sleight of hand – Page 12

Triumphant Flip Off

I’ve been facinated by using the old card revelation where you drop the deck on the table and the top card flips to reveal a selected card as a way to correct the deck for a triumph style effect.

Here’s a video demo of one that I’ve been doing lately:

About a month ago I wrote up a quick outline of the working of the effect:

http://www.magicshow.tips/magic-show-tips/triumph-clean-up/

One of the challenges was figuring out how to do Daryl’s Triumph Display with the deck in the condition that the deck is in for my routine. It’s basically the same as Daryl’s except the final two blocks of cards are hand hand and you rotate your hands palm up to show the face up and face down blocks.

I’m glad I figured out how to do the final display, it just took sitting around and playing until I worked it out, and the solution was soo simple!

-Louie

Twisting the Aces…

A couple of weeks ago I posted a method for doing an Elmsley style false count that hid the second card from the top (you can learn this false count here) that I came up with on a long flight. Unfortunately, this count isn’t particularly useful and doesn’t have much of an advantage over a normal Elmsley Count.

Well, last week I was on another long flight from New York to Seattle and I was playing with the false count that hides the second card and I came up with a trick with it. It’s Twisting the Aces, but it has one advantage over the original Dai Vernon version and that’s that it all four counts look the same, so you don’t have to openly turn over the ace of clubs or do that weird strip out of one of the red aces and then flip over a few cards.

You start with the four aces (could be any order) face down in your left hand.

Triple turn over to show the “top card”.
Kill your wrist and turn just the top card over.
-The position of the cards are: face down – face up – face up – face down
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, but don’t flip over the packet.
Do the Second From the Top Elmsley and this will show the first face up ace.
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, but don’t flip over the packet.
Do a regular Elmsley and this will show the second face up ace.
-The position of the cards are: face down – face up – face down – face up
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, and secretly flip over the packet.
Do the Second From the Top Elmsley and this will show the third face up ace.
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, but don’t flip over the packet.
Do the Second From the Top Elmsley and this will show the fourth face up ace. As you do the count, leave the final ace out jogged.
Strip out the final ace and put it on top of the packet face up
Half pass the bottom card as you spread out the packet to show the three face down bottom cards (this is the Asher Twist move)

The main problem with the above version of Twisting the Aces is that it’s soo much harder than doing the Vernon version. Honestly, I don’t know if this is better than the original Twisting the Aces, maybe the variation in procedure makes that trick more watchable from the audience perspective?

-Louie

Triumph Clean Up…

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of using the old card production where you drop the deck of cards on the table and the top card flips over as a “clean up” for card trick triumph. By clean up, I mean the last thing you have to do in my sequences where you need to reverse one card…or half of the deck.

In the past I’ve published a fairly complex version of Triumph that used a stripped deck and had a kicker ending, but used the flip over production to clean up the deck for the reveal. About a month ago, I think I finally hit on a sequence that makes sense, and it’s pretty simple, I’m surprised I didn’t think of it earlier. Here it is:

Card is selected and returned to the deck, but secretly controlled to the top.
The bottom half is flipped face up and you are going to do a modified zarrow shuffle. You will shuffle all but the top card (selected card) of the face down half into the bottom half of the face up cards. Then run about a quarter of the face up cards, drop the final face down card, and run the remaining face up cards.
You will now strip out the face up cards, but add the face down selection to the face up cards, so they to on top.
Find the natural break between the face up and face down halves. Side jog the face up half and drop it on the table. They should flip over, giving you deck that’s all face down except for the face up selection!

That’s it. While the shuffle procedure reads fairly complex, it’s not. If you can do a Zarrow Shuffle, you can do this.
-Louie

Double Cupped…

One thing that drives me nuts is when I go to coffee shops and they give me a to go cup that’s double cupped. To me it feels wasteful to give me two cups, when one will do the job. That inspired me to mess around with a way to make the second cup disappear.

The method that I came up with was pretty simple. It’s the top inch of a cup and only half of the “circle”, and this makes a sort of a shell for the top of the front of the outer cup. If I held the cup so that my hand covers the bottom of the shell, it looks like a coffee cup that’s double cupped. I can also lift the top cup up and it creates the illusion that the two cups are separate. For the vanish I simple need to steal this little shell for the vanish.

The hard thing is to figure out how to ditch the shell. My idea was to palm the shell as I take the lid off of the cup. That still leaves the actual ditch of the shell, I think if I put the lid into my table, then it’s out of sight out of mind.

So now the second cup has been stolen, and the audience doesn’t know that yet. How do I reveal it? Maybe I could produce a cup and then call attention to the original double cup is now a single cup?

Honestly, I don’t know how to end the trick. I will say that this is probably a trick I’ll never do, so I don’t know how much energy I’m going to put into figuring it out.

-Louie

Hiding The Second Card…

A couple of weeks ago I was on an airplane and messing around with some cards. I was thinking that there wasn’t (that I was aware of) a false count like an Elmsley Count or Jordan Count that hid the second from the top card of a face down pile. After playing around a little bit I came up with a count to do hide the second from the top:

Count 1: Push off a double
Count 2: push off a single with the left hand. The right hand buckles the bottom card and when the card from the left hand covers the right hands cards, the the left hand steals the top card of the right hand’s pile.
Count 3: deal one card
Count 4: deal one card

That’s it, pretty simple. There’s not much to it. I think the reason not many people have explored a count that hides the second from the top card is that you have pretty much have to start with a double push off. This isn’t the easiest thing to do…it’s not crazy hard, but hard enough to scare away people.

