Arrangements

“Arrangements”

I‘ve already complained at length about the lack of work in Royal Road on the full deck stack, so I‘ll keep it brief: This chapter should have work on something like the Si Stebbins or Eight Kings stack in it, and it‘s annoying to me that it doesn‘t. Instead, most of the tricks in here are based around the idea of medium-sized arrangements of cards. The introduction to the chap ter offers some ideas for getting into position with the arrangements, and some are better than others. ―1″ makes the most sense to me if you‘re going to be working with a large stack. It‘s worth mentioning that with the rise of full-deck stacks, a lot of work has been put into coming up with routines that are slight variations on traditional card plots but that don‘t alter the stack. Juan Tamariz and Simon Aronson are both worth reading for this sort of thing. That way, you don‘t have to worry about opening up with the routine that takes advantage of the stack exactly, and  put that off for later. Starting with a version of Triumph that maintains the stack, for instance,

might get them looking for sleight-of-hand prowess in subsequent routines, which can be a nice way to get one-ahead of them in a different way.

―2″ strikes me as somewhat problematic. When I‘m working, I tend to end up with a diminishing deck due to signed cards being handed out during the course of the evening. A lot of the time,  people don‘t notice, but when they do, I‘ve got a fair answer for it, and the magic itself doesn‘t

suffer (meaning, working with 40 cards doesn‘t explain how their signed card ends up in my hat). If you‘re going to have to make a move to the pocket to retrieve cards and then boldly add them, I think you‘re taking a bit of a risk. Now, some deck switch approaches might work here. Juan Tamariz had a neat idea for ringing in a deck —  force the 3 of clubs (or whatever) and turn around while they show the card to everybody (justified by standard operating procedure of making sure the magician can‘t see the card) and then ring in the stacked deck that‘s missing the 3 of clubs on top. Reveal the 3 of clubs, and then move into the stack work. Something like this could conceivably work with grabbing a small arrangement. I‘d probably want to force several cards to make a bigger deal out of the moment (turning your back on the audience is a fairly memorable moment that requires, in my opinion, a suitably impressive trick to match it), make sure that ringing it in was totally expedient, and probably motivate a trip to the pocket by putting the card box away or something. I also wouldn‘t do this (I don‘t think) with an arrangement larger than a half-dozen cards. The real benefit to this sort of strategy is that the spectator can shuffle to their heart‘s content, but that means making sure that a spectator doesn‘t notice that the deck is missing a few cards. Good spectator selection might help, but I don‘t necessarily know if it‘s worth taking that risk. And, if you‘re not going to let them shuffle, you might as well just go with ―1″ above.

―3″ strikes me as lame. I can‘t imagine doing any sort of open arrangement of cards and then doing an effect which relies on them. Now, I‘ve gone through the deck and culled, but to me

there‘s a huge difference between being seen to be picking out and reordering specific cards, and  being seen going through the deck to make sure there aren‘t any jokers, and apparently doing

nothing else. A cull will have the potential disadvantage of not ending up with the culled cards in a correct order, though. In any case, yeah, I‘m sure it probably flies b y most people, but it strikes me as terribly inartistic. If you‘re trying to do something like an on-the-spot arrangement of the four aces or whatnot, a cull is definitely the way to go.

―4″, on the other hand, reads much better to me. I think this would definitely fly, assuming that you‘re doing a trick where you‘re apparently uncertain of what‘s going on, and then moving into the next trick gracefully — or perhaps even having another trick in between them that doesn‘t alter your arrangement. If I ever relied upon rearrangements, I‘d probably do this. One potential application for this could be forcing a card, letting them shuffle, and then acting as though you forgot that they weren‘t suppose to shuffle, before moving into the Biddle Trick, doing the

arrangement while picking through several cards which are necessary to set up the Biddle Vanish anyway.

One additional thing that isn‘t mentioned in the book but that I alluded to previously, was the idea of doing a deck switch. It‘s a much bolder strategy than just ringing in a few cards, but the rewards are such that a great many magicians have put the effort into finding wa ys to do it. The deck switch is a whole topic unto itself, though, and I‘m not conversant in all the techniques available out there, so you‘ll unfortunate have to research that one on your own.

Finally, that last point in the chapter is worth stressing, that of doing a thorough-looking false shuffle once the arrangement‘s in place. If I were going to go the ―1″ routine, I think that‘d be one of the first things I‘d do immediately after pulling the cards out.

