I Can No Longer Keep My Blinds Drawn

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From: thejerx
To: stasiab
Subject: Cover

Hey Stasia,

Do you think you'd have time to do a cover painting/illustration or whatever for the next book over the next couple of weeks?

I know it's last minute, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do with the cover until a little bit ago. 

Let me know! Hope all is well. 

From: stasiab
To: thejerx

Hey Andy,

I would love to do the cover for you! And I do have availability the next couple of weeks, so let me know what you’re thinking! 

From: thejerx
To: stasiab

okay, the front and back cover are going to be one image. It's going to be, more or less, this image of Joni Mitchell and David Crosby

With these changes:

1. Crosby's hat should be a magician's top hat

2. He should be rolling a coin on his left knuckles

3. Joni isn't playing the guitar. She's concentrating on doing something with a deck of cards.

4. There should be a bunny in the grass near Joni.

As for what she's doing with the deck of cards, I don't really care. Something that looks magical. She can be holding a deck in one hand with a card or cards floating above it, or whatever.

The rabbit can be sleeping, or sitting and looking up at Joni, whatever you feel like drawing.

I've attached the template for the book cover. In general the guy will be on the front cover and the woman on the back. You'll probably have to add some "padding" around the image or crop it in some way to make it fit the dimension of the cover. Whatever you need to do there is fine.

Stylistically I'd like something on the realistic end of the spectrum. Not necessarily "photo realism" but realistic human features and proportions and stuff like that. Beyond that, whatever style, technique, medium you want to use is up to you.

Let me know if that makes sense or if you have any questions. 

Thanks!

From: stasiab
To: thejerx

Cool, I think you’ve covered all the bases I need to start. I’ll let you know if I have any questions pop up. What’s your deadline for this?

Thank you Andy!

From: thejerx
To: stasiab

Ideally, in the first few days of July.

Also, if you have a recommendation for what endsheet color would complement the cover, let me know. Thanks.

From: stasiab
To: thejerx

Andy,

Here’s progress on the cover! I will continue working on this, and when I get to the color stage I will consider complimentary end sheet colors! Thoughts so far? I’m really enjoying this and will keep you updated.

Stasia

From: thejerx
To: stasiab

I'm loving it! So good.

From: stasiab
To: thejerx

Hey Andy,

I’m happy to announce the new masterpiece that is your cover is done! I’ve uploaded it to the folder, along with the elephant illustration.

For endpaper color, I recommend both the saffron and the turquoise, both would be great. Do let me know what you think!!!

From: thejerx
To: stasiab

It’s beautiful!!

The hardcover proof of the next book is here. For supporters at the Rich Uncle Millionaire-level, the book ships in October. More details on that will be in your email at the end of this month to make sure I have the correct shipping info for you.

The next book’s subtitle is taken from the final essay in the book: Young Girls Are Coming To the Canyon. This essay looks at the fundamental ways of making magic a more communal experience (as opposed to a magician-centric one) and relates it to the Laurel Canyon music scene from the late-60s, early 70s.

If you want to do your homework before you get the book, you can watch this video. This is the soundtrack and inspiration for the final essay in the book.

(And to save anyone from having to write an email, no, there will be no extra copies of the book available.)

Spex Mix: Anchoring Deck Switches

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Spex Mix is a series devoted to the most disarming thing you can do with a deck of cards: have the spectator shuffle them. Search the sidebar for “Spex” for the other posts in this series.

This is one of the most powerful techniques I’ve ever stumbled upon. I first used this while creating my story deck trick, which ended up in The Jerx, Volume 1. As far as I know, I haven’t seen this idea mentioned before—certainly not as a general concept with broad applications—but those of you who are more well-read than I am might be able to direct me to a precedent.

Anchoring Deck Switches

This technique reduces the suspicion that maybe you switched decks during a trick to almost zero, in my experience. That’s with laypeople, of course. But I’ve even fooled knowledgeable magicians with tricks that should have obviously screamed deck switch to them.

