Shakespeare!
Sometime in the 18th or 19th century, the scam was resurrected with a new method—one which used a continuous loop of string. The scam artists who worked the docks would often play this con on a barrel top for the sailors. This new version of the game was called On the Barrelhead, from the phrase, “Put your money on the Barrelhead.” It was also known as The Figure Eight and later as The Endless Chain. Two or more loops are formed within the circle of a string (See Figure 1 below). The spectator bets on which loop will hold Fast. In this version, it doesn’t matter in what manner the string is picked up. Instead, the important thing is the method used to lay it out. Laid out in one pattern, one of the loops holds Fast. Laid out in what looked like an identical pattern, none of the loops would hold Fast—the suckers couldn’t win.
Since the theme of both the older Pricking the Garter and the newer On the Barrelhead is the same, and the term Fast and Loose makes a good general heading for this type of trick, I have always taken a liberty and used the term Fast and Loose interchangeably for either swindle—whether one plays On the Barrelhead or Pricking the Garter, one is playing a game of Fast and Loose.
20th Century American grifters call the Pricking the Garter version of Fast and Loose The Strap or The Belt. It has also been called The Old Army Game.
The On the Barrelhead version of the game is called by magicians the Endless Chain, Loopy Loop, and Fast and Loose.
--Whit Haydn, October, 2005
On the Barrelhead
Here are the main figures of the On the Barrelhead scam:
This is the Hour Glass pattern. It can be thrown so that either side holds fast and the other is loose, both hold fast, or both come loose.
This is the Figure Eight. The top and bottom of the Hour Glass are pushed in to make it harder for the spectator to follow the lay of the chain.
The figure can be opened back into the Hour Glass with thumb and fingers of each hand before opening the chain.
This is a figure created by magician Fred Lowe which he called The Flower. The three center loops can be set to either all catch or all lose.
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WhitHaydn
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