Howdy, hotshot.
This week I wanted to ‘indulge’ myself—in a diabolically devious little idea that I think you’ll have some serious fun with.
I’ve wanted to give you this one for a while but passed on it in favor of more ‘serious’ ideas.
Today, I decided it was high time I channeled my inner Aziz Ansari and ‘treat myself.’
(it’s from Parks and Rec…what do you mean, ‘you haven’t seen it??’)
Here’s the context:
In his blockbuster book ‘Strong Magic,’ Darwin Ortiz talks about the danger of ‘conflict’ routines where you create ‘challenges’ between you and the audience, or between the audience themselves.
However, there IS an exception to this, and here it is:
When you cast an ‘underdog’ in the challenge—and make him win!
For example, a routine in which the child upstages the parent is both engaging, funny—and harmless.
(the reverse, as Ortiz points out, is practically the opposite.)
I’ve always liked that idea, and I’ve since come up with a few fun routines that leverage the power of this kind of ‘underdog’ presentation.
If you don’t happen to be performing for a parent/child combo, these routines will also work in a presentation where the spectator upstages the magician.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be showing you three routines straight from the depths of my murky mind that achieve this goal.
We’ll start with this one…
Out Of This World—the ‘Showdown.’
You begin with two decks of cards. You let both the spectators shuffle each other’s cards, and then hand one deck to the child and the other to the parent.
You explain that you’re going to test their ‘intuition.’
You place a red card and black card in front of each of them and tell them to deal through the deck face down—deciding at each point whether the card is red or black, based purely on their intuition.
Once they’ve done this, you turn over the cards.
The parent gets a disappointingly average score.
But the child, thanks to their ‘incredible intuition’, has managed to get a PERFECT score—separating the reds and blacks into two different piles.
What’s going on here?
This routine utilises a very simple but fooling concept in card magic—one we call the ‘divided deck.’
The concept is simple: if one half of the deck is all red, and the other half of the deck is all black—we can shuffle those halves individually, and at the end of it all, the deck will be in the same state.
Try it:
Grab a deck and put all the red cards in one half and all the black cards in the other half. Now break the deck in two. One of the two packets is all red, the other is all black. Now if you shuffle those packets INDIVIDUALLY (not together), you won’t achieve a whole lot.
After all, shuffling a packet of red cards is just going to give you a shuffled packet of red cards—but at the end of it all, they’ll still be red.
Now, we can’t very well just do this kind of shuffle in a performance—it would look decidedly odd.
But what we can do is use an overhand shuffle where we only lift off half the deck (at a break we previously obtained) and shuffle that half on top of the deck, then break off the other half and shuffle that half on top of the deck.
This achieves the same thing.
But we can actually take it one step further, and make the spectators feel like THEY shuffled the cards.
Here’s how we achieve that in this presentation:
One of the decks is in this ‘divided deck’ setup. The other is shuffled. We pick up the ‘divided deck’ and break it in half. We give one half to each spectator and ask them to shuffle. Make sure they’re shuffling face down—so the colors aren’t visible.
(for this, a riffle shuffle might work best—or a ‘wash’ on the table.)
Then we ask them to swap packets and do the same to the other packet. We now take both the packets back and place one on top of the other. We’ve retained our ‘divided deck’ while making it feel like the whole thing was shuffled.
Now we pick up the truly shuffled deck and hand it to one of the spectators. We ask them to cut it, and hand the other half to the other spectator. They then perform the same shuffle, swap, shuffle procedure.
We take the deck back.
(the nice thing about this one is that you can let the faces be shown ‘incidentally’ while shuffling. Plus the cut to begin with helps cloak the fact that YOU cut the deck for the first one.)
We now have two decks—one in divided deck setup, and the other shuffled.
We give the shuffled deck to the parent. This ensures they’ll ‘mess up’ in the OOTW presentation.
We hand the divided deck to the child. This ensures they’ll get the OOTW perfect—because that’s the precise setup needed for OOTW.
