“Introduction”
I really like the fact that they cover this aspect of card magic early, but at the same time, I‘m somewhat torn on the way they went about it. First, let‘s get one huge bias that I have out of the way — the best first palm that somebody can learn is a bottom palm, and the specific technique that I would recommend anybody go to first is taught on John Carney‘s ―On Palming‖ DVD. I‘m not sure if it‘s his, exactly, but he‘s pretty good about crediting and there weren‘t an y credits on this one, although Ackerman attributes a similar get-ready for a multiple card bottom-palm to Marlo. Carney had it as a small- packet palm for his ―Everywhere, Nowhere and On Your Face‖ routine, but it‘s doable with a full deck — I‘ve been doing it for the last few years, and it‘s honestly one of my go-to moves. Michael Close, in his Workers series, has talked about the merits of the bottom-palm as opposed to the top-palm. The big ones that were obvious to me before I‘d read Close‘s comments — you‘ve got the deck as cover during and after the steal. I‘m
actually more intimidated doing the double-lift for people than I am doing this palm.
In any case, if you‘re looking for a palm simply because you need it for a card-to-impossible- location or whatever, and you‘ve got some flexibility about where the impossible location is going to be (eg: it‘s got to be in a pocket, but it doesn‘t matter which one), then this is a
ridiculously attainable palm. There will be a non-trivial jump in difficulty if you‘re going to go to multiple cards, but not everybody wants to (or needs to) make that leap. If you‘re not going to bother with that, then you‘ve got a brilliant palm right there, and trust me, the fact that you can
use the deck to mask the fact that you‘re palming a card will take away almost all fear at being discovered — it‘s essentially magic-wand theory brought to cards.
Obviously, Hugard and Braue shouldn‘t be faulted for not teaching this palm, or for ignoring the bottom palm in this sort of book to begin with. One of the things that the 20th Century has given
us is a lot of innovation in card technique, and at the moment we can palm from friggin‘
anywhere in the deck. Still, if a beginning magician needs to learn a quick-and-dirty palm just to get a single card from location A to location B, then I‘d tell them to ignore Royal Road and go straight to the technique that Carney teaches right away. It‘s worth mentioning that some of the better card steals from the center of the deck also end up with the card being palmed by the left hand (just as a bottom- palm would). Things like the Diagonal Palm Shift (Erdnase, ―Expert at the Card Table‖) or the Tamariz Perpendicular Control (Juan Tamariz, various) can be extremely effective, and while there are some variations that allow you to use those strategies to get the cards palmed in the right hand, from my (admittedly limited) experience, the best ones involve getting the cards into the left hand.
One other nice thing about the DVD is that Carney talks about the concept of the retreat, which is extremely helpful, because it doesn‘t really matter if the steal is good — if your hand comes away from the deck looking like it could be concealing a card, you‘re toast. If you‘ve got the
card bottom- palmed and the deck is on top of it in your left hand, then there‘s a brilliant retreat that you can do, simply by picking the deck up with the right hand and rotating it slightly so that the face of the card is flashing out at the audience — this is an almost perfect misdirectional technique that will cover the retreat of the left hand. I‘ve done this for other magicians,
explaining what it was that I was going to do, and their eyes still followed the deck, rather than the palming hand. It‘s almost unfair. I learned that strategy from Tyler Erickson and it was confirmed by Steve Draun elsewhere in his teachings. It‘s gold. Unfortunately, if you‘re top palming, you don‘t quite have that strategy, as you‘ll only be flashing the top of the deck towards
the audience. A rising action might still draw their attention (Gary Kurtz talks about this sort of thing in his excellent work on misdirection called ―Leading With Your Head‖) but I suspect it only has a fraction of the power that the face-of-the-deck flash that the previous strategy has. Incidentally, the choreography should be this — right hand rises with the deck and rotates, left hand falls dead by your side, wait a beat, and then have the left hand go where it needs to go. However, all this stuff isn‘t taught in Royal Road, and (as before) I‘m not going to outline the mechanics of things which aren‘t mine to teach. For the excellent single-card bottom palm, I can only point you towards Carney‘s DVD and hope you get it, figure out which palm I‘m talking about, employ the retreat that I describe in the previous chapter, and just start doing it for people. You‘ll be pulling cards out of nowhere in no time.
In any case, if there was anything to add to the ―Introduction‖ text, for me it would be two things. First, if you‘re worried about palming cards, one o f the things to keep in mind is that the people you are performing for are not going to be prepared for it. Second, when we‘re talking
about palming, we‘re talking about a larger branch of magic that extends beyond cards, and you can gain some quick confidence in the realm of ―holding out‖ (ie: concealing stuff in your hands) if you don‘t limit your studies to card magic, and in fact look into coin magic (or other forms of small object manipulation) and study the concepts of timing, misdirection, choreography, and body language — you can take the things you‘ve learned from these lessons and bring the
knowledge back to card magic.