I will say there are probably better ways to hide the card second from the top of the deck. I will also say it was a fun way to spend some time on a plane!

-Louie

Let Them Show You…

The amount of magicians that complain when people want to show them a magic trick is staggering. I don’t get it, why not let the person show you?
The person will be the star for a minute, and I think that’s where the problem is, most magicians have a ego that won’t let them step away and let someone else into the spotlight.

At a gig the other night a someone wanted to show me a trick and I say “yes”.

They did the trick with the glide where at the end the slap the cards out of your hand and one card is left in your hand and it’s the selected card. When I let her do it, she nailed it! That’s going to be one of the memories from the party for the dozen people that say it, and something they’ll talk about longer than my roving set.

I’m not saying you should 100% always let the person show you the trick. There are times when it’s inappropriate, like in the middle of a ticketed formal show. but if you’re roving or after a show, why not? It’s not going to hurt anything.

-Louie

Mish Mash Wallet

A few weeks ago I ordered a custom designed wallet that had playing cards on it (you can read about my card wallet here). I had totally forgotten about it, until it arrived yesterday. It was a fun surprise!

Here’s the wallet:

This wallet is essentially Harry Anderson’s MishMash card design, but set up like John Kennedy’s Mind Power Deck! I’m happy with how it turned out, however if I was going to make another one, there are a few small changes. Right now it’s a way to force one of 8 cards, then a fishing procedure to know the card.

I’ve got an idea to then have the card appear in your wallet, with no sleight of hand! I’m going to play with this idea later this week!

-Louie

Tooth Fairy Magic…

The other day I had a strange idea. I wanted to do a transposition between a tooth and a quarter. Using the toothfairy as presentation hook is a no brainer for this. The challenge was that I wanted one of them to be held in the spectator’s hand and obviously they are very different shapes.

The solution finally hit me, why not hand them a folding coin that was folded in thirds? This will have roughly the same shape as a tooth, and have some textures like a tooth. Once that was figured out, the rest of the mechanics were pretty simple. Here’s me trying it out:

It works! This was a great solution for strange problem.

– Louie

Googly Eye Magic…

In my daily writing that I do in the morning, I was brainstorming some ideas using Googly Eyes. One of the tricks that I came up with was essentially a spellbound using a coin an a googly eye. The kicker would be the coin ends up inside of the eye where the black googly part would be.

One of my thoughts was that maybe I should do it with a signed coin. I ended up discarding this idea. The main reason I got rid of the idea of a signed coin was that if the coin changes to the googly eye, then it should still be signed. Well…it should be signed if we’re trying to prove it’s the same coin. Logically if we’re magically transforming it to something else then the signature doesn’t have to be there.

I think magicians get hung up on having things marked, where I think that non magicians don’t need it as much as we think they do. YES, there are times when it makes the trick stronger, like bill to lemon. An ambitious card with a borrowed deck doesn’t. Usually an ambitious card with your deck doesn’t need to be signed.

Now for the next part, which is when the coin appears inside the googly eye, should the whole coin appear inside of it? That’s the thing, if the outside of the eye is still there, then shouldn’t the coin that is replacing the black part inside just be the inside of the coin?

I do have a coin that’s just the center copper part of a half dollar. That would be what would make the most sense inside of the googly eye.

Is that too much logic?

Probably.

However all of that thinking gives me a more unique trick!

-Louie

Sequential Twisting…

Well, I was just on another long flight and I was playing with the Twisting the Aces that uses the false count of four cards that hides the card that is second from the top. I’ve been calling the count the Second From the Top Elmsley Count, but I think I’m going to call it the Runner Up Count as it deals with the “second place”

Click here for the routine for Twisting the Aces

While I was on the flight, I got to thinking about how I bet the spectator doesn’t really remember which aces have flipped over and which haven’t. What I mean by that is if you stopped in the middle of the trick and asked which two aces haven’t flipped over, I think most people couldn’t tell you. That’s a problem with the Twisting the Aces premise, the audience is taking your word at what’s flipped or hasn’t flipped.

While I was on the plane I started to play around with the handling to be able to do it with an Ace – 2 – 3 -4 instead of four aces. Luckily I was able to do that with pretty minimal changes to the handling.

Here’s the handling, and the changes have been added in bold:

You start with an Ace, Two, Three and Four in that order face down in your left hand.

GET READY: Have the cards in a fan and gesture towards a person from the audience. As you do the gesture, your right hand takes the top two cards and the bottom card, leaving the second from the bottom card in the left hand. Your right hand then sets it’s cards on top of the single card in the left hand.

Triple turn over to show the “top card”.
Kill your wrist and turn just the top card over.
-The position of the cards are: face down – face up – face up – face down
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, but don’t flip over the packet.
Do the Runner Up Count and this will show the first face up ace. When you count the fourth card, DO NOT put it on top of the packet in the right hand, but but under the top card.
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, but don’t flip over the packet.
Do a regular Elmsley and this will show the second face up ace.
-The position of the cards are: face down – face up – face down – face up
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, and secretly flip over the packet.
Do the Runner Up Count and this will show the third face up ace.
Do the “Thru the Fist Flourish”, but don’t flip over the packet.
Do the Runner Up Count and this will show the fourth face up ace.
As you do the count, leave the final ace out jogged.
Strip out the final ace and put it on top of the packet face up
Half pass the bottom card as you spread out the packet to show the three face down bottom cards (this is the Asher Twist move)

That’s it, a simple displacement at the beginning of the trick and then one displacement after the first count and it will work with a set of cards in numerical order. While this is essentially still Twisting the Aces, I’m happier with this now that I was a few days ago.

-Louie