Bar Bets

A Bar Bet is a bet that you make with somebody at a bar. The purposes of a bar bet are: (1) to show what a clever and engaging chap you are; (2) to get the other fellow to pay for your drinks. Since jovial bonhomie and good fellowship are important ingredients of social drinking, you do not try to make a substantial killing with a bar bet. Of course, if you don't care about niceties of that sort, go ahead, get yourself punched in the nose after a nasty argument with a lush.

The props for these bets are the things one would naturally have at hand at a bar: bottles, glasses, matches, cigarettes, money, paper, pencil, and so on, including an obliging bartender. For instance, a stood many bars have hard-boiled eggs lying around waiting to be bought. You can work up a good bar bet around such an egg. Buy one, and ask the bartender to bring you a fresh one too. Now get them mixed up, so nobody knows which is which.

"Hey, which one do I eat?" you ask.

"Beats me, Mac," the bartender says.

"You should of thought of that earlier."

You turn to the fellow on the next stool, who has been following your antics with interest."Can you tell them apart?" you ask.

He picks them up, weighs them in his hands, shakes them, holds them up to the light, and whatever. "There's no way of knowing," he declares.

"Tell you what," you say. "I'll buy the next round if I can't pick the hard-boiled egg without cracking either one. You buy the next around if I can. OK?"

He subjects the henfruit to further intensive scrutiny. They are as alike as two eggs. "There must be some catch," he says,"but go ahead." You see, he will go for this if the stakes are small, merely from curiosity, even though he suspects he is being taken.

And he is being taken – that is inherent in every bar bet. You spin either egg on the bar, stop it with your finger, and instantly release it. The raw egg will start turning again. With serene composure you order your second gin and Compari –on him.

A build-up of some sort is generally required to get a bar bet accepted. If you had come out cold with the assertion,"I'll bet I can tell a hard-boiled egg from a fresh one," you wouldn't have found a taker. Similarly, there's little use in offering point blank to bet somebody that he can't do something – he will suspect, quite correctly, that he can't. You have to work up to it.

The very best way to bring a bar bet home is to challenge the other fellow to perform some feat, let him try in vain, and then offer to bet that you can do it.

Having proved that it is"impossible,"he is almost certain to take you up. A good one of this type involves arranging two bottles, a coin and a match, as shown.

You defy him to remove the coin without touching the match and without causing it to fall. His efforts are unavailing, and he readily bets that you can't do it either. Whereupon you light the head of the match with another. It will stick to the bottle and you then lift the other bottle and retrieve the coin.

(Right here is the place for a word of warning.Sometimes the match doesn't stick. With most of these bets it will sometimes happen that something goes wrong and you lose. In such cases your attitude should be: so much the better. All the more chance that this poor foolish fellow will take you up on your next proposition.)

A wheeze with cigarettes: bet that with six of them he can't make four equilateral triangles with no leftover lines. When he passes the ball back to you, you set them up like this, with three cigs forming a triangle on the bar and the other three erected as a tripod above them. The cigarettes will stand up more easily than you might think.

The solution may elicit complaints that they're not all flat on the bar, but who said anything about flat?

A bet that requires a rather steady hand, and hence should be proffered before you've won too many drinks with other bets, is this: Fill two shot glasses brim full, one with whiskey, one with water. Ask your gull to exchange their contents without using any sort of container and without spilling more than a negligible amount. He has a dollar that says it's impossible. You now take a small piece of stiffish paper – part of a magazine cover, say – and lay it atop the shot glass filled with water, where it will stick by capillary attraction, permitting you to deftly turn it over and put it upside down exactly over the whiskey shot glass. Then you gently draw the paper from between the glasses until a tiny gap is made, through which the whiskey will flow up – being lighter – and replace the heavier water. Like this: Incredibly, the two liquids don't mix! Better practice this at home a couple of times before your first public appearance. And don't try it with gin: you can't see it; nor with a liqueur: it won't work.

When you see the bartender about to throw away an empty liquor bottle, ask for the loan of it and a straw. Use the straw to fill the bottle with smoke, and challenge someone to get the smoke out in less than a second. Whatever he tries (including filling the bottle with water) will take far more than a second. Now, of course, you bet that you can do it. Bet accepted, you simply drop in a lighted match. Spectacular. (Note: be sure the bottle is at room temperature and that it has dregs of hard liquor in it.)

Another category of bar bets involves wagering the other fellow that he can't do something so apparently simple that he is certain he can do it. His ego becomes involved – particularly if you have beaten him at one or two of the bets described above – and he is likely to grasp the opportunity to put you in your place.

For instance, bet him he can't light all twenty paper matches in a match book with one strike each on the scratch surface of said match book. The odds against him are astronomical, provided you set a reasonable time limit – say five seconds a match – and have him tear out all the matches first, "to save time." Actually, having all the matches handy will tend to make him hurry, and haste will make him break some of the matches; this is bad for him, good for you. Try it a few times just to convince yourself how little chance he has.

Or write the following on a piece of paper, but don't let him see you write it. Show it to him for two seconds, and bet him he can't repeat the words correctly. The chances are very good that he will muff it.

There are other word combinations that work well, too, but remember that they must be placed in the drawn triangle with the repeated word on different lines. You can use Beware of the the dog Or the birds and and the bees in place of the illustrated example.

After he's had a couple of drinks (and incidentally, getting your opponent somewhat lubricated is one of the basic tactics of barbetsmanship), you might try the following list of words on him, which you have conveniently in your pocket. Assure him that they are all words of common knowledge and bet him he can't read them off at a normal rate of speed, pronouncing them all correctly on the first try.

