![]() The cards are only a theme, a background, for mechanics that have barely anything to do with an actual card game. If you think that you’re going to actually play card hands, that’s not it. However under the hood hides nothing more than a succession of very frustrating QuickTime events: mini games in which you must remember a series of button presses or controller inputs with very unforgiving precision. It’s true that the theme and the art direction both have undeniable appeal. Unfortunately, as it is often the case, the disappointment matched the expectations. Unfortunately, as it is Considering that Card Shark comes from the same people who made the excellent Reigns, I had high hopes for this game. A preview of the film took an audience award at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March.Considering that Card Shark comes from the same people who made the excellent Reigns, I had high hopes for this game. But the arc of Turner’s life, the story of the kid from California who wanted to become a gambler after watching Maverick on TV, and who became an internationally recognized performer, is even more impressive. Watching Turner perform up close, in slow motion and high definition, is worth the viewing. The outlandish story of Turner’s career and life-from performing on riverboats wearing a bowler hat to achieving global acclaim-is the subject of a documentary, Dealt, out this month from a team of producers that includes Houston native Bradley Jackson and Dallas-born director Luke Korem, both of whom worked out of Austin while putting the film together. “We had a forty-year relationship, a forty-year battle.” In 2007, at age 84, Giorgio called Turner’s skill “incomparable.” When Giorgio died, in 2012, Turner wrote an appreciation of the man he had had such a fraught connection to. “We ended up becoming very good fri ends when I finally earned his respect,” Turner says. ![]() For decades, Turner and Giorgio battled each other, going move for move until someone failed or was stumped. There he gained a mentor in Vernon and a nemesis in Tony Giorgio, a card manipulator who is best known for playing Bruno Tattaglia in The Godfather. I have an advantage over them in that way.”Īt age 21, in possession of a new suit he won on a bet with a salesman, Turner sought out Dai Vernon, then the world’s top card manipulator at the Magic Castle, the magician’s clubhouse/venue in L.A. Most mechanics do things based on sight, ensuring they’re moving the right number of cards to a specific spot in the deck, for example. “Your sight is your disability,” he says from behind a wide grin. That explains his immense biceps, wrapped in tight, short sleeves. ![]() ![]() When he’s not at the card table, the 63-year-old is in his home gym, honing the skills that made him a sixth-degree black belt in karate. By Turner’s own estimate, he goes through three to six decks a day-more than 80,000 cards a year. At church, he practices with a special deck, blank on both sides, so that his fellow congregants don’t get a whiff of gambling culture. He has a deck on his nightstand, and a waterproof one for the shower. He has a closet stuffed with six thousand decks, fresh in their cellophane wrappers. For most of his life, he has practiced an average of fourteen hours a day to master the art of rigging games. Seated at a plush green-velvet half-moon card table on the second floor of his San Antonio home, Richard Turner keeps a deck twisting and shuffling in his hands as he describes his decades working to become perhaps the most respected living “card mechanic”-that is, someone who can cheat a card game with sleight of hand. One of t he world’s greatest card sharks, true to the old legend about sharks, never stops moving. This article appeared in the October 2017 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Richard Turner’s Full House.” ![]()
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