Here’s an example of the technique in action…

Anchored Out Of This World

I give you a deck of cards to shuffle in any way you like. When you’re done, I have you remove the Aces and mix them face down, and then try and separate them into reds and blacks.

If you don’t separate them properly, that just proves how hard it is with four cards.

If you do, I point out that could just be luck.

The aces are tossed back into the deck, and I ask you to try it now with the full deck. And somehow you impossibly are able to separate the deck into red cards and black cards.

How?

A deck switch.

When?

The deck was switched after you removed the aces, for a deck that already had the aces removed.

As the spectator, you, of course, remember shuffling the deck and then spreading through it to remove the aces. Those aces then got put back into the deck later on.

This is the idea behind “anchored” deck switches.

A card (or cards) are removed from a genuinely shuffled deck. The deck is then switched for a stacked deck that is missing those cards. Usually (although it’s not necessary) those cards are placed back into your stacked deck, and you go on with the trick. These few cards, which never leave their sight, help “anchor” the mixed-state of the deck, even though the deck has been switched.

This becomes even more deceptive if the cards that are removed seem random.

For example—keeping with the OOTW theme…

Have two decks. Remove the 4 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, and Ace of Clubs from each.

Separate one deck into red/black and have it in a position to be switched in.

In performance, the other deck is shuffled while you hold out the three cards. They are palmed in and the deck is cut into three piles using a variation on a Spectator Cuts the Aces procedure. The top card of each pile is slid off.

“We’ll look at the cards you cut to and see if there is a preponderance of red cards or black cards in order to see which color you’re more naturally attuned to find.”

As the focus is on those three cards, the deck is switched.

In this case, where random cards have been removed, I often find it better to keep them out of the deck. That way, if the spectator does suspect a switch, they have this visual reminder of the deck they shuffled and cut three random cards out of. And those three “random” cards are not duplicated in this remaining 49 card deck, so how could a switch have occurred? There are too many interconnected layers of deception here for people to unravel.

That’s why I think this is so powerful. A deck switch, by itself, is a pretty “dumb” method. It’s a method a non-magician could easily conceive. Anchoring the switch adds some more layers to it. Especially when your “anchoring” procedure involves things like palming out and a seemingly fair cutting sequence which forces “random” cards. The non-magician doesn’t stand a chance at untangling that.

Not only that, but the anchoring procedure provides the necessary misdirection for the deck switch. At the point in time of the switch, the locus of their suspicion and interest is on the cards which are never switched.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you wanted to perform Sam the Bellhop (because you like shit). The deck would be shuffled by the spectator and spread toward them to see if they were satisfied it was well mixed. Meanwhile, you cull a known force card (missing from your stacked deck) into position to be forced. The card is forced and while the spectator takes a look at it, you do the switch for your stacked deck. You try to read their mind of the card. Maybe you even get it wrong. “What was it? The 4 of Spades? Damn.” You take the card back and casually toss it into the middle of the deck. (Made possible because the card below the 4’s position in the stack is a corner short card, which you can cut to easily.)

“My mindreading abilities have taken such a hit recently. I’ve been spending a stupid amount of time working on this thing called StoryShuffling where you try and make a story from a shuffled deck.”

That’s bound to get a “Huh?” From which you can transition into Sam the Bellhop.

You don’t have to get that first card wrong. I just think the acknowledgement of your failure could make a good transitional moment into Sam the Bellhop, as you admit you’ve been working on this other stupid skill.

Okay, to wrap it up…from my experience, when it comes to anchoring deck switches:

  1. The more cards that cross over from one deck to the other, the stronger the anchoring is.

  2. If you named the cards to be removed, e.g. “Give me the four aces,” then you’ll want to place them back into the other deck before moving on. The physical action of those cards coming out of a deck and then going back in one, suggest it’s the same deck.

  3. If the cards involved appear to be random selections, then they can either go back in the deck before the “real” trick starts, or they can be pushed off to the side where they will serve as a subconscious reminder of the “random cards removed from this deck after it was mixed.”

Mailbag #98

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There’s a rumor that I normally wouldn’t believe but I heard from two reputable people who don’t know each other that you wrote part or all of Derren Brown’s new book.