Indeed, once we’ve done this initial setup, we’re in position to perform the OOTW effect.
You can use any of the standard handlings that make use of this setup.
Here’s a good one:
You’ll need to know the regular OOTW handling. Below is how I describe it in the Skyscraper Method (which incidentally, shows you how to perform an OOTW even though you don’t start in ‘divided deck.’ It’s a lot of fun—check it out.)
At the time, I was describing a ‘packet trick’ handling that used just 16 cards. We’re using 52, so your key number will be 26, not 8. However, the concept is the same.
Also, start by retrieving some red and black cards from an indifferent deck.
“Take a red card and black card from the rest of the deck (the cards not in use) and lay them on the table face up. Tell the spectator to deal cards they think are black onto the black card, and cards they think are red onto the red card.
Once they deal 8 cards, we’ll know they’ve exhausted the first color.
At this point, remove another two cards from the remainder of the deck—one red and one black.
Tell them “we’ll make things even harder” by placing the face up red card on the pile that started on the black face up card, and vice versa. Now tell them to deal red cards on top of the face up red card, and black cards on top of the face up black card.
At the end you’ll be left in either of these situations (the exact number of cards might be different, but the color separation will be the same)…
Scenario 1:
PILE ONE: PILE TWO:
R (face up) B (face up)
B B
B B
B B
B B
B (face up) R (face up)
R R
R R
R R
R R
Scenario 2:
PILE ONE: PILE TWO
R (face up) B (face up)
R R
R R
R R
R R
B (face up) R (face up)
B B
B B
B B
B B
You’ll know which of these scenarios is the case, because you’ll have previously glimpsed the bottom card.
As you can see, in either of the scenarios, one pile is already ‘done.’ You can hand that one to the spectator and ask them to ‘turn it over’ but not spread yet.
You then take the other pile and turn it over—but in the process you steal the bottom card to the top.
As you can see by looking at the table I made above, if you were to move the bottom card to the top, you’d be set for the reveal.
Which move you use to accomplish this is up to you, but I do the following:
Hold the packet in your left hand. Get a break above the bottom card. Slide the rest of the deck forward with your right hand in overhand grip. Once the cards are jutting out from your hand, move your right hand so you’re holding the cards with thumb on top and first finger below and flip the cards face up back into the hand in almost a ‘sweeping’ motion. This hides the face up card in your hand and moves it from the bottom to the top.
(video of this below)
You can then get the spectator to spread their pile—they’ll see that the blacks and reds are separated, and if they turn over the two face down cards they’ll see that they also match the color they’re alongside.
When you spread your deck, the colors will also be separate. You want to spread your deck almost as an afterthought—the focus should be on revealing their hand. This helps misdirect from the fact there’s only one face down card in your cards. So spread as they react to their own pile, and once you’ve done so, turn the face down card in the center face up to complete the picture.
If you have an alternate handling of Out of This World that you prefer, feel free to ‘plug it in’ in place of this one.”
Of course, the above only really applies to the child’s cards—but we should apply the same actions to the parent, so the whole thing feels like they got an equal opportunity to accomplish it.
NOTE: Originally I also included a moment where the parent’s cards are spread in front of them—to display their shuffled nature.
While this might make for interesting patter about how it’s actually HARDER when you try to remember, and it’s better to just ‘go with the flow’, I don’t like calling attention to the fact we don’t spread the other deck.
Alright.
There’s the first ‘finger-licking good’ effect.
The next is coming next week. It looks like this…
You spread a packet of cards in front of the parent, and another packet in front of the child.
You ask the child to pick a certain card. Of course, since the deck is facedown, they won’t KNOW which card is which—they need to rely on their intuition.
We do the same thing for the parent, then place the selected cards face down in the center of the table.
We do this a couple more times, and then reveal how they did.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the child has got a perfect match for each card—while the parent has none!
I’ll show you this one next week. Speak then!
Benji