Basic Trope: A situation where someone figures out part of a con, but not the whole thing.
- Straight: Ulysses tries to swindle Mark, a cop, out of ten bucks for a cup of "really good coffee". Mark declines, giving him a booby prize instead: a donut, which was what Ulysses wanted all along for his coffee.
- Exaggerated: Mark has a whole box of donuts. After parting with Ulysses, he comes across several more people: a homeless man, an office worker with no time for breakfast, a boy who's lost his ice cream, and so on. The day ends with Ulysses and his buddies noshing on an entire box of donuts, each one swindled out from under an unsuspecting Mark.
- Downplayed: Mark figures anything Ulysses gains is his loss, but the donut was free, so he lets it go, even if it is a swindle.
- Justified:
- Mark doesn't think enough of Ulysses' intelligence to anticipate him to pull off anything even mildly complicated.
- Ulysses knows Mark thinks he's a dip, and that makes him the perfect victim for a shuffle because he believes he's smarter than the average lowlife.
- Inverted:
- Mark takes the deal for the coffee, making a shuffle superfluous.
- Mark gets Ulysses to spill his coffee.
- Subverted: Getting the donut was unplanned, but as long as Ulysses gets something out of a failed con, he's satisfied.
- Double Subverted: Mark's donut was the one that won the grand prize in a raffle, so he gets even more out of it than he planned.
- Parodied: Ulysses insists on pulling a con on Mark when he could just sell the coffee to him at a reasonable price.
- Zig-Zagged: The conversation between Ulysses and Mark takes several turns, with Mark talking himself into, out of, and around both taking the coffee and giving Ulysses one of his donuts. Eventually, he finds a way out by giving Ulysses nothing … but Ulysses gets the last laugh by selling his assessment of Mark as a target for swindles to his fellow con artists: the real con was their conversation.
- Averted: Figuring he's having an off day, Ulysses cuts his losses and makes tracks after Mark sees through his coffee swindle.
- Enforced: This shows that Ulysses is a master con artist without being too drastic (e.g., robbing a whole bank without anyone noticing).
- Lampshaded: Mark knows Ulysses has an ulterior scheme of some kind; he just doesn't know what it is.
- Invoked: Ulysses makes up his cons on the fly, so there's no attempt to shuffle for the coffee until he makes the suggestion that Mark's throat will be dry from the donut. Once Mark offers him the donut as a mockery, he leans into it.
- Exploited: Ulysses' skills with a con win him a seat at the table in some very high circles.
- Defied: Mark sees through both schemes and threatens to run Ulysses in for an outstanding warrant, which gets Ulysses off his back quickly.
- Discussed: Mark says he knows every trick in the book, and that Ulysses has no chance of getting one over on him.
- Conversed: The viewer keeps trying to figure out what Ulysses is pulling next, yet is always proven wrong with their predictions.
- Implied: Ulysses makes a big, Sarcasm Mode-laden show out of getting the donut.
- Deconstructed:
- Ulysses' scam works, but it still makes Mark suspicious of interacting with him. A few more scams and he's on the warpath to bring Ulysses in, or at the very least make Ulysses regret he ever met him.
- Ulysses knows Mark knows he's a conman, and Mark knows Ulysses knows that he knows every interaction with him is an invitation to be scammed. The two are trapped in a personal cold war where everything simultaneously is and is not a con.
- Reconstructed: Mark's friends, and more importantly his superiors, don't take his vendetta against Ulysses seriously; nothing illegal has technically occurred, and they figure Mark just doesn't want to admit he got swindled out of pride.
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