Old Wine in New Bottles

Where is this mar­ket­place going? A “new” trick is offered: A ver­sion of the “7 Card Monte” (click here).

Well, some sort of dis­cus­sion and spec­u­la­tion start­ed in some mag­i­cal forum. When read­ing this, it real­ly raised my eye­brows. Some peo­ple appar­ent­ly have only a lit­tle or lim­it­ed idea of the his­to­ry of mag­ic. The basic effect and inspi­ra­tion was Peter Kane’s “Gip­sy Curse”. From that, the late Fred Kaps built his (unpub­lished) ver­sion, using unpre­pared cards. The Kaps rou­tine is a blast and unmatched.

Lat­er, José Car­oll was inspired by the Kaps rou­tine and devel­oped his bril­liant rou­tine, which is pub­lished in «52 Lovers». Derek Din­gle had some work on the same lines. Dar­win Ortiz has a nice rou­tine in “Scams & Fan­tasies with Cards”. So there is plen­ty of peo­ple out there that have been con­tribut­ing to that plot, the “Gip­sy Curse” and the Wild Card. Espe­cial­ly Span­ish magi­cians are very famil­iar with that effect. There is a beau­ti­ful ver­sion on the Dani DaOr­tiz web­site for down­load. It is well-known and on the way to becom­ing a clas­sic. Basi­cal­ly, it is a wild card done under the premise of of Monte effect. I am sure there are oth­er ver­sions as well, which I am not aware of …

The deal­ers offer us a “new” trick, there is even a gim­mick involved that “does the work” for you. Giv­en that some of the above men­tioned ver­sions are done all with­out trick cards, using a gim­mick in that rou­tine seems like a lit­tle step back.

I pre­fer the oth­er ver­sions. Pepe Caroll’s rou­tine, for exam­ple, is just a thing of beau­ty. Read­ing the books real­ly pays off …