However, things being what they are, we‘ve got a top palm here to look at.
“Top Palm, I (Single Card)”
This is a pretty good technique. One thing to make sure you don‘t do is use the second image as a model for how your hand should look at the point of the steal. It is possible to get the card into position and pop up into place using the techniques taught without having to align your hand to
the deck like that. Ackerman talks about keeping a nice high arch to the hand, and that strikes me as good advice here. To its credit, the book points out that having a nice high arch throughout is important, but at the same time, that image doesn‘t seem to me to convey that advice. For what it‘s worth, my memory of R. Paul Wilson‘s teaching on this entire topic in his DVD set for Royal Road was pretty thorough.
Since we‘re speaking of top palms, you might want to looking into one of Dai Vernon‘s highly- praised contributions to card magic — his ―Topping the Deck‖ technique. This was published in
―Select Secrets‖ but has been taught in a few places, including John Carney‘s ―On Palming‖ DVD and the second volume of Card College. Dai Vernon was also highly influenced by the writings of Erdnase in ―Expert at the Card Table‖, and while I‘ve got some criticisms of that text, the palming taught in there is really quite good — in fact, the multiple-card bottom palm can look excellent if done well (and you should know how I like bottom-palms at this point).
Another thing that‘s good about the teaching of this technique in the book is that they talk about some of the surrounding actions for the moment you‘re palming. Imagine, for instance, that you‘re holding the deck in the left hand, with a spectator on your left. ―Can I ask a favour?‖ you ask, gesturing out with the left hand, which is somewhat awkward given that you‘re holding the deck, so you continue saying ―I need your help‖ and you transfer it to the right hand, executing the palm at that moment, and take the entire deck in your right hand (ignore the illustration for that as well — use a Biddle-style grip rather than having the deck feed into the thumb crotch like that), and then gesture with the left hand more openly ―Can you come over here?‖ These sorts of transfers in order to free up a hand that‘s closest to the direction you want to gesture towards are what some people consider ―theatrically correct‖ — to do it the other way (ie: making that
gesture with the hand opposite from the direction that you want to gesture with) would require you to reach across your body, and that‘s somewhat awkward. A small point, but if you‘re going to do the same dozen routines for the rest of your life, these sorts of touches can be beneficial details. It‘s worth mentioning that you‘ll want to make sure that your transfer of the deck is done exactly as you would do it if you didn‘t have to palm off cards at all. That‘s not as trivial as it sounds, but we‘ll hold off on that for a second.
“Top Palm, II (Several Cards)”
A slightly more difficult technique. I wish I was more conve rsant in palming multiple cards so that I‘d know if there were easier methods out there. Unfortunately, I don‘t. This one will involve a bit more of tension in the left hand as it‘s putting more work into making the steal happen. If the right hand can remain soft throughout up until the point where it takes the deck (at which point it‘ll have a reason for looking slightly tense, since it‘s holding a deck of ca rds) then that should help camouflage things.
If I were in a situation where I needed to start multiple-card palming regularly, again, I‘d probably be looking at methods that involved the bottom-palm. The Erdnase bottom palm can
look great, and another one which Michael Vincent does a lot — the Hofzinser Multiple Card bottom palm explained in ―Expert Card Technique‖ — looks great in his hands as well (I‘ve not
yet been able to get the knack of it, presumably because I haven‘t practiced enough). There are even strategies for doing one-handed multiple-card b ottom palms, including one in Benjamin Earl‘s Past Midnight DVD set.
“Palm Glimpse”
This is good. If you control and then palm off a card, it‘s a simple matter to catch a glimpse of the card you‘ve palmed, under pretense of directing your attention towards the deck itself (all the while using the deck to cover the palmed card). This can be helpful to name the card they‘ve selected (before pulling it out of somewhere unexpected), or simply make sure that you‘ve not stolen off the wrong card (if you‘ve had it signed). I do the latter all the time as a safety
precaution. One thing you might want to consider… later on, you‘re going to learn the hindu shuffle. When you do that, come back to this portion of the text, and consider how you might, after having palmed a card in the right hand, use your left hand to rotate the deck and then re-grip it so as to begin a Hindu Shuffle, from the cards in the right hand into the left hand. This can help you out a bit because it‘s no big deal to glance at your hands if you‘re executing a shuffle
(staring is bad, but glancing is not), and that means that your glimpse of the card is covered by a naturally motivated reason somewhat. I personally do this all the time before heading into my card-to-impossible-location effect. It‘s worth noting that a bottom- palm, for all its merits, doesn‘t automatically give you this advantage.
