Help me present this card trick

I do card magic as a hobby. I’ve reached the point where I can perform a fair number of tricks convincingly and with confidence, and I’m now spending more time building strong presentations around them.

In an effort to get some new ideas, I thought I would explain one of the effects, and see if anyone had any suggestions for patter, plot, or presentation.

The effect: a card is freely selected and returned to the deck. The deck is shuffled, and then half of the deck is turned upward and shuffled into the face-down half. It is clearly shown that the deck contains both face-up and face-down cards. Finally, the deck is spread, showing that all the cards are now face-down except for the selected card, which is face-up in the center of the deck. (For the magicians–yes, I’m talking about Triumph. For the non-magicians–no, I’m not going to tell you how it’s done.)

In my current presentation, I tell a story about doing magic for people in a bar, when one guy decided to trip me up. I had him take a card and return it. As I shuffled, he said that he wanted to shuffle the deck, and he wanted me to turn around as he did. He then turns half the cards over, blah blah blah… finally, with a wave of my hand, I impress the guy by turning them all back over exept for his selection.

This usually goes over OK, but it’s weak, IMO, for such a strong effect. I know that the collective Doper creative mind can do better. The most important thing in presenting this effect would be to provide a logical reason for reversing half the cards.

Any ideas?

Dr. J

I feel bad because I might be the first to post here when I have no responce to the real question…

I just wanted to tell you that I envy you… all my life (thats really no exaggeration) I have wanted to be able to do close up magic… but my hands are fairly small and pudgy and don’t live up well to that (I have to stick with gimmick tricks and coin box trick to fool the kids). I envy you.

DoctorJ, you’re using the most popular presentation. I’ve seen 3 famous magician’s do this trick (it’s also in two books that I have) and they all do slight variations of this presentation. I have, however, seen one alternate presentation where the magician explains the different ways of shuffling, and shows how the most difficult is when you flip one half over. It is a very fun trick to do, and can be very powerful. I enjoy doing it, and generally do the second presentation I mentioned. You just have to work out some fancy shuffles but it works out well. I’ll look through my magic library, and get back to you if I find something else. Since it’s Dai Vernon, very few people want to mess with greatness.

Rob–I’m also working on a version that combines Triumph with Vernon’s Aces that I saw Ricky Jay do. He presents it as part of a big gambling piece. I like that presentation, but the routine involves a Faro shuffle, which I’m not quite ready to do in public yet.

Dr. J

Ricky Jay does some really great stuff. The Triumph/Vernon’s Aces sounds familiar. But yeah, the Faro shuffle takes a long time to get down. I’ve been working at it for quite a while and still seem to mess up, somehow. The partial Faro shuffles are no problem, I do a couple of tricks that utilize this (one of which is a version of Scarne’s Aces). But a perfect Faro is very hard to do and make it look like you’re just shuffling. Depending on what you’re using it for, sometimes a different shuffle is better. Unless you’re using it for its mathematics.
I’d be interested to hear more about Ricky Jay’s trick. It reminds me of when I saw him perform the Queen trick from The Expert At The Card Table, ver batem. Nobody even suspected that it was from there. Out of curiosity, is it Vernon’s Aces or Vernon’s Cutting the Aces?

What about feigning incompetence, playing it as if the upside-down part was done mistakenly? Ort claiming that you learned the trick from an Australian friend, and therefore have to do it the way you were taught (which is upside-down here)?

I like Mojo’s train of thought. You know how lots of times in life, people do really strange stuff because their mom did it that way or the person who taught them did it that way.

So, maybe you could explain that this trick was taught to you by a great magician from Australia or some such place and you do not know why half the cards must be upside down but that is the way you were taught it and that is the way you must perform it. Or something along those lines.

Didn’t you request similiar help a while back on a different card trick? If so, how did it go and what lead in did you use?

Jeffery