Hey Pav, just curious, what resources are you using to learn from? Which books/dvds/downloads? One thing that helped me a lot after I'd read up on the pass in a few card books was a dvd simply called "Richard Kauffman On The Pass". Fantastic resource that helped me a lot.
By the way, has anyone ever seen Dan Hauss do the pass in front of a layman? His cover is looking right at them and saying "Do you know what a pass is?"... for him, it works every time!
I honestly can't understand why the Richard Kauffman pass video is so popular aside from the fact that he's a 'big name'. It's only value is in demonstrating how not to do the pass. It's truly one of the most god awful things I've ever seen from a 'professional' in this area. It's filled with tension and unnatural movements. I believe his passes are only invisible from the point of view of a magician, in that it is difficult to actually see the packets transposing. This doesn't matter if you're drawing attention to your hands the moment the pass happens, your spectators will be left with no doubt that something happened even if they aren't sure what. You could wildly flail your arms around as you do the pass and it would be technically invisible, although not particularly deceptive. Using a brute force approach to the pass along with absurd covers results in much the same thing. I think it's a shame when people who are so respected come out with such junk as people understandably believe it's a source they can trust, unfortunately on many occasions this isn't true.
I haven't see Dan Hauss do a pass so I can't really comment on it although I'm always a bit skeptical of the advice which suggests you look somebody in the eye or say their name then do the pass for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it seems to rely on the assumption you're performing for one person, I'm not really sure how this principle applies when you're surrounded by 10+ people. Secondly, from personal experience, it simply just doesn't always work. This is not to say it doesn't work for Dan Hauss, he's obviously a very different performer from me and what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for everyone. A believe a better approach is by considering the structure of an effect and designing it in such a way so that the audience has something else to look at when you do the pass. For example, when a spectator is looking at a card and showing everybody, that's a good moment to do the pass. Obviously you can't do every move at this time, but moments with an equal level of atttention elsewhere should be searched for, or created if necessary. All sleights should ideally be done in these sorts of moments whether it's a shift or a double turnover. As Erdnase said "The expert, failing to improve upon the method, changes the moment".
I believe these principles have been largely disregarded in modern magic as can be seen in many of the effects sold today which seem to encourage staring at the hands while executing endless double turnovers and colour changes. These effects are not fooling or mystifying audiences to anywhere near the extent a lot of people think they are.