ONE EVENING AT THE MAGIC CIRCLE Alex Elmsley was asked to show something to a group of card magi. A man with an open mind to any method required to achieve a magic effect, be it a set-up deck, a sleight or a gimmick, he pulled the following stunt which later he told me he’d drummed up on the spot. (This was the truth for Alex was as straight as a magician’s wand)

Effect:

A card is selected and returned and the pack is freely shuffled and cut by several spectators and placed on the floor. It was then covered by a tabloid size newspaper and the cards were commanded to cut themselves at the selected card. The spectator removed the paper and the cards were seen to be cut a right angles in the form of a cross and when the top half of the pack was removed, the chosen card was revealed on top of the lower half.

This simple plot succeeded because of Alex’s reputation and the build-up that he used to surround the presentation (Read his book “The Collected Works of Alex Elmsley” if you want more depth to his ideas on how to present an effect).

Method:

There is no method. As mentioned it was sheer audacity. Alex was sitting beside a table on which rested a glass of his favourite falling down water and his evening paper. Some time earlier he had deposited about a quarter of the pack face down under the newspaper and left it there. (John Ramsay also used to get up to this same kind of subterfuge from time to time. He’d sit with coins palmed in his hands for half an hour, knowing that at some time someone would ask him to do a trick.)

Inevitably someone asked Alex to do a trick so he produced a pack of cards (less the cards already under the newspaper), had a card selected, controlled, palmed out whilst the pack was split in two and given to two spectators to shuffle and cut. This covered the fact that it was a short pack. The cards were assembled and the card was secretly re-introduced on top of the pack.

The pack was placed on the floor and the newspaper picked up with one hand, together with the cards underneath and casually tossed over the pack making sure that the added pack was roughly at right angles to the cards on the floor.

A sip of whisky and Alex extolled the impossible conditions and the presence of a ghostly gambler who could always cut a pack to any position. A spectator was asked to lift the paper to reveal the cut pack in a cross. The top half was removed and the next card turned over to reveal the chosen card.

Many people that evening were fooled because their minds were conditioned to believe that Alex possessed some super new idea involving one of his cunning methods. But he was just as adept at presenting an effect as performing a difficult method.

I believe it was Max Maven who said that doing a mental effect was easy – it’s the presentation that is the hard part. Alex later said his inspiration for this casual piece of foolery came from the coin tray whereby coins on a small metal tray were poured into the spectators hand whilst extra coins hidden underneath the tray were added in the move.

If you want inspiration think simple – think of the magic of past years.

Filed under: Magic Ideas, Magic Miscellanea