thimblerig
three shells and a pea
shell game

Full disclosure: I've known the performers in Thimblerig Circus for a really long time.

In the 1790s, it was called "thimblerig" as it was originally played using sewing thimbles.

In route to San Antonio the pair are joined by a riverboat gambler named Thimblerig.

Denver Pyle as Thimblerig (the Gambler), one of Crockett's Tennessee volunteers.

A book published in England in 1670 (Hull Elections-Richard Perry and his fiddler wife) mentions the thimblerig game.

After they successfully manage to scale the walls, the Mexicans outnumber the Texans, killing all of them, including "Busted Luck" and Thimblerig, as well as Jim Bowie, who is sick in bed.

And yet every day one saw more distinctly that they were the pea in the thimblerig of life, the hub of a universe which, to the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable.

The shell game (also known as Thimblerig, Three shells and a pea, the old army game) is portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud.

Far from Indiana, in Moscow's Novyye Izvestia, the columnist Vyacheslav Shirayev blasted Ukraine for delaying payment of its debt to Russia for natural gas: "In fact, Kiev has resorted to a kind of thimblerig in an effort to hoodwink Moscow."