How to Improve The Card to Wallet

Here is a small refine­ment to the hand­ling of a card-to-wal­let routine, with the pur­pose of obscur­ing the moment of load­ing of the card into the wal­let. I’m sure oth­ers have come up with this, as it’s such an obvi­ous idea. So I don’t claim any ori­gin­al­ity. Think of it as a reminder of some­thing import­ant (not just for the Card to Wal­let trick).

The basic idea here is to get the audi­ence used to the action of the hand reach­ing into the jacket for the wal­let. Once they are con­di­tioned to this action, and see that noth­ing unusual or sus­pi­cious is hap­pen­ing, they will miss (or worse, ignore) the moment of actual loading.

The­or­et­ic­ally, if you make this move two times, and they see that noth­ing sus­pi­cious is hap­pen­ing, then they won’t notice it the third time. Again, the magic three.

To make this pos­sible, restruc­ture your routine. Include a (motiv­ated) reason that allows you to reach in, remove the wal­let, and then remove some­thing from the wal­let that is related to the routine. This could be a note, a piece of paper (with some­thing writ­ten on it that is part of the present­a­tion), or really any­thing that would help the routine.

The hand­ling is as fol­lows: You reach into your pocket, take out your wal­let, open it and take out a piece of paper with your other hand. While the paper is being unfol­ded and shown around, the hand hold­ing the wal­let closes it and puts it back in the pocket.

Do the same thing a second time with a dif­fer­ent object in the wal­let (or put the slip of paper you took out before back in). The third time, hold the card in your palm and reach for your wal­let with that hand. Take out the card, remove the wal­let, and then go on to reveal the card in the sealed envel­ope in the wal­let’s zipped com­part­ment, etc.

This con­di­tion­ing, inno­cent as it may seem, is a reli­able strategy. It cov­ers the moment.