I’ve read it and I can definitely see your influence at the very least. There are ideas in there that are more similar to your books than anything Derren has written in the past but there’s a lot he must have written himself as well.

It’s also interesting that you took a longer break between your books that just happened to coincide with the release of his book.

Were you involved? Or was the reveal five years ago [See here] the real deal?—CT

Who me?!?!?!?

The secret author of Derren Brown’s new book?????

That’s totally ridiculous.

That I, a simple magic blogger, could ever write anything so wonderful is utterly absurd!!

Seriously though… no.

I didn’t have anything to do with Derren’s book. If it sounds anything like what I’ve written, it may be because he read my books a couple of years back, and those ideas were floating around in his head. He once told me that before he read my books, he had read only one magic book in the previous 20 years. So it wouldn’t surprise me if there were parts of my philosophy that resonated with him and permeated into his work, given that he isn’t someone who is consuming a ton of other outside magic content.

But other than that, no, I didn’t have anything to do with the book.

You’re going to be getting a lot of emails asking about Weber and Pictionary, although you might already know that….

Weber’s debuting a booklet with new work on Pictionary and a couple new cards to go with it at Magic Live.

Max Temkin wrote the foreword where he describes TheJerx.com as being Weber’s blog citing his distinctive performance style. —MC

Who me?!?!?!?

Secretly Michael Weber—the newguy himself?????

That’s totally ridiculous.

That I, a simple magic blogger, would ever be compared to someone who is described as a “living legend” by no less an authority than Vanishing Inc., is utterly absurd.

Seriously though… no.

I’m not Michael Weber. I know we have similar philosophies in some regards, but I’m not him. I’ve never even met him.

It’s not crazy to me that someone might suggest it, but if there’s one person that should know I’m not Michael Weber, it’s Michael himself. So I’m surprised he would print that. Especially without running it by me.

But he may be so much on my wavelength that he knows I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about it. Anyone who wants can claim to write this site, as far as I’m concerned.

But if you care about the reality of the situation, no, I’m not Michael Weber.

Did you get Enigma yet? It’s been a fooler for me but the reactions have been just “okay.” And ideas yet to squeeze a little more juice from this? —MC

Who me?!?!?!?

Oh wait… that structure doesn’t work for this question.

I got to play around with Enigma this week. It’s pretty cool. My initial introduction to it was a bit inauspicious. I was working my way through it with a friend who has had it for a while and while he was demonstrating one of the inputs, it gave him no results. That is to say, we coded the information to the app, and it gave us no results, but there definitely should have been results. We went back and forth doing the same input a few times, sometimes it would give us a bunch of options. Sometimes it would say there were no results. Normally, I would assume we were the ones screwing up, but it tells you what you have inputted, so it was clear that we hadn’t. So it seemed a bit flaky originally, but I haven’t heard of anyone else having this issue. So maybe it was just a weird quirk.

Then we went to the drive-in movie theater (an surprisingly good place to find social, friendly people with a little time to kill) and between features he performed it for a girl sitting in the back of a truck that was parked next to us. He nailed her word and she seemed pretty impressed. When this girl’s sister got back from the concession stand, she asked him to do it for her. So my friend started performing it for the sister and the first girl said, “Is it spoon?” She made a lucky/educated guess just based on watching along and decoding the information, and maybe some sisterly-intution. So it was kind of a weird performance overall and I think after that they sort of looked at it as a game he was good at rather than “mindreading” because they started thinking up words and going through the Enigma process back and forth with each other to see if they could guess each other’s words before the next movie started.

Since then, I’ve performed it a couple of times to good reactions. I like it a lot, but I’m still missing something that will push it to the next level for me presentationally.

And I don’t love that the information you openly collect from the spectator is also the information that is used to determine their word. I wish there was a bit more of a disconnect there. Somehow.