The Mew Few Sew Ewe Awe sequence puts him in an alert, slightly nervous condition, so he'll have trouble with Awry, Imply, Denial, Ally, Rely and Inter. The first time he hesitates be sure to cry out, "No more pauses!" He's almost bound to go wrong before he's finished.

While he's recovering from this defeat, place two cigarettes on the bar, get him to cross his fingers – all the way over – and bet him he can't tell by touch alone whether he's touching one cigarettes or two. Explain that the cigarettes will lie parallel to his fingers, not at right angles. He closes his eyes; you remove one cigarette and guide his hand to the other so that it lies between his crossed fingers, with both of them touching it.

He will say it is two. Then do it with two cigarettes, each finger touching one. Sure enough, he gets it wrong again.

(continued on page 128)

Bar Bets(continued from page 98) (Warning: this is not the sure thing you like to have working for you in a bar bet. A good many people will correctly identify the one cigarette, though the odds are in your favor, so you may find it pays to omit that part of the problem.)

Put down six similar coins on the bar, like this:

The problem is to arrange them in a perfect hexagon, like this:

and the rules are:(1) move one coin at a time, without knocking any other coin out of position; (2) slide it – don't lift it off the bar; (3) in its new position, the moved coin must touch two others; (4) make the hexagon in three such moves. Now bet him that, even after you demonstrate how it is done, he can't do it within three minutes. He must have a low opinion of himself if he doesn't take you up. In your demonstration, don't move the coin directly to its new position – circle it around the others first, to confuse him. And when you set it up for him to try, shift the original arrangement to look like this:

It's the same pattern, and it has the same solution. In case you'd like to tinker with it yourself, here's the solution.

Given arrangement

First move (1)

Second

Third.

Along about this time, he should be ripe for revenge – which is just the frame of mind in which you want him for the next bet. "Here," you say, "I'll give you a chance to recoup very quickly." You take a dollar bill from your pocket, flatten it, hold it by one end between thumb and index finger of your left hand. Hold the thumb and index finger of your right hand on either side of the bill, ready to grab it. Release your hold with the left hand and, as the bill begins to drop, catch it in the extended thumb and finger of your right hand, like so:

"Easiest thing in the world," you say as you do it a few times. Now you offer to let him catch any number of dollars dropped between his fingers by you in the same manner, telling him he can keep each one he catches but will owe you two for each one that floats from between his fingers, when you release it, before he can grab it. Only stipulation is that his thumb and index finger must be opposite the portrait on the bill, or above it. The simple neurological fact is that he's bound to miss: it takes longer for the nerve impulse to go from brain to fingers than for the bill to drop between them. An additional edge is that your gull will have had at least one drink to slow his reflexes.

A third category of bar bets involves propositions so obviously unlikely that, when you bet you can do them, your bar friend swiftly bets that you can't. A relatively simple example is to make a cross with four wooden matches that looks like this:

Note carefully the way they meet in the middle. You bet you can make a perfect square with them by moving only one match. He has probably not noted so carefully the way they meet, and the bet is on. So you slide match A out a tenth of an inch or so, and there's your square, right in the middle, formed by the ends of the matches which had previously been against each other. Small, to be sure, but a square nevertheless.

A bet similar in conception is this: put two quarters touching on the bar, display a penny, and declare that you will put it flat down between them without touching quarter A, moving quarter B, blowing on them, or upsetting the bar. After the stakes have been agreed upon, you hold B firmly down with one finger and slide the penny hard along the bar to hit it. Quarter A, untouched by anything that wasn't touching it already, flies away to leave room for the penny.

Or there's the bet on who can guess nearest to the date of a coin. You explain to him gently that he will have one guess and you will have two, but to compensate for this he can pick the odds. Don't let him have more than five to one, but make a point of doing him the favor of letting him guess first, since your success depends on his doing so. If he says "1950," you, of course, say "1949" and "1951." Odds in your favor are about twelve to one.

You can almost always get a bet with odds out of this one. Put two paper clips on a dollar bill folded in this fashion:

Bet that you can pull out the ends of the bill with such dexterity that, no matter how high you hold the bill, when the paper clips drop to the bar, they will come to rest touching each other. Results guaranteed – since the clips will be interlocked!

The next one is also a sure-fire winner, but it's a little complicated to explain. Take a paper clip and straighten it out, but leave the smaller hook at one end. Then bend it to close with the straight part like this:

Now break off a half-inch piece of a flat wooden toothpick, from the wide end. Hang the paper clip over it and ask your victim to hold it as illustrated.

Tell him you are going to flick it so that it whirls around several times; and you are going to flick it just hard enough so that when it stops it will be pointing up, not dangling down. Needless to say, you want pretty good odds on this one.

Actually, the odds are about thirty to one that it will do what you want it to.

The last Category of bets involves those you'll lose, but come out ahead in the losing. One such bet is to borrow a dollar of his, take a dollar of your own, and, holding them up, state, "I'll bet you a nickel you won't pay me $1.50 for what I have in my hand – and you have to make up your mind right away, in the next five seconds." If he won't buy, he won't, and you give him back his dollar. But very likely he will, so you lose a nickel and win fifty cents.

And, to conclude this foolishness, induce your friend to place his hat over his drink – a full one – and bet him a dime you can drink it without touching or moving his hat. So you up the hat and down the drink and pay the dime.

This, of course, is a variation on the old dodge of betting a girl a dime or a dollar– depending on her looks and your libido – that you can kiss her without touching her at all. In fact, this one is so ancient that maybe the modern young sophisticate on the next stool, who has been following your gambling career with amusement and admiration, has never bothered her head with such square stuff. Anyway, it's worth a try. Some beautiful and enduring friendships have flowered from such corn.