card manipulator of all time. But he was happiest when inventing (and marketing, through his company John Scarne Games, Inc.) new games, which he did quite a bit. And he was especially proud of one called Teeko, which he invented in 1945 (version withdrawn), re-invented in 1952 and modified in the 1960s. He was so proud of the game that he named his son John Teeko Scarne. Teeko quickly spread around the world. Even Orson Welles was reported to have been playing Teeko. However, Scarne never made a profit on the game, mainly due to water damage in a warehouse which destroyed the entire stock of Teeko sets in one day. Today Teeko is virtually unknown. Scarne's most famous card trick was titled "Scarne's Aces". The trick involved taking a spectator's shuffled deck of cards, performing a series of riffle shuffles himself and then cutting to all four aces. Another one of Scarne's most notable card effects was the triple coincidence, in which a spectator and a magician each pick three different playing cards out of two regular decks of opposite colors and it is shown that all of the selections match. Scarne also created a quadruple coincidence, wherein a spectator selects a card and four apparently impossible predictions of their card are made. Scarne also attempted to discredit Edward O. Thorp's card counting system for the game of blackjack. In his 1966 autobiography The Odds Against Me, he analyzed Thorp's system and concluded that the whole system was loaded with mathematical errors, and that it was pure fiction dreamed by Thorp. Scarne also dismissed Wilson's famous blackjack point count system as "hokum". Scarne offered a challenge to blackjack card counters, but the prospective participants were never able to agree upon its terms. In The Odds Against Me, Scarne described his own technique for counting down up to four-deck blackjack with the rules generally used in Las Vegas in 1947: Scarne made use of his stacks of chips as a device to help track the contents of the undealt cards. A more complete description of his technique is present in his later book, Scarne's Guide to Casino Gambling, where he also described preventative measures taken by casinos to combat card counting. Personal life Scarne married Steffi Storm (née Norma Kearney) in 1955, with their son John born the same year. Scarne died on July 7, 1985 at 82, while living