I got an email from someone saying it actually didn’t diminish the effect that people inform you the length of the word and where vowels are and so on. But that’s a hard argument to make, given that Christian uses dual reality to hide that he’s getting this information from the participant. If it didn’t weaken the effect somewhat, you wouldn’t bother with that. (On top of that, it just doesn’t make sense to use dual reality when performing socially. The next person will say, “Try with me!” and realize what’s going on.)

I’m trying to conceive of other techniques to use that might hide that they’re giving away information, even to the primary participant (since I prefer to perform one-on-one). If any of those pan out, I promise I’ll let you know. And that’s a promise you can take to the bank, or my name isn’t Derren Weber.

Dustings #94

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For a couple of years now, I’ve had two levels of support for this site. A $10 tier and a $25 tier. The $25 tier is limited in number and there is a fairly long waiting list for spots at that level. If you’re a supporter at that level for the full 18-month season, you get that season’s bonus, a hardcover book of (mostly) new material. The $10 tier supports this site, receives a 20+ page monthly newsletter, is on the mailing list for the stand-alone tricks and books I’m releasing (other than the regularly scheduled supporter bonus book mentioned previously) and gets first dibs on any slots that open up in the $25 tier.

This is not an ad, I’m just setting the table for something, and I realize I never mention this stuff so anyone who hasn’t been around the past 18 months might not have any idea what I’m talking about.

Anyway, when I created these tiers, I called them the Friend-Level ($10) and the Family-Level ($25).

It has come to my attention that Ben Earl calls his membership site The Family.

I don’t know who came first or what. It doesn’t matter, neither of us ripped the name off from the other. It’s the most basic, obvious name for a group of supporters there is. Neither of us put any thought into it.

However, to keep things clear, I’m going to stop referring to the $25 tier as the “Family-Level.” Ben can have that designation. He deserves it more than me. He has a Discord, online events, livestreams, etc. What he is selling is definitely more of a “family” and a “community” of magicians.

I, on the other hand, want nothing to do with you all as a group. As I wrote in this post, I have no interest in creating a community. I’m more than happy to hear from you all individually via email, but I wouldn’t want to hang out as a group. I wouldn’t want to get barbecue with you all. And I sure as shit don’t want to hang out in any sort of online forum with you, which is all the worst parts of getting barbecue with you, but without any brisket.

No thanks. I have not seen any online community that is not dragged down by its dumbest members.

Plus, it just gives magicians something else to do besides actually performing some magic for people. You’ll learn more with 5 minutes of actual performing (if you pay attention) than 5 hours spent in an online magic community.

So that’s not my scene.

The $25 tier is not my family. They are the deep pockets that keep this site afloat. They’re the wealthy benefactors who allow me to create tricks and test out ideas as an amateur. So instead of being called the Family level, the $25 tier will now be known as…

Yes, the Rich Uncle Millionaire level.

Thank you for all your support.

The problem with trying to pull off bigger, immersive tricks is that it can amplify how meaningless smaller tricks are. “Oh, look, a ball changed color.” Unless you come up with a more interesting context for that color change, it’s probably going to fall a little flat if the previous week you were doing a trick for them where you reversed time over three nights.

But those little tricks are still fun. So I sometimes like to emphasize the meaninglessness of them by claiming I am a god.

Recently, I’ve started singing this after those types of tricks…

So matches will penetrate each other, or a card will get sandwiched, and I’ll start bending back and forth at the waist and singing, “You know he’s doing it! God is doing a new thang.”

It says: Yes, I know this isn’t quite at the same level as some of the other stuff I do, but I’m having fun so I don’t care.

Mailbag: Fantasy & Humor

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Just been rereading The Amateur at the Kitchen Table (looking forward to the rerelease by the way) and the section about introducing people slowly and the fantasy analogy (page35) you give reminded me of something. Game of Thrones. My father hates fantasy, D&D, Harry potter, wizards and monsters etc. I’m a big fan and he’s mocked for it my whole life. However he LOVES Game of Thrones. Your analogy really rings true here. GoT started out like a standard historical drama/action series (which he likes) for the majority of the first season, it drew my Dad in so by the time the Dragons turn up he was already invested in the world. Also the characters were reacting as he would rather than just accepting the crazy shit that’s happening, “WTF is that? A fucking Dragon?!?” I think that also makes it easier to buy into.

