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.