One of the most enjoyable things about being a magician is the ability to go back to material I learned years ago and revisit some of the really basic techniques.
Arturo de Ascanio once said to Roberto Giobbi: “An architect builds a house, forget about it and move onto next project. Magician, one the other hand, is like a gardener who must constantly take care of his plant. He has to take care of each trick and technique so it gets better and better”.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is often credited with saying that ” the only constant in life is change.” I suppose this applies to magic in more ways than one can imagine. Things around us change, the way we learn and perceive information also change overtime, and, whether we notice it or not, the way we look at magic also changes as well.
When I started learning magic around 2006 or 2007, most of what I learned came from books, DVDs, magic shops, and other magicians.
It wasn’t particularly difficult to get hold of magic secrets 20 years ago. Once you found your way into the magic community, there were plenty of opportunities to learn, as long as you are willing to put time, effort and of course, money (This last party has and will probably never changed).
The problem, at least among many of the magicians around me, myself included, was that we tended to learn something, become reasonably comfortable with it, and then we move on to something else.
And there’s always something new. A new DVD, new book, new sleight, new tricks, etc, waiting for us to explore.
One of these new things that arrived on my desk one day, was Roberto Giobbi’s Card College series, which changed the way I looked at some of the most basic techniques I thought I already knew.
I had already learned quite a few of the techniques described in the books at that time. However, reading the description in Card College was a very different experience.
Roberto Giobbi is deeply influenced by the Spanish school of magic, particularly the thinking of Ascanio and Tamariz, and that influence is apparent throughout the entire series . Techniques are examined almost at a microscopic level, with attention given not only to what the hands are doing, but to why an action is structured in a particular way and what the spectator is suppose to perceived.
For example, after a deck is apparently cut, the packets may deliberately be left slightly askew before being carefully squared by the magician or even the spectator.
Or take the Elmsley Count. One hand can remain relatively stationary while the other is treated as the taking hand, giving the action a clearer image and rhythm.
Or the Flushtration Count. Instead of displaying each card from the same Biddle grip position, the action can be adapted to resemble showing a group of people from different directions, giving the count a more natural appearance.
Or the Hamman Count, where the rhythm does not have to come from a series of identical beats. Different pauses and accents can be built into the count so that the sequence feels less mechanical and more like an actual display.
This was the very first time I became aware that sleight of hand could be studied intellectually, scientifically and artistically .
And once you start looking at technique at this microscopic level, it becomes quite easy to go back to something you learned earlier and notice a problem that had never bothered you before.
For me, one of those problems was the Bobby Bernard False Cut.
I first came across this false cut during the beginner magic class that I attended in 2006, the handling was more or less this:
- The deck begins in left-hand dealing grip.
- The right hand takes the deck from above in end grip.
- The right index finger lifts approximately half the deck and swing cuts that packet into the left hand.
- The left wrist turns slightly downward until the packet is close to vertical.
- The edge of the right hand packet lightly taps against the back of the left hand packet.
- The right hand packet is placed onto the table.
- The remaining packet is placed on top.
- The deck is squared.
For years I didn’t think very much about this particular tapping action. However, at some point, I started wondering what that tap was actually supposed to be doing.
Was it there to square the cards? Was it creating some kind of time misdirection? Did it help create a spatial separation between the packets (vertical and horizontal) ? Was the sound important? Should the action register consciously at all? Would the cut look better without it ? (Roberto suggested in his Magic Memory column that he no longer use Bobby Bernard False Cut and has adopted something else which explained in his book Sharing Secrets)
Or was I simply doing the very magician thing of spending far too much time thinking about an action that nobody else cared about?
The more I looked into it , the more interpretations I found.
In Jerry Sadowitz’s Cut Control, the tap is discussed in relation to squaring the cards.
In Dominique Duvivier’s write out, the action has more of a time misdirection quality built into it.
Giobbi’s description in Card College also places some emphasis on the squaring and reassembly of the packets, particularly the condition of the deck as the cut is completed.
After discussing the move with Justin Higham, several other possibilities came up as well. None of them completely stopped me thinking about the tapping action, though, and over time I gradually arrived at an answer that made sense to me which I have started to adapt in my own routine.
Then, few years later, I came across Michael Close discussing the same false cut in Paradigm Shift Vol. 1. In which he was clearly bothered by the same tapping action.
More importantly, the answer he arrived at was essentially the same one I had reached.
There is always a small amount of relief when you spend years worrying about some bit and piece of card handling and then discover that somebody considerably more experienced had been worrying about the same thing.
I won’t go into Close’s solution here, because his discussion is worth reading in full.
But if you use the Bobby Bernard False Cut and that tapping action has ever looked slightly odd to you, I would strongly recommend tracking down Paradigm Shift Vol. 1.
These days, revisiting the basics is probably easier than it has ever been. Card College is still one of the first places I would go back to, but there are also newer resources that approach the fundamentals from a different angle. Ben Earl’s Brilliant Basics material through Studio 52, for example, spends a considerable amount of time on things such as natural handling, squaring, tension, transitions, false cuts, forces, palming and the Top Change.
I very much enjoy going back to this kind of basic handling every now and then. Sometimes I notice something I completely missed before, sometimes I end up changing nothing at all, and sometimes I just come away with another question to ponder about…
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