The other day I encountered a peculiar con game outside the local gas station. The guy balanced an empty beer bottle so that its neck was tipped to one side resting between two vertical dowels; the object of the game was to push the bottle to a fully standing position without overtipping, using a Y-shaped prod made from a plastic salad fork.
This whole arrangement was set up on a small raised platform covered with a cloth, upon which ten pennies rested. The guy encouraged me to mark each successful attempt by sliding a penny from one side of the platform to the other. If I was able to right the bottle ten times, I’d win a PS3. Of course, the first attempts were free.
I was able to right the bottle fairly easily the first two times, while the guy lavishly complimented my amazing glassware-balancing prowess. The third time, the bottle overtipped-- but the guy assured me that I could keep playing for only one dollar a try! Also, no matter how many times I tried, once I righted the bottle ten times, I’d win the PS3… AND get back all the money I’d spent during the game! I couldn’t possibly lose!
Okay, so this was a pretty obvious scam. However, the setup was fairly complex and I was unable to ascertain the precise mechanism of the con. On the face of it, the game could inevitably be won by a patient enough player. How did this guy ensure that didn’t happen? Did he switch bottles on me? Did the act of pushing the coins across the cloth somehow affect the outcome? Was the platform itself rigged? Or would a couple of burly guys simply have shown up and pummeled me into oblivion after I’d paid out enough money?
Paraphrased from “Gambling Scams” by Darwin Ortiz, page 184:
All glass bottles are not symmetrical. Because of the manufacturing process, glass bottles are always slightly heavier on one side than on the other. If you place an empty beer bottle on its side and roll it gently across a tabletop, you will see an eccentric slow-fast pattern to the roll. This is caused by the imbalance.
So when the beer bottle is place with the heavier side downward, it is pretty easy to set the bottle upright. When the heavier side is on top, as soon as the bottle is almost upright, the imbalance causes it to tip over.
Darwin Ortiz refers to it as, “The Push-Up Bottle” scam.
I’ve seen this scam first hand and it really is ingenious. The handling of the bottle is just so innocent. You never see or suspect that the con artist is doing anything. He’s just setting the bottle back on its side for you to push up again. You never see him give the bottle a half turn, and its that half turn that makes all the difference.
It is physically impossible to turn the bottle with the prod as you are attempting to balance it. It will cause the bottle to fall and you would lose the bet anyways.
I did say that it was an obvious scam. I may be dumb, but… well, there really are no qualifiers; I’m just dumb.
Not dumb enough, however, to throw money at a setup that I recognized as an obvious scam, even if I wasn’t quite sure how it worked. I was curious enough to give it a try for free, but cut out at the first mention of cash. There’s an old saying about bar bets and having one’s ear filled with unlikely fluids, that I think applies here.
Now that I know the secret, though, all I have to do is figure out a way to work it into my own particular brand of disinformative mischief. “Did you know that gravity is always strongest at the exact center of a room? It’s true! Here, let me demonstrate with this empty beer bottle…”
