The King of Cards

On my recent lec­ture tour, I spent a won­der­ful even­ing after the lec­ture din­ing with my friends. Sud­denly a small dis­cus­sion about Denis Behr’s new full even­ing pro­gram came up. Some guys had seen it already, and the talk was about Denis’ open­ing effect, which seemed to be quite strong (at least to me).

I was told the fol­low­ing: Denis would spread a red backed deck face down onto the table in a wide rib­bon spread, each and every card vis­ible. Then Denis would intro­duce a single card with a dif­fer­ent colored back. He would show the face of this card and slide it slowly along the spread, until a spec­tat­or stopped him. The spec­tat­or was giv­en the choice of a few cards more or less to the left or right. In oth­er words: a com­pletely free choice. The card was cleanly inser­ted into the spread at the point the spec­tat­or decided.

The deck was then slowly and without any false moves squared and taken face­down into deal­ing pos­i­tion. Denis would then start to deal the cards singly onto the table, into a faceup spread. The spec­tat­ors could see that the cards were in new deck order. They came from Ace to King in each col­or. At same time, the dif­fer­ent colored card would appear and when he dealt it face up, its value match the pos­i­tion in the deck order. For example, there was the Ace of Dia­monds, then the 2, the 3, the 4. Then came the dif­fer­ent colored card, which turned out to be the 5 of Dia­monds, then came the 6, the 7, and so on.

Denis then removed from his pock­et the reg­u­lar 5 of Dia­monds, exchanged it or the dif­fer­ent colored card and went on with his set (with an unpre­pared deck).

This seemed to be the routine, because my friends, who had seen the show, couldn’t exactly remem­ber all the details, nor did they know the exact meth­od Denis was employ­ing. So my start­ing point here is without any know­ledge of the actu­al Denis Behr meth­od (and right now I don’t want to know his meth­od). Also, I don’t know about all the tiny details and work my way through with only the few things I heard from my friends. A funny but inter­est­ing start­ing point. But I like the effect and it was a chal­lenge for me to cre­ate a work­able routine.

Know­ing Denis and his unbe­liev­able abil­it­ies with a deck of cards, I knew he could have employed almost any sleight of hand meth­od, and he would have fooled me with it. This includes false deals, etc.

But I know Denis a bit, and I do know that he COULD real­ize this with pure sleight of hand. But I also do know that Denis is very clev­er and has no hes­it­a­tion to use a gim­mick, if it makes things easi­er or stronger. After all, his dex­ter­ity is only matched by his intel­li­gence. So everything was in the open …

The one thing that gave me some head­aches was the pro­duc­tion of the card from the pock­et. An index? If so – which one? And how could that be prac­tic­al? Luck­ily, my mind made a con­nec­tion to some­thing else, which solves the prob­lem in a nice way and makes an index unne­ces­sary. The routine now is totally easy to per­form and 100 per­cent prac­tic­al. A real worker!

The works

For the first prob­lem, there are dif­fer­ent ways pos­sible to go. The easi­est reminds me of an old Annemann routine, where a waxed card is used. Nowadays we have ’Sci­ence Fric­tion Spray’ so this could be a good altern­at­ive. The face of the card with the odd-colored back is either treated with a bit of wax (old-fash­ioned meth­od, which makes the hand­ling of the ‘single card’ more secure) or it is treated with the Sci­ence Fric­tion (which is easi­er to sep­ar­ate later, but requires a bit more atten­tion in the hand­ling whilst deal­ing). Pick your choice. I am happy with both meth­ods, but tend to the old waxed card because of the care­less­ness whilst hand­ling the double card.

The index thing is solved in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent way. The deck itself serves as an ‘open index’. The card that Denis appar­ently pro­duced out of his pock­et is in my case in my ‘Avalon Envel­ope’ (this is my ver­sion of a multi-pur­pose envel­ope, based on the work­ings of Roger Cursor’s great switch envelope).

In the envel­ope (and vis­ible through the win­dow cutout) is the back of a red backed card. This envel­ope is placed in full view onto the table. Of course, the card in the envel­ope is a dummy card.

Now the red deck is shown and it is explained that it is in new deck order (without show­ing the faces, of course). The deck is rib­bon spread on the table.

The odd and is intro­duced, again without sow­ing its face. Here I bring in a little sub­tlety I learned from the writ­ings of Theo Annemann: I ask the spec­tat­or to sign the back of this card. This actu­ally is not neces­sary, but makes it all more con­vin­cing. With this little strategy, the idea of hav­ing more than the one card in play is can­celled out.

The spec­tat­or stops and the card is fairly inser­ted at this point. Of course, this brings the card auto­mat­ic­ally right on top of the prop­er card in the new deck order.

The spread is gathered up and the deck squared. When using the wax meth­od, a slight pres­sure onto the deck makes sure that the card sticks to the card under­neath. With the Sci­ence Fric­tion pre­par­a­tion, you have to do noth­ing here.

Now the cards are dealt slowly face-up onto the table (in a spread, so the spec­tat­ors can fol­lowed the order). At one time there will be the card with the odd back. Deal this card (the double) onto the table and con­tin­ue with the rest of the deck. Due to the pre­par­a­tion there are no ‘moves’ to pay atten­tion to, and it is the nat­ur­al hand­ling without any ‘get-ready’ or any fum­bling that makes it all so deceptive.

The effect is fin­ished here. In a low key, you remove the double card from the deck, and put it into your pock­et. In the pock­et, you quickly sep­ar­ate the two cards and palm the card from the reg­u­lar deck. In a seated per­form­ing con­di­tion I use a simple gam­bler­’s cop here.

Then you take the envel­ope and trans­fer it to the hand palm­ing the card (thereby load­ing the card under­neath) and pro­duce the ‘reg­u­lar’ card from the envel­ope. Add this to the deck, which is now com­plete and unpre­pared and you are good to go.

Note:

When you don’t want to use the Avalon envel­ope (or the one from Roger Curzon), a clas­sic­al Fred Kaps Wal­let is a nice solu­tion. Have the wal­let set-up in the pock­et. When you removed the odd card (double) from the deck and pre­tend to place it into your pock­et. In real­ity, the double is loaded into the wal­let. This might be the easi­est load­ing pro­ced­ure of a trick wal­let, all done in the open.

After some time mis­dir­ec­tion (import­ant!), reach for the wal­let. Open the zippered com­part­ment and remove the red back card from it. The cards are sep­ar­ated inside the com­part­ment, there­fore the Sci­ence Fric­tion pre­par­a­tion might be a bit easi­er and more practical.

I do know that it is a fine effect, when using an index, that you can bring out the reg­u­lar card and openly remove the double and replace it with the reg­u­lar card. Well, my solu­tion is quite close to this ideal but more more practical.

I per­formed this a few times at my lec­tures without explan­a­tion. Most magi­cians were com­pletely fooled and angry with me, because I didn’t explain it. Now you know how I did it!

Addendum:

Denis informed me that this is not his effect, but Held­er Guimarães’.