“The Selective Touch”

This reads lame to me, and seeing Daryl perform it on his Revelations DVD series didn‘t help. This is one of those tricks that would be at the bottom of the list of things I‘d want to do if I had real magic powers. The only way I could see this playing well is if it were a follow-up to a trick where you found their selection by touch from your pocket, only to offer to do it again, but apparently screwing up and forgetting to have that card replaced into the deck, at which point it would make sense that you could come up with such a ludicrous way of finding their card. Also, there‘s no way I‘d want to know what the card is before going fishing for the other cards

necessary to identify it. Instead, if I was going to say that my sense of touch is so sensitive that I know which card is where, I‘d start that bit by saying, ―Well, it‘s easy! All I have to do is go through all fifty-one cards and figure out which one is missing. Now, I‘m thinking that I got the suit right, because I only counted twelve. If I‘m right, the suit of this card matches your card. For the first time, what was your suit?‖ ―Diamonds.‖ Turn over the card you fished out to show it‘s a diamond. Proceed similarly to get the index value.

“A Future in Cards”

 Not really too keen on the scope of effect here. On his Easy to Master Miracles series, Richard Osterlind talks about being able to give the impression of showing a large fan of cards when really only five or six are visible —  something like that I think would be far better here. I also don‘t like the idea of you actually seeing the cards ahead of time that you‘re going to ask them to think of. If I was going to do this trick, I‘d open with a known prearrangement, shuffle or cut it into the middle, force that spot, and then let them think of any card they wanted from a fan. Of course, if I was aiming high, I‘d dump this trick altogether and instead start looking into

something with a memorized deck.

“Jacks Wild”

While I‘m sure the discrepancy flies for many, it strikes me as unnecessarily risky. I don‘t k now how highly this rates when compared to a proper gambling demonstration since those routines are not really my thing, but my impression is that if you‘re going to go this route, there are better routines than this. A Poker Puzzle, earlier in the book, strikes me as stronger. That said,

 presentationally there might be some potential in the idea of dealing the three Jacks a couple of times (only to yourself, rather than to them), so that you win a couple of heads-up games,

explaining that you‘ve been working on dealing yourself a three Jacks whenever you wanted, and then, after the reversal, dealing them an incredibly strong hand that should beat Three Jacks, only to reveal that you‘ve dealt yourself the Four Aces (or whatever). Now, as with an y

magician-wins-spectator-loses presentation, you‘re taking a risk that they won‘t hate you afterwards, but plenty of performers have found ways to pu ll that off.

“Think Stop”

Yeah, I don‘t buy the magic behind this effect at all. Either the magician is really counting down from 21 and saying the number he‘d counted to when the spectator said ―Stop‖, or else that‘s a  bunch of nonsense to justify the magician naming whatever number he‘d planned on anyway.

I‘m thinking that since the spectators can never verify the legitimacy of the claim, it‘s too easy to assume the latter. If you‘re going to work with this arrangement, I‘d jump straight ahead to…

“Deal Away”

Denis Behr‘s archive lists this as a variation of the Lazy Man‘s C ard Trick, which is itself a well- regarded trick. This one doesn‘t strike me as that bad — it‘s certainly less transparent than

―Think Stop‖, and I believe Ed Marlo had something extremely similar to this in h is own work. To me, the real key is trying to get to a position where the spectator doesn‘t have to do a whole massive load of dealing, as well as trying to justify why the selected card shows up after one card rather than the first three (or whatever) that they dealt to. I‘d probably want to design the

 presentation so that it seems like they‘re dealing down for no apparent reason, and then (upon finding a club, and then dealing down that amount) saying ―Are you getting bored of this yet?‖ hoping to elicit a ―Kinda.‖ response, and then just asking what their card is, and getting them to turn over the next one.

“The Educated Cards”

I‘m going to guess that you‘re sick and tired of me spouting the old adage that one of the weakest ways to reveal a card is within the deck. Well, I‘m going to spout it again. There‘s a slight difference with the previous trick in that with ―Deal Away‖ you can really play up the amount of card handling that the spectator is doing, but with this particular trick you‘re doing all the work. At the very least, after shuffling, talk them through a false cut (such as the Jay Ose cut), and then let them deal by themselves. Or else, learn a better trick. I do like the placement  procedure, but the payoff doesn‘t do anything for me. As for the initial setup procedure, which  places the cards at the necessary points in the deck, I‘m baffled by it. Presumably it‘s there to

that you can just arrange the four cards you need on top of the deck and then openly get them into place, but if you‘re going to have to move those cards around, you might as well have just slotted them in at the necessary spots. Alternately, the actual shuffle they reference (the Faro) could help you do this, and at the very least it can look like you‘ve shuffled the cards properly ahead of it. There just doesn‘t seem to be a need to do it —  better to just have the arrangement already and head into the effect. The range forcing procedure is nice, but magicians have put it to  better use (Eugene Burger, in ―Exploring Magical Presentations‖, has a very good trick that uses

the idea).

