Weird photo anomaly in poker magazine

Last night I was reading along in the December, 2008, issue of Poker Pro magazine, when I came across an article about the recent UltimateBet tournament in Aruba. I usually don't read stories about tournaments because they just don't interest me much. But something about this one caught my eye. Here's a low-resolution scan of the first page of the article:




My brain is wired in seriously weird ways. This announcement will come as no surprise to regular readers.

One of its bits of strangeness is that if I see something that is anomalous, and I can't quickly figure out why it is the way it is, I can become fixated on it. For example, for several months I have noticed a dirty spot frequently showing up just above the right knee on my jeans. I put on a clean pair in the morning, and at the end of the day I see this dirt spot. Always the same place and same size, though not showing up every day. At first I ignored it. But as I kept noticing it time after time, I started becoming increasingly obsessed with figuring out what was causing it. I thought that maybe it was from the underside of casino poker tables, or maybe I was unconsciouly brushing it against my dirty car door when I was getting in or out of the car. But I couldn't ever catch myself in the moment when it was happening. I started having to force myself to be conscious and aware of everything that I did through the course of a day so that I could nail it down. It wasn't that I desperately need my jeans to be pristine and spotless. (I'm a bit of a slob in dressing, actually.) I just couldn't stop obsessing over where this strangely consistent spot of dirt was coming from. I finally nailed it one evening upon coming home a week or so ago: I discovered that when I take off my left shoe, I untie the laces by first propping the heel of my left foot at that exact spot on my right leg. (For some bizarre reason, I don't perform the symmetric action with my right foot; I just hover it in the air. I never noticed this about myself until being faced with tracking down the dirty jeans problem.) Mystery solved!

Anyway, what caught my eye about the magazine page was the image of the $100 bill. Here it is in higher resolution, though it's still fuzzy because it's out of focus in the original:



In case you don't spend a lot of time looking at Benjamins, here's what a real one looks like for comparison:



Well, of course, real ones don't have colored dots or the word "SPECIMEN" superimposed on them, but I stole the image from the Bureau of Engraving web site (here), and they obviously figure that those extra features will help prevent people from stealing the image for use in counterfeiting. I assume that if they can post it, I can, too. I know there could be trouble if I scanned a real bill and threw it up here.

Anyway, it's obvious that the bill in the Poker Pro photo is not genuine U.S. currency. The portrait doesn't look anything like the real Franklin engraving. This puzzled me, so I kept staring at it, trying to figure it out.

I thought perhaps Aruba uses currency that sort of looks like American money, but isn't. Nope. They use the "florin," and you can get a good sense of what their paper money looks like here. Not even close.

The basic layout of the bill appears approximately correct. For example, the photo is clearly showing the bright green "100" in the lower right corner. But some details are off. Note, e.g, that the words presumably reading "The United States of America" (though you can't actually read them because of the focus problem) are spaced differently than on the real bill (on two lines instead of three). Also, the seal of the federal reserve system (on the left) is white in the center instead of dark.

So the image is definitely not real money, but something made to approximate the appearance of real money. But why?

I first wonder whether the fake money was what was actually sitting on the table when the picture was taken, or whether they had real cash, with the photo doctored in processing. The latter is a possibility if the magazine feared violating the federal counterfeiting statutes by publishing a photo of actual currency. However, that possibility doesn't really make much sense, because they are reproducing the image so small and with such low resolution that it wouldn't even come close to being a violation. On that consideration, I conclude that most likely the tournament organizers put phony money on the table as a prop for the victory photos.

But why? Well, after giving it some thought, my best guess is that they didn't want to bother with the legal paperwork requirements and security concerns associated wtih moving large sums of cash out of the states, and didn't want to saddle the winner with the same problems taking it back home (if the winner was a U.S. resident). I assume, then, that the big-money winners were paid by check instead of cash. I understand that Vegas casinos will usually give winners of their big tournaments the choice of payment in cash, chips, check, wire transfer, etc. (You can read an interesting post by F-Train, live-blogging for PokerNews, about the details of getting paid in a WSOP event at the bottom of this page--a post which I suggested that he write, incidentally.) In Aruba, they probably just didn't offer the cash option. They just threw some stage-prop money in bundles onto the table to make it look the way we're used to seeing winners' photos at WPT and WSOP events--with blocks of cash piled on the table next to the champion.

Where did they get the fakes? A little exploration on the web this afternoon (see how obsessive I can get about this stupid stuff?) led me to understand that fake money to be used as props in movies and plays is actually a fairly significant problem for the producers, and one that I hadn't thought much about before. (I did, however, make a note about the obviously unreal C-notes displayed in the horrible poker movie "Aces," here.) Of course, the big studios can afford real cash as needed. But low-budget projects struggle with it. You can understand that the feds do not look kindly upon the manufacture of paper money that looks too real. But on the other hand, if it looks too fake, you intrude upon the viewer's illusion. I'm guessing that in Aruba they're less concerned about violating U.S. counterfeiting laws, and are perhaps somewhat more free to make and/or purchase stuff that sort of looks real.

In the process of researching this stuff, I learned today that there is even a small world of collectors of Hollywood prop money! You can get a taste of that world and see at least one published catalog of what has been produced over the decades here and here. Is there anything that people won't collect?

So there you have it. I think that the Aruba tournament put fake money on the table for its photo ops, and Poker Pro used a picture with just enough detail that the wrongness of it caught my strangely wired brain's attention. It's even possible that neither the photographer nor the photo editor at the magazine noticed the oddity--they left that up to me.