To maneuver two opponents so as to benefit oneself; also, to hedge against a risk. This expression comes from faro, an extremely popular gambling game in nineteenth-century America. Played honestly, it is the fairest of the games that pit players against a bank, because there is virtually no percentage in favor of the bank (dealer). (For this reason faro has never been permitted at Monte Carlo.) However, numerous ways of cheating were developed. One such method involved marking the cards by trimming the sides and ends of certain cards in each suit by a tiny amount, unnoticeable to the ordinary player but obvious to the experienced gambler, who could then tell where the cards lay in the pack and stack it as desired. When such cards, called “strippers,” were cut convex or concave, it was called “both ends against the middle.” R. Maury used the expression figuratively in Wars of the Godly (1928): “Bennett played both ends of the religious fight against the middle.”