Breaking the Rhythm

It is the lit­tle things that real­ly make the dif­fer­ence. This post is to make you aware (or remind you, if you have for­got­ten) of some bril­liant analy­sis and think­ing by Ascanio regard­ing the Ham­man Count.

Usu­al­ly this count is done in a steady rhythm:

1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9

Let us assume that we are going to show/count 9 cards and make the change on the 5. The chal­lenge is to make a per­fect change on the 5, keep­ing the rhythm. If there is a slight delay in the action of the switch (and I have seen very few peo­ple who can do this per­fect­ly), then the switch stands out and is notice­able.

But if we take Ascanio’s sug­ges­tion and start exper­i­ment­ing with break­ing the rhythm into uneven chunks, the decep­tion of the dis­play increas­es. The change is also eas­i­er to make. For exam­ple, we could count like this (mak­ing the change at 5)

1 … 2–3 … 4 … 5–6 … 7–8‑9

This feels dif­fer­ent and much bet­ter. Oth­er com­bi­na­tions are pos­si­ble.

By doing the switch on the 5–6 and putting the empha­sis on the hand that ‘counts’ and takes the cards, the switch is much bet­ter hid­den.

Try Roy Walton’s ‘Oil and Queens’. The set­up is (from front to back) B,R,B,R,B,Q,Q,Q,Q. Now do the Ham­man count using the 1 … 2–3 … 4 … 5–6 … 7–8‑9 pat­tern, chang­ing the pack­ets to 5. Can you see the dif­fer­ence?

The same is true if we use Fred Kaps’ han­dling of the ‘Gyp­sy Curse’. In this, Kaps used to do the Ham­man Count while doing a casu­al over­hand shuf­fle (with the cards fac­ing the audi­ence). Break­ing the rhythm here makes every­thing so much eas­i­er and more decep­tive.

All this is described in detail in Ascanio’s book ‘The Mag­ic of Ascanio, Vol. 3’ (writ­ten by Jésus Etchev­er­ry), start­ing on page 320.

Read and study Ascanio’s books, there is much more gold to be dis­cov­ered that will make you think and improve your under­stand­ing of mag­ic.

Ascanio’s work has done this for me.