“Reds and Blacks”

The divided deck principle is worth knowing, and this application of it might be good enough,  but there are more deceptive ways to go about it than just having half the deck red and the other

half black. Now, if there is one advantage to having a separation like that, it‘s that it‘s a decent lead in to other, stronger tricks (such as some han dlings for Out of this World), but if the aim is  just to be able to pull off this specific trick, then you could learn a better system for dividing the

deck into two halves so that you can spread the cards out face-up ahead of time to show what looks to be a properly mixed deck. After all, if the magician asks you to take a card from one half of the deck and put it into the other half, it seems to suggest that there‘s some fundamental

difference between the two halves, and there‘s little more obvious than a separation of blacks and reds. Daryl, in his Encyclopedia of Card Sleights, offers some good ideas for a divided deck, and there are several resources that teach the Ireland Shuffle, which is a great shuffle for this setup. You might also want to consider just having them freely take any card they want from the spread (making sure to only spread over the top half) and replacing it anywhere they want into the

spread (making sure that you‘re now offering them only the lower half) —  something like this could work well for the various ―pulse reading‖ tricks in the book. After that, they can cut as much as they want and there‘s no problem. It‘s a nice memory that they can shuffle their packet as much as they like, but the trade-off (that of treating the two halves as being conspicuously separate entities) isn‘t worth it to me.

You might also want to consider learning Juan Tamariz‘s ―Neither Blind Nor Stupid‖, which is a trick of this same general class of effect, but with two selections instead of one, justification for

every step of the effect, and a presentation that really stresses the fairness and makes the reveal seem that much more impossible. The end state is also worth considering.

General Thoughts on this Chapter

Bleah. Go learn Si Stebbins and Eight Kings, or else memorize a deck that looks like it‘s been shuffled, and then master a false shuffle and cut, and you‘ll have access to material which is a hell of a lot better than what‘s here. This definitely ranks up there with the False Shuffles and Cuts chapter as being one of the most disappointing in the book —  I made some

recommendations in that other chapter‘s annotations that you might want to look into. Consider what arrangements allow you to do: you can deal any poker hand you want; you can let them take a free choice of any card, shuffle it back into the deck, and you‘ll still know what it is; you can ask them to name any card, and instantly it‘ll be on top of the deck, at any number down in the deck, at your fingertips, at their fingertips, inside your pocket or hat, etc.; you c an have multiple cards change into a four-of-a-kind instantly; you can tell an entire story based on the cards that keep turning up; and so on… These are feats far more m ysterious (and less trivial) than what‘s in this chapter, and they‘re not all that hard, either. Well, the one where the named card instantaneously jumps where you want it to will take some work, but there are still great effects attainable while you build up your skills to that level.

Chapter 19, Routines

This is a fascinating topic for me, since this is one of those things that many magicians have found their own approaches to. That said, while there are a lot of potential models, they‘re not exactly easy to hunt down. Later on I‘m going to be listing the ones I‘ve gleaned from various  places in our literature, but for now, let‘s see what Royal Road has to say about it. Some of

what‘s in here is going to be interesting for several reasons. First, when routining, it‘s not usually about choosing all the strongest tricks in there and packing them into your show —  rather, you usually aim for escalation, and that can mean that you‘ll want to actually open somewhat noticeably weaker than how you close. Second (and this follows from the first), the key component is often not so much about the tricks but how they relate to each other, so even though ―A Tipsy Trick‖ and ―Do As I Do‖ might both be good tricks, it might also be awkward to have them in the same set. Third, this is one of the few resources on routining that focuses specifically on cards.

In any case, keep in mind that my opinions here are strictly those of a critic not having seen somebody competent perform these routines as described.

“Routining Card Tricks”

Decent enough advice to start with. I dislike ―Topsy Turvy Cards‖ as a rule — it‘s probably safe to say that if you open with it, you‘ll get that escalation dynamic which is great in a show, but that‘s only because the trick is pretty weak to begin with that it‘s almost impossible to follow with something worse. ―Now You See It‖, because of the apparent magician-failure, does have a nice middle-routine element to it, but I think you‘ve got to open stronger. Darwin Ortiz talks about prestige as a concept in Strong Magic, and one of the really important things you‘ve got to do as a magician is establish prestige immediately, particularly if you‘re new to performing for  people. Starting with a weak trick and then moving into a magician-in-trouble trick is going to be

a hard sell. I‘ve complained about ―Obliging Aces‖ before — I don‘t think it establishes exactly what the authors suggest, which is that you‘re supremely skilled with cards. That said, the use of ―Now You See It‖ to arrange the setup is a smart idea. ―Do As I Do‖ isn‘t a bad trick, but at this  point we‘re now mixing card tricks of various genres together — we‘ve got a couple of magic

effects, apparently one skill- based effect, and then now we‘re moving into mentalism. This sort of thing is usually indicative of sloppy routining, and it will take a great deal of effort for the  performer to find some other way to add consistency throughout the routines, perhaps through

character. ―Card To Pocket‖ was another routine I wasn‘t very fond of, and now has us jumping  back towards another magic effect. ―Three Cards Across‖ is considered by many who perform it

to be a very strong magic trick —  Bill Malone named his version (not too different effect-wise