I imagine at their best the amateur introduces someone in to the world of magic like GoT season one and then reacts along with them as things get progressively weirder in the following seasons

I’m going to keep GoT season 1 in mind with new people in future.—KF

I think that’s a good analogy.

For those without that book, in The Amateur At the Kitchen Table, I wrote:

If you had never read a fantasy book, and weren’t even sure what they were like, and then you picked up a book and on the first page an elf is talking to a dragon or whatever, you might not be able to get into the book. You might not even really understand how you were supposed to appreciate it. But if you had a book that eased you into the world of fantasy from a world you already know, it would probably be a transition you could more readily adapt to.

For most people, the magic tricks they’ve seen in real life amount to no more than puzzles and brain-teasers. They may not know how they’re done, but they’re not really “magical” in any way. When you’re doing more high level tricks, that’s a completely different animal. So you want to, essentially, ease them into your world of fantasy. Once they realize the stuff you do is unlike what they’ve seen anyone do in person, then you can open the door to all sorts of effects. Once they’re acclimated, once they understand this is a world where dragons exist, then you can do anything else you like.

The type of magic I enjoy performing and advocate for on this site is one where you create a fictional version of the world and reality, rather than just a fictional version of your own abilities (which is what amateur magic has almost always been for centuries).

In general, I like to gradually take people into more and more unbelievable premises.

But I have also found a pretty sure sign that I have a person with whom I can progress into unreality more directly, and that is to see how they respond to silly or absurd humor.

I was at a party at my friend’s beach house a couple of weeks ago, and I was talking to this woman there who I had just met. And she was mentioning how she likes trash reality shows like 90 Day Fiancé, and she asked if I had ever watched it. I furrowed my brow a little and said dismissively, “Hmmm…no. That’s not really my scene. I’m more of a bibliophile. I like to curl up with the Canterbury Tales or maybe Beowulf.”

My friend who was in the conversation with us rolled his eyes and said, “Uh-oh, here he goes again with Beowulf.” As if it was something I’m always talking about.

Now, the woman we were talking to understood immediately that we were kidding around and that I was just feigning my intellectualism. But that’s not always the case. I’ve had plenty of situations in the past where I’m screwing around in a similar manner and people act as if I’m being serious.

When I meet someone with a “playful” sense of humor that meshes well with mine, I usually find them more willing to go along with an unusual magic premise and not feel the need to question it as if I’m being 100% sincere. So if I introduce a fantastical concept that also is humorous in some way, I can “skip the line” with them and get straight to something crazy because the absurdity of the premise tells them the spirit in which they should go along with what I’m saying.

So if you find someone whose sense of humor matches yours, and you present them with a humorously “out there” presentation, you can quickly advance to a more unbelievable effect without alienating them.

I was comfortable enough with this woman that later on in the evening I leaned into her and whispered, “This is going to sound like bullshit, but God has been texting me about stuff five minutes before it happens,” which was my premise for a prediction effect I showed her. She went along with it happily and without thinking I was legitimately crazy.

However, if she had not latched on earlier in the day humor-wise, I probably wouldn’t have jumped into something with such an odd premise.

So while I’ll normally take things slow, if the humor connection is there, I’m sometimes comfortable pushing things along more quickly.

Peeking: A Quick-Start Guide

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After Monday’s post I got a number of emails saying that sure, while peeking information may have some benefits over something like Enigma, there’s just no rationale for having someone write something down and putting it in a wallet or envelope or something like that. So how do I get around that flaw?

It’s a little frustrating to have people who read this site ask me that question, given that it’s something I’ve talked about in the past. And yes, I know new people are finding this site all the time (despite my best efforts) and it’s maybe unreasonable to ask people to go back and read all the posts, given that takes months to do. But that’s my new policy. Just go back and read the whole site. Take notes this time. Not that everything I write is brilliance. But if you like the site enough to email me about something and get my thoughts on it, then you must resonate on some level with my ideas. And even if only 5% of what I write is worthwhile to you in some way, you can still easily fill notebooks with the ideas you find here.

