Noun
a swindling sleight-of-hand game; victim guesses which of three things a pellet is under
Source: WordNetThere is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible. Elliot Richardson
Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty. Lionel Shriver
He likes you, too." Finn repeated. "And don't tell me to shut up." "Shut up!" -Kingdom Keepers, Shell Game. Ridley Pearson
We reward people for making money off money, and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China... and it becomes this shell game. Michael Moore
It's a shell game... They "give" you "free" health-care, then enslave you with a tax burden so heavy you go into cardiac arrest from the load. Michael Savage
He and eight others said their managers had asked them to engage in a monthly shell game of briefly inserting these unavailable properties into Oyo’s listings — complete with fake photographs — to help impress investors. Source: Internet