Chase The Ace Revisited

When I was work­ing for the ZZM (Zauberzen­t­rale München) with Har­old Voit, one of the main tricks to be learned and demon­strated for the cus­tom­ers was Ken Brooke’s “Chase the Ace”: the one with the three jumbo cards with the false indices: Ace, Two and Three.

I always liked the trick. Small props but big effect. In the course of the years, I added a tiny thing, which makes the routine a bit more con­vin­cing. I wanted to be able to show the com­plete face of the Ace in the begin­ning, without hav­ing to cov­er the false index with the hand.

After dis­miss­ing all kind of weird and pre­pared jumbo cards stands that covered the false index, I finally hit upon the easi­est solu­tion. You need the clas­sic set and an index piece from a match­ing Ace. This means you will have to buy two sets and des­troy one of them.

Note that the index piece is not cut straight, but at an angle. This assures a more nat­ur­al hand pos­i­tion when hold­ing the cards.

Put the cards togeth­er and snap some broad rub­ber bands around them as shown. Pos­i­tion the bands so that the index piece fits. When bring­ing the cards out, you will hide the edge of the index piece in a nat­ur­al way with your thumb.

In this way, you can show the card pack­et more freely. The spec­tat­ors see a com­plete Ace. Remove the rub­ber bands, con­cur­rently secretly steal­ing the index piece, and put them away.

You are left with the tra­di­tion­al set of cards and can go into your routine (prefer­ably Ken Brooke’s).