But because I got so many emails about it, I’m going to explain what I believe to be the basic elements of a successful peek. This information is elsewhere on the blog, but it’s now here too in this very clearly titled post. Please, I beg of you, after this, stop asking me “how can you justify writing a word down if it’s supposed to be mind-reading!”

Get Out of Your Fantasy World

Every form of “mindreading” has some sort of conditions involved. Reading someone’s mind of any thought-of word or picture (as peeking allows) is going to require that word or picture is manifested outside the spectator’s head. They’re going to have to write it down, or search for it online, or speak it aloud at some point. This is the trade-off that comes with the freedom of allowing them to think of absolutely anything.

In my opinion—based on 500 days of testing—having someone write something down is one of the least invasive conditions for mindreading. But magicians have this fantasy where the spectator will be able to think of anything just in their mind and the magician will be able to name it out loud without any other steps. That’s not a thing that exists. “But I saw Derren Brown do it. The person just thought of a word and—” He was fucking with you. I promise you. Derren Brown can’t do this. Nobody can do this. This is off the table.

First Write, Then Explain

“I’d like you to write down the name of a stuffed animal you had in childhood… Great. I don’t want to see what you wrote, so let’s just put it away for now, and we’ll get back to it later if we need to.”

That’s all there is to it. The word is written and peeked before the subject of mindreading even comes up. I break down a slightly more detailed version of this set-up in the same post linked above. It goes into why each sentence is important. Read that for a further breakdown.

This is the first key element to peeking. Don’t explain what you’re going to do and then have them write down their thought. Have them write down their thought. Make it clear that you don’t want to see it. And put it away for later.

This is all just “set-up.” It will be frequently be forgotten in the long-run. And it is almost never questioned. It’s not questioned in the moment because it happens before you’ve said what you’re going to do. But in my 500 days of testing, it was rarely questioned afterward either—even when asking people for weaknesses in the trick. When people look back on the totality of the effect, the idea that a target thought might be recorded in writing before a demonstration of mindreading is not illogical to people. So it’s not something that needs to be overly justified or explained.

Enter the Process

The nice thing about the new Enigma app is that people are seeing that having a process doesn’t diminish the impact of mindreading. The negative about Enigma’s process is that it involves the length of the word, letter shapes and vowel position and things like that. These are things that humans never actually think of when they’re thinking of something. When you think of a baseball, you think of the weight and feel of it in your hand, and the stitching, and the way your hand grips it, and the sound of a bat hitting it or maybe being in the stands watching a game on a summer day. You don’t think, “Ah yes, good old baseball. That eight-letter word, with a first letter made up of straight and curved lines. Yes, yes, just thinking about how the first two vowels are in the 2nd and 4th positions makes me feel like I’m back in old Yankee Stadium!”

The trade-off for Enigma’s strength (that the word is never spoken or written) is a process that is sort of bland—focusing on the least interesting aspects of a word (its spelling rather than its meaning or its emotional relevance). But even this dull process doesn’t detract from the effect.

When it comes to a peek, a process isn’t necessary. But at the same time, a process is necessary.

What I mean is, if they write something down and 12 seconds later you tell them what they wrote down, they will assume you somehow saw what they wrote down.

So you need a process (even though you don’t need a process) to put some temporal distance from them writing down the word, and to give them something else to focus on.

So if I just had you write down the name of your favorite stuffed animal, I might have you imagine saying the name out loud. Then I might have you picture yourself back at a young age walking into your bedroom, noticing details about the room and then picking up the stuffed animal and saying its name. When that doesn’t work, I might ask you to imagine a man dressed in black breaks into your childhood bedroom at night and pulls your stuffed animal from your arms and hops out the window. You chase after him and come to a cliff with a raging fire down below. The man in black stands at the edge of the cliff and tosses this stuffed animal—was it a bear? oh… an octopus—he tosses this stuffed octopus over the cliff. You run to the edge and look down and see the octopus growing smaller as it falls into the flames. And you say its name. No, you shout its name. Tears rolling down your face. Imagine seeing that and shouting that name for me as the octopus falls into the fire. You’re shouting… guh...Gigglepants? No… Mr. Gigglepuss??

