In a 1940 comic, the Joker comments, “If the police expect to play against the Joker, they had best be prepared to be dealt from the bottom of the deck.”
Does he mean drawing a card that hasn’t been properly shuffled and, also due to being on the bottom of the deck, the drawing player therefore knows in advance what the card will be?
There are many different cheats you could be pulling by dealing off of the bottom of the deck, but if you’re doing it at all, it’s surely because you’re pulling some cheat or another. There’s no legitimate reason to.
It’s easy for a cheater to peek at the bottom card, and then reserve it for the moment when it can do the most harm. A similar cheat is dealing “seconds,” the card under the top card.
Ah OK, thanks.
In the interests of completeness, dealing from a deck that’s been fraudulently shuffled such that the dealer knows which cards are going to which player is known as dealing from a stacked deck, and, as you may imagine, if someone can stack the deck, they can stack it so they can cheat just as effectively dealing from the top.
“Stacking the deck” and its various grammatical forms is also a common phrase in the English language, and that’s what it means: To have a situation unfairly arranged to your advantage, such that your success is assured.
What bugged me about that story was Joker announcing that he would murder a guy at midnight an the guy, terrified and surrounded by cops, tries to steady his nerves by playing solitaire with a deck of cards planted by the Joker and which has sharpened and poisoned edges… at midnight.
Just to give you a different context, I recently watched the new miniseries about the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and after the trial Robert Shapiro said of Johnnie Cochran, even though they were on the same side, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck”. That is, he didn’t agree with the way some things were handled, as they were a bit underhanded.
Just to round out the discussion:
Mechanics will cull certain cards to the bottom of the deck during the shuffle (and there are many ways to get around cutting the deck, to put those cards right back where they’re wanted). Face cards culled to the bottom can be used to kill a lowball hand. A high pair can be dealt to an associate. Basically, if the dealer knows what the bottom or bottom few cards are, he can deal them to maximum advantage, be it improving his or an associate’s hand or killing an opponent’s hand. (Or sort of in the middle, giving a sucker three queens when he holds three kings - ensuring a win on a fat pot.)
The other technique is “dealing seconds” - knowing what the top card is and holding it out for a special deal, and dealing the second card down each time until that moment is reached.
It’s also possible to deal seconds from the bottom, but as Dai Vernon is dead and Ricky Jay is pretty recognizable, you probably don’t need to worry about that. 
Do not play poker with this guy.
Mechanics? Is that slang for card sharks or something? I’m genuinely curious; I’ve never heard that.
I saw his show in NYC and was one of his volunteers! I got to go onstage and work this huge upright chess board with lights. Very cool!
A mechanic is someone who can manipulate cards to his advantage, moving a card to the top or bottom of a deck to save it for himself, or deal it to an opponent, as needed. So, yeah, they’re basically card sharps if they do it for non-entertainment purposes. Shawn Farquhar, the guy in running coach’s video is one par excellence. I managed to spot two false cuts (I’m sure there were more) and that’s about it.
A card shark is someone who’s legitimately good at a game, but pretends to be a novice, to sucker in other players who might not play if they knew how good he was. A mechanic is someone who cheats by manipulating the cards.
Pretty much this. Look on youtube for “bottom dealing.” A card mechanic can arrange an entire hand on the bottom of the deck, false shuffle, and deal it to themselves. Back in high school, there were kids at the back of the bus to school who were great at this and made a few extra bucks for themselves. Done right, it’s really difficult to track.
But, yeah, it basically means you’re cheating and throwing good cards to yourself (or possibly bad cards to others) at will from the bottom of the deck by pretending to peel them off the top in a legitimate deal, but actually pulling them from the bottom, where you know where they’re at.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s (as i recall), Arizona allowed “friendly” poker games, where gambling was OK. This was before the Indian casinos became ubiquitous. I went to a few of these places, and the cheating was just rampant. Bottom and Seconds-dealing all over the place.
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