ABOUT US

Due to the fact that the book Sharps and Flats is in public domain, anyone could have decided to publish an online version of the book. However, it would seem that the idea did not occur to anyone else, or perhaps others simply didn't act upon it quickly enough.

It is not a total coincidence that this site was published by us. After all, we are also the publisher of the oldest card-cheating web site on the internet, CARDSHARK Online, that was first launched in late 1999.

The first incarnation of our site, CARDSHARK Online, was admittedly quite heavily influenced by materials from John Maskelyne's classic book, Sharps and Flats. Today, in 2009, we are launching the first electronic edition of Sharps and Flats, in honor of the book that greatly influenced our own work and as a celebration of our 10th year anniversary.

In addition to CARDSHARK Online we are also the publisher of several other gambling-related web sites, most notably: Playing Cards Online, which is a great online resource for playing cards and rules of card games from around the world; Bustout Dealer: Crooked Blackjack Parties, which is a site promoting a unique form of entertainment, that consists of a live demonstration of various blackjack scams, while people participate by betting play money; and CASINOVILLE gambling comics, which is a site that features some gambling-related humor in the form of comic strips (and hopefully one day also some animated films).

We are also in the process of starting an online hub for gambling-related resources. The future home of that site will be GamblerPress.com, which is why this name appears at the bottom of every page (although it is not yet a live web site).

Due to the fact that the book Sharps and Flats was written in the 19th century it is, by many standards, outdated. However, since this is an important historic book this fact does not diminish its importance. Also, some of the materials in this book are still applicable today in various gambling situations, especially hope poker games that have no regulations to speak of.

So, in the interest of keeping the materials of this book current we took some liberties to add our own 2 cents in the form of annotations. These annotations appear throughout the book in blue italics.

Due to the booming popularity of poker we believe that this book should remain on the shelves of educated poker players. After all, this is a classic.