Now, maybe you don’t want to traumatize the imagined childhood version of your spectator like that, but you can see how giving them a process—in this case one of ratcheting up the emotion tied to the thought of word—would give them something else to focus on and consider beyond just, “I guess he saw what I wrote down.”

Those, I believe, are the two fundamental concepts when you want to peek something a spectator wrote:

  1. Get the writing and peeking out of the way before going into the details of what you’re going to do.

  2. Have an interesting process to walk them through.

I’ve found that to solve most of the issues with peeking information.

Now, there are still bad peeks and bad peek wallets and stuff like that. That’s a conversation for another day. I’m just pointing out that I don’t believe the concept of peeking itself is flawed.

Spex Mix: A Minor Tweak

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There’s a mistake I see magicians make quite frequently, and it goes like this…

They need to get a card or cards in a specific position, but they want to have the spectator shuffle the cards first. So the spectator shuffles, then hands the deck back to the magician. The magician spreads the deck in front of himself and says, “Okay, these look pretty well mixed.” And in that process he culls out the card he needs or otherwise manipulates it back to the top of the deck.

This is fairly standard technique, and I’m sure it flies by a lot of people. But from some old “suspicion testing” we once did, I also know that it can pique people’s suspicion.

You can see Craig Petty doing what I’m talking about at 1:20 in the video below. (I find myself often referring to a Craig Petty video when I have something to comment on. This isn’t because I take issue with what he’s doing any more than I do with most magicians. It’s just because Craig puts himself out there performing more than any other magician—so he provides more content to comment on.)

Here’s the thing, you can’t have the spectator shuffle the deck and then take it back and spread it towards yourself. This is antithetical to the point of having them shuffle in the first place.

Yes, but what I’m doing is looking to see that they’re well mixed.

Okay. But that’s not your concern, so why would you be looking at the cards?

If my goal is to demonstrate that I can deal a royal flush from any mixed deck of cards, I don’t have to assure myself that the cards are well mixed before I start. I shouldn’t give a shit whether they are or not. But I need you to know they’re well mixed.

So when I need to spot some cards and get them in place, I need to do it under the guise of showing you the deck. Are you happy that these are well mixed?

But there’s a problem with this. Asking if you are “happy that the deck is mixed well” or something like that is a bit of a nonsensical question. What does it even mean to a spectator? If someone asked you, “Are you happy the Yahtzee dice were well mixed in the cup?” You would think, Yeah. I mean, I guess. What are you even talking about? You asked me to shake the cup and I shook it 🤷‍♂️

The question itself is a little strange, so you end up drawing attention to the moment in a way that can feel odd.

Here’s what I do instead. After they shuffle, I take the deck back, turn it over and spread it to them (although I can still see the cards, of course). “Does that look well mixed now? It’s not like… the aces are all gathered together in one area or anything like that, yes?”

You see what I’m doing? At first, I’m asking them if the deck seems well mixed generally. But then I’m giving them something specific to look for as an example of a deck that wasn’t well mixed.

“Is your salad well-tossed, sir?”

Huh, what? I guess.

“Like, the croutons are evenly dispersed, yes?”

Oh, yeah. They’re fine, thank you.

By giving the spectator something specific to look for, I’m empowering them to answer the question with confidence.

This reinforces that the deck is really mixed, gives a reason for me to spread it in front of them, and occupies their mind with a little task, so they’re not focusing on what I’m doing.

If you’re looking to see that the aces are dispersed throughout the deck, I can easily cull the diamonds out without you noticing.

Of course, if I was doing a trick where I needed to cull the aces, I wouldn’t direct you to look for them specifically. Instead, I’d say something like, “And you’re happy the cards are well mixed. There’s not, like, a big string of diamonds right in a row or anything like that, yes?”

I know this probably seems like a “little thing,” but powerful magic is all about accounting for these little things.