I just finished reading “The Long Walk”, and at one point a couple of the walkers play a game they call matching dimes. It’s some sort of gambling game where two people flip coins and see if they match or not, and money is won.
Is this a real game? How do you play it? I’ve never heard of it, and Google searches mostly turn up March of Dimes charity walks.
We use to play it when I was a kid, except usually for pennies.
Two people each flip a coin in the air at the same time. One of them calls mix or match. If he calls mix and one coin lands on heads and the other on tails, he wins both coins. If he call match, he wins both coins if the two coins match (both heads or both tails).
Then you do it again. You can either alternate who makes the call or you can have the guy who won last time make the call. Or let the guy who lost last time make the call. It’s a random luck game with no strategy.
Keep playing until you run out of coins or time or find something more interesting to do.
We played something similar with quarters, at the high school lunch table. But each side got heads or tails, and if they were mismatched, it was a push (each bettor won one).
It wasn’t a very popular game, but everyone knew about it.
It was around long enough that Con Artist #1 could befriend a mark, both of 'em agreeing to call out opposite results to swindle Con Artist #2 – who’ll invariably match one guy, leaving the other to win as odd man out, right? Whichever of us it happens to be, Con Artist #1 makes clear, we’ll split the winnings later.
It’ll happen to be Con Artist #1. The mark will never happen to see him again. Thing of beauty.
From reading James Clavell’s King Rat, I’ve just learned of a similar Australian gambling game called Two-up. It’s a bit more complicated, but is based on the same principle.
Comparing Coins is often mentioned in the book The Big Con. It seems to have been a sufficiently popular game among adults, before the 1940s, that it was the bread-and-butter of short cons.