The Wash Replacement

Palming cards is one of the scarier moves in card magic. It’s not that it’s difficult to do, but it’s easy to get busted and there’s no talking yourself out of the situation if you are. If someone catches you doing a double-lift you can sometimes say, “Oh, whoops, I accidentally turned over two cards.” If someone spots something funny when you’re culling a card you can just be like, “Huh? What? No… I was just spreading the cards.” You can play dumb.

But if you’re spotted secretly removing or bringing in cards from a palm, you’re pretty well busted. You can’t really be like, “Huh? I have cards in my hand? Oh wow. That’s what that feeling was. Thanks for telling me.”

A lot of the time, you can change your routine so it doesn’t have to use a palm. And that’s what I did for the first 10 or 15 years of performing. Then I tried palming one day and it wasn’t really that bad. There’s still a decent chance to get busted, but it’s usually worth it.

Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of John Bannon’s Directed Verdict effect and have come up with many different presentations for it. In its basic form, it’s a Spectator Cuts the Aces effect. Although it can be used for so much more. And I’ve learned that palming out the aces and then adding them back in elevates the trick to a point where I can’t justify not doing that. From questioning people, I’ve found spectators only have a couple of guesses for how that trick is done. First, they think there are a whole lot of aces in the deck. And when they see it’s a normal deck they think that maybe the Aces were set up at certain spots making them likely to be cut to. As if that would work.

But when they shuffle the deck, they are truly left without even the beginning of an understanding of what could have happened.

So, for me, that trick needs to start off with them shuffling the deck.

If you don’t like palming, this is a super easy alternative and one that I think is actually better than palming if the situation allows for it. I use it all the time. Certainly, others have done this before. I’m not suggesting I created this. Just pointing out the benefits for the amateur. It’s ideal for when you’re sitting on a couch with someone.

First, you don’t palm out any cards. The cards (let’s say the Aces) are already out of the deck and in an easily accessible pocket or—in my case— they’re usually stuck behind a pillow or between couch cushions on my end of the couch.

The deck is on the coffee table in front of us, in its case.

I ask my friend to take the deck of cards and spread them all around the table so they’re completely mixed up.

This takes all their focus. Nobody does this while also staring at me. So I have all the time in the world to get the Aces into this position in my right hand (or whichever hand is furthest from them if we’re side by side—for this example we’ll assume they’re on my left).

You don’t have to clip them like this, you can palm them if you prefer.

Now, with the cards spread on the table, I say, “Let’s just gather these up.” And I will go to help them scoop up the cards.

I reach forward with both hands. My right hand is palm down. My left hand is at a 45-degree angle, fingers spread. If you draw a straight line between my friend’s eyes and my right hand, my left hand is directly on that line, obscuring my right hand. They’re not looking at my right hand. And they wouldn’t really see anything if they were. But the left hand is just an extra bit of obfuscation. From their perspective, it just looks like two empty hands reaching for the cards.

If I’m opposite the other person, then my empty left hand reaches forward and up a little while my right hand hovers low over the table. As if I’m going to scoop some cards back toward me.

From there, my right hand deposits its cards on the table and I start gathering up some of the cards and coalescing them under the cards in my right hand. I don’t gather up all the cards. I let the other person help.

Once the cards are straightened up, I take the packet the other person gathered up and push it into mine, below the Aces on top.

Then I go into whatever the trick is.

One of the advantages of this over giving someone a deck to shuffle is that you can “palm” in a huge chunk of the deck. I’ve done up to a third, regularly. If I’m doing this with more than 6 cards, I will usually dump out the cards out of the case and onto the table myself and start to spread it a little. This way the other person never sees the deck in its coalesced stack until the other cards have been palmed in and it’s a full deck. A normal person who doesn’t handle cards frequently can’t tell the difference between a scatter of 38 cards and one of 52 unless they’re Rain Man or something. This allows me to do tricks where very significant set-ups have been removed from the deck. Far larger than you’d feel comfortable palming out of and into a deck and allowing a spectator to shuffle with that many missing cards.

Washing the cards across the table is also more memorable than a shuffle and feels like it’s less predictable. And the percentage of the population who can shuffle a deck of cards gets less and less every day so this technique matches perfectly with that decline in dexterity.