How to Be Blown Away by A Layman's Card Trick
/I met a guy named Jason recently. Jason found out I have an interest in magic and offered to show me a card trick. I borrowed a deck from our mutual friend whose house we were staying at. I took out the cards and handed them to Jason to show me his trick. He dealt out 21 cards into a pile and had me think of any of the cards. Then he dealt them into three columns of seven cards and asked me which pile my card was in. He gathered up the piles and dealt them into three new columns and again asked me which pile contained my card. One more time he gathered the cards up and dealt them into three more columns.
“Which column is your card in?” he asked.
I looked through each one carefully. “Wait…,” I said. “Where is it?”
I poked through each column a little to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. The card wasn’t there. “What the?!”
Jason looked at me, confused. “Which column is it in?” he asked again.
“Uhm… I don’t know… what do you mean?” I said. “None, I guess. I mean it’s gone. Where did it go?”
Jason was still confused. “What card did you think of?” I told him the 4 of Diamonds. He pushed through the cards on the table himself. “You couldn’t have,” he said.
He picked up the rest of the cards on the table and spread through them. The 4 of Diamonds was genuinely gone.
“Dude that’s crazy,” I said. “But seriously, where is it?” I looked under and around the table. “Is it behind you?” I looked through the cards again and behind and under some objects on the table. I checked under the card case, there was nothing. But wait… There was a slight rattle in the case. I paused and my mouth fell open. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked. I slowly opened the case and dumped out a card. The 4 of Diamonds. My dropped jaw was frozen, my eyes were wide and searching around for an answer. After a few moments I snapped out of my shock paralysis. “That was one of the coolest tricks I’ve ever seen,” I told him.
When a layman offers to show you a card trick, there aren’t a ton of great ways to respond to that.
You can put them off and say, “Well, I probably already know it so there’s not much point to really showing me something.”
Or you can let them show it to you and not really react because you know exactly what’s going to happen. You can just let the trick end and say, “Ah yes, that’s a classic,” and leave them feeling like, Why did you let me go through the whole thing if you know it?
Or you can let them show it to you and pretend to be amazed by it. In the past that seemed like the best option to me, but that has its own problems associated with it. If they catch on that you’re pretending, that can come off as very condescending. And even if they believe you, if you end up showing them a trick afterwards, it’s likely to be so much more impressive than what they did that it will become clear that you probably weren’t fooled by their trick and were just pretending to be. Which, again, can come off as a little infantilizing.
Here’s a fourth option…
Leave a card in the case when you remove the deck (or find a way to get one back in there at some point, if you’re playing cards or something like that). Then at the point of the trick where you’re supposed to name your card, you just name the card in the box. This works for most of the standard card trick laymen know.
21 Card Trick - As illustrated above, you just claim you can’t find the card the last time you’re supposed to be looking for it in the columns.
Key Card Trick - If they ask you to name your card, you name the one in the box. If they don’t ask you to name it, but just ask you to confirm your card after they remove it. Then you just say, “No, that’s not it." They will always ask you to name what it was (so they can see how they screwed up), and it’s at this point that you name the card in the box.
That Trick Where they Slap the Cards Out of Your Hand - You know, the one with the glide. Here’s what I’ll do (this also works with key card tricks too). When they ask me to pick a card, I’ll say, “I’m thinking of one. Do I have to pick one out?” Of course they’ll say yes, because laymen don’t tend to know tricks that start with a freely thought of card. At the end of the trick they’ll usually (not always) ask for the name of the card. I name the one in the box. They slap the cards in my hand leaving only one card. I turn it over. It’s not the one I named. Then I say, “Wait… that’s the one I was thinking of at the beginning of the trick!” And act amazed. Again they will look through the cards to find the one I named and see what got messed up. It’s here that we find the card is gone and the point where I get super impressed.
This little gambit works far better than I ever imagined it would. Here’s why, I think:
The people who offer to show me a trick tend to be people who haven’t seen me perform much, if anything. So they’re not on guard for some weird subversion of a card trick.
I do not play this tongue-in-cheek at all. I act genuinely impressed and amazed by “their” trick.
When someone shows me a trick, they might be prepared for me to fuck with them a little to screw the trick up. But what they are absolutely unprepared for is the idea that I would fuck with them in some way that makes their trick seem more amazing, and makes me look more fooled. Since they don’t know me very well, that possibility just doesn’t seem to come to them as they try and decipher what happened.
Sometimes people will take credit for what happened.
Sometimes they explain to me that they really didn’t make the card vanish, and they’re not sure how that happened. I’m always like, “Hmm… okay, sure. I guess the card just got there by ‘MaGiC,’” I’ll say, and wiggle my fingers like I’m casting a spell. I act as if I’m momentarily “playing along” with the idea they didn’t do it. Then I’ll slap them on the shoulder, “Seriously though, that was dope.”
Sometimes I’m sure they probably question my role in what transpired, but I just don’t let that idea take purchase. I just act fooled and impressed by what I saw. I’ll call a third party over and describe the awesome trick this person just did. Or I’ll just sit there quietly, staring intently like I’m replaying what I just saw in my head, and hopefully getting them to question exactly what just happened in the trick they showed me.
This has been my go-to way of handling laypeople wanting to show me a trick in one-on-one situations for a few years. To me it just feels better than brushing it off or sitting there pretending to be fooled. It adds some mystery but it doesn’t shift the focus onto me. That’s about the best I could hope for.