How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker : The Wisdom of Dickie Richard

This is a hilarious book. As Penn Jillette explains at the beginning, Penn (ostensibly) met Dickie Richard when Penn was hitchhiking as a teenager, and Dickie taught Penn everything Dickie knew about how to cheat at cards. Penn himself isn't a card cheat, doesn't condone card cheating, and feels bad about publishing this book. But Penn owed Dickie a favor, and Dickie wanted his memoirs published, so Penn agreed. The memoirs were horribly written so Penn and his co-author rewrote them. The bulk of the book, then, is a first-person narrative from Dickie about how he cheats at poker.
Dickie explains that you could cheat in a casino, but it's too hard. Instead Dickie shows up in a town, makes "friends", and then plays poker with them, takes their money, and skips town. Dickie cheats any way he can -- from bottom dealing to marking cards to simply walking out the door with the cash box. Dickie's descriptions of what he does are amusing yet appalling -- he is a sociopath and an egomaniac, and yet he manages to be so entertaining, you can't help liking him (a bit).
Is Dickie a real person? I highly doubt it. As Penn tells us at the beginning, Dickie is a "fictional" character -- that's a big clue that you shouldn't take the narrative veridically. Does this book teach you how to cheat at poker? Kind of. It doesn't actually teach you how to bottom deal, for example, but Dickie correctly says that you can learn that from any standard magic book. It doesn't teach you a system to follow for marking cards, but Dickie correctly says that you wouldn't want to follow a standard system, since that would make your cheating easier to detect. As I see it, the point of this book isn't to teach you how to cheat -- though you might learn about how to detect cheaters (even though Dickie insists that's not a goal of the book). The book is a novel about a card cheater. Dickie epitomises an amoral, larger-than-life showman who lives life to its fullest. I get the sense that Dickie represents a somewhat darker side of Penn. Penn manipulates cards -- and people -- to entertain others and make money. That's what being a professional magician is all about. Dickie manipulates cards and people to make money -- the entertainment comes in being able to read about it.