Stop Touching the Fucking Cards
/You would think this would be the first thing magicians understand about card magic, which is why it’s so bizarre to me when magicians violate this seemingly obvious rule:
Touch the deck as little as necessary.
I constantly see magicians:
taking the deck back unnecessarily
squaring up packets
dealing through the cards themselves to “speed up the process”
shuffling “for” the spectators
spreading the cards in a nice ribbon spread for a selection
In casual performing situations, these things don’t add anything to the procedure and instead detract greatly from the impact of an effect.
Every time you touch the deck you are—from the audience’s perspective—potentially doing something underhanded. And that’s most of what people know about card tricks: the magician touches the deck and does something stealthy.
Now, you might say, “But I’m clearly not doing anything. I’m just squaring the pile of cards.”
Regular people don’t know that. They suspect that sleight of hand is probably meant to look like nothing. So the fact that they don’t see you do something doesn’t mean they don’t think you might have done something.
Spectators don’t have a video camera in their head that records everything perfectly. They don’t necessarily remember how “cleanly” you handled the deck when you handled it. All they remember is that you did touch the deck at times.
Here’s a specific example…
Last week, I mentioned John Bannon’s 51 Fat Chances as a good “Failsafe Trick.”
In looking for a performance of it on YouTube, I stumbled across this person’s version.
51 Fat Chances is a trick that can be done more or less entirely in the spectator’s hands.
Yet he keeps taking the deck, spreading through the cards, giving them back to the spectator, taking them back… to the point where there is essentially no trick anymore—certainly not if you look at the spectator’s reaction.
When you perform casually, you want to do whatever you can to touch the deck as seldom as possible—even if that means the trick ends up being sloppier or slower than it would be otherwise.
It’s easy to forget that a layperson’s understanding of the “trickery” in card magic is mostly that the magician is going to do something sneaky when they touch the deck. They have less of an understanding about procedural sneakiness or obscure mathematical methodologies, so they’re less on the lookout for such things.
That’s not to say a self-working trick is always going to be better than a sleight-of-hand trick. I’m just saying you don’t want to give them an answer as to how something might be done by playing into their knowledge of methods and allowing them to brush something off as sleight of hand.
“I’m not going to touch the deck at all” is one of the strongest conditions you can place on a trick. Don’t undermine it unnecessarily.