Kid Canfield

George Washington Bonner (1878 – March 12, 1935), popularly known as Kid Canfield, was an American gambler and confidence trickster who later reformed and made a series of lectures and two films on the prevalence of cheating in gambling.

By 1910 Canfield had ended his gambling career and was touring the vaudeville circuit with a show recounting his story and revealing his methods of cheating.

Canfield continued his vaudeville act until 1935 when he died while making a promotional radio broadcast on WHIS in Bluefield, West Virginia.

[4][2] Canfield claimed to have stopped his gambling career after one mark committed suicide with a gun at the end of a 28-hour poker game in which he had lost $20,000.

[2] The publicity material for the film promised that it would demonstrate "the dishonest methods by which the victims are fleeced in gambling dens" and that it was "a distinctly educational feature".

[3] In 1915, he was billed as presenting a show in person that played a three-reel film that included his biography and featured Baldy Jack Rose, Sam Schepps, and Harry Vallon, mob figures turned police informants in the 1912 Rosenthal murder case.

One of his gimmicks was to walk into the local newspaper office and challenge the journalists to gambling games, with the stake being a good review of his show.

The Bluefield Daily Telegraph of West Virginia described one such occasion on March 9, 1935, saying, "Kid Canfield with his long tapered fingers, resembling a piano player's, could manipulate a deck of cards so fast that the eye was unable to follow his movement".