Welcome Back My Friends, It's the Show That Never Ends

By Sarah Dahnke in News on Jun 22, 2006 2:47PM

"Listen up everyone. I'm an entertainment officer for the CTA here to make sure you have fun on your commute today."

If you're a frequent CTA rider, chances are you may have heard this pitch in the past month. The shell game is back, and just in case your mommy never told you, it's a scam.
How it works: The man (hint: NOT hired by the CTA) puts a board on his lap and lines up 3 bottle caps. He places a small ball under one of them and does the usual trade-the-cap dance with his hands. Then comes the fun part. He asks the train car where the ball is, but he won't listen to you unless you give him $20. In the CTA version of the game, either another man who looks like the self-declared CTA Funmaster's brother or a seemingly toothless woman, who just so happened to get on the train with the shell game leader, places the first bet. He or she hands in $20, finds that the bet is correct and wins back the $20 bet plus another $20. When the “winner” is standing there with two balled up Andrew Jacksons in his or her hand, it's enough to drive an entire El car into a tizzy reminiscent of Chicagoist's days of betting on the donkey races in Tijuana. All of the sudden women and men alike are pulling out their wallets, getting hot and bothered and yelling,"It's in the middle!"
Chicagoist witnessed this scenario first hand about a month ago while riding north on the red line. Even though the bottlecap man had seemingly slow hands, (We always knew exactly where the ball was.) and half of the passengers were yelling at the rest not to play, the duo managed to swindle at least a hundy before retreating to another car.
Chicagoist knows that street corner games aren't exactly front page news, but we were under the impression that most of these shysters had given up on the CTA.

Has anyone else out there lost their shirt in a CTA hustle? Tell us your story.