aking money as a magician.
John Scarne used to be the world's foremost authority on gambling, and particularly cheating at gambling, but he was not a gambler himself. He was one of the best sleight-of-hand performers in the world, particularly with a deck of cards. He achieved his fame through hard work from a very early age. He travelled throughout the military during World War II, teaching the soldiers how to keep from getting cheated at card and dice games. Scarne was a brilliant mathematician as well. In 1955 he was married Steffi Storm and they had John Teeko the same year.
John Scarne's reputation as the world's Number One expert on gambling is well established. What is not recognized sufficiently is his virtual genius for calculations, which is a key factor in his unique supremacy. His facility with figures, his ability to compute the odds, the favorable, and unfavorable percentages in complicated gambling situations is unmatched. Life, Look, Collier's, Newsweek and other leading publications have at one time or another called on him to verify calculations, and in the gambling casinos of the world John Scarne is known as The Professor because of his mathematical wizardry. Scarne's figures and percentage tables are The Law in gambling -- professional as well as amateur...
It is perhaps typical of the fantastic world of gambling that its foremost expert and authority, its unofficial "Judge Landis," is not a gambler.
Scarne died July 7, 1985 at 82, while living in North Bergen, New Jersey.