“Replacing Palmed Cards”
This is a good topic for those people who are either going to be stealing cards off prior to letting spectators shuffle the deck, or else to add cards to the deck that weren‘t there to begin with (such as smuggling in the four aces, or a gaffed card). The first method strikes me as a teensy bit
awkward (despite the authors‘ claims that it‘s perfectly natural) since there‘s no reason wh y a spectator who‘s just shuffled the cards themselves couldn‘t also cut the c ards themselves, so I don‘t quite like the momentary intervention. That said, if the execution is solid, I‘m sure it would fly by most people.
The second method, I‘m not totally on- board with, but it‘s a bit convoluted to explain why. Tyler Erickson made a great point about false transfers that applies here — people do not always pass an object from one hand to the other in the same way. Depending upon the object and what it is that they plan to do with it, they might either toss the object from the left ha nd to the right hand, or else the left hand might present the object to be taken by the right hand. This might sound like overthinking, but consider that we have natural ways of dealing with these sorts of things, and since we want these transfers to be forgotten and l ost amidst other surrounding actions, we need to know what feels specifically natural. Tyler‘s example (which I b elieve was ins pired by the writings of Michael Close) was to consider what would happen if you got home and needed to unlock the door, and the key was hidden above the upper ledge on the side opposite the
doorknob. Obviously you‘d have to fetch it with one hand, get it into the other hand to open the door, and then get it back to the first hand to put it back on the upper ledge. Do you know off the top of your head if this involves ―taking‖ actions or ―putting‖ actions? I sure don‘t. But I‘m sure my body subconsciously does.
Anyways, I said all that to say this. If the idea is to transfer a deck from one hand to the other, and to use that action to cover the moment that palmed cards are replaced on the deck, you need to surround it with the proper motivation. It‘s not just a question of having objects to transfer. I‘m not saying that what they‘re talking about wo n‘t work, but I do think the motivation needs to be made clear. Are you passing the cards to make a gesture with the hand? Are you passing the
cards to place them to the side? Are you passing the cards because you plan on actually doing something with them? etc. And yeah, I‘m sure all this reads as nitpicky. Take it with wh atever grains of salt you need.
It‘s worth mentioning that in Expert Card Technique, the authors of this book offer many more covering actions for getting palmed cards back on the deck. There are nine in total — they‘re for different situations, and while some of which might have choreography that might be awkward for you if you‘ve not designed the effect that way, there‘s a good chance that you‘ll find at least one good one. Other texts will no doubt offer plenty.
“Card in Pocket”
One mistake that‘s easy to make with card palming is to look down on an effect just because you know the modus operandi. Before I‘d started doing them myself, I never understood why people found card-to-impossible-locations strong, since frequently it‘s just a question of being able to palm off a card and then loading it somewhere. It took me some experience to realize that, if the
effect is properly defined, it‘s a nuance that most people never, ever pick up on. Something like a simple ―Card To Pocket‖ can play nicely. In Pete McCabe‘s ―Scripting Magic‖ he talks about a great strategy, where you have some stuff already in your pocket, such as a cellphone and keys, and you palm off the card, and go to the pocket to remove the cellphone and then the keys, and later on, when it‘s time to find the card, you riffle the deck, and reach in with a clearly empty hand, and produce their card. Now, this sort of thing needs to be designed impeccably, since you don‘t want to stuff your hand in your pocket without them knowing why you‘re going there. McCabe‘s book is well worth owning for many reasons besides his script for that particular trick, so you might want to invest in it (I‘m unfortunately away from most of my print library right now, so I cannot verify if this touch was from him or somebody else, but it was definitely in that book).
Taking a cue from Pete McCabe… Put in your r ight pocket a card-shaped object (such as a library card or a business card — some cities have bus transfers that are card shaped) and then your cellphone and your keys. Control their card to the top. Riffle the deck with your left hand, and then (with an empty hand) proudly go to the pocket to produce their card, and then pull out the card-shaped object and display it proudly, before you notice what it is. ―Sorry, can you hold onto this?‖ you ask as you extend the object forward for them to take, and then reach inside to pull out your cellphone (make sure they see an empty hand go in). Drop it back in, saying
―Maybe it went to the wrong pocket?‖, and then pass the deck from the left hand to the right hand (executing the palm in the process), and go with an empty hand into the left pocket,
producing nothing. Say ―No, it should be the right pocket… Can I ask a favour?‖ as you take the deck back with the left hand, and without waiting for an answer say ―Can you take this?‖ and extend the deck towards them with the left hand as you drop the right hand dead for a moment, and then go into the right pocket again with the palmed card and dump it off, as you remove the cellphone (hand it to them to hold again), and then go back with an empty hand again to remove the keys (give those them), and then finally grip the card, acting suddenly reassured, saying ―Sorry, it was there under all this other stuff. What was your card?‖ They name it, and you produce it.
The trick here in Royal Road is, unfortunately, not in that vein. Instead, it‘s yet another attempt at mentalism. They think of a card in a packet, you remove a card from behind your back and put it in your pocket, and then you deal off a bunch of cards, making a big deal on the last card dealt