Hi, my 8-y.o., 11-y.o. and I (a complete newbie to magic) am working our way slowly through Scarne, Fulves and Wilson and will probably have a few questions as we go. I assume that it is not a disallowed reveal if one obliquely refers to parts of old, published tricks and cautiously asks a question such as this, to be answered by those who already have the book, of which I assume there will be a number of you given how common and popular it apparently is. After all, you’d have to own the book to follow my question, so you’d already have the reveal.
In Calling the Cards, pp. 9-11, for those with that book, the magician appears to rely on the assumption that the card he’s keeping an eye on and will choose for himself at the end will not be among the first several of the unspecified number of cards which the spectator will first point to for him to name, until the mage steps in to end the trick by choosing one (the card of interest) for himself "just for fun".
But if, say, a spectator just so happens, very early on, to indicate the very one you have then no paving stone awaits for you to stand on for the next indicated card, since you’ve already milked that first Holstein, so to speak. If they happened to indicate, as the very FIRST card, the one you peeked, you'd really be screwed. The trick would have to end right there, if I understand it correctly, which would be fine if it were already, say, card six out of 52, as that's impressive enough and you'd no longer need to pick a card yourself 'for fun', as they'd have done it for you, and you could move it to the bottom of your in-hand collection and end the trick there. But if they name it as e.g. the first card or one of just the first two or so, you’re stuck, unable to go on to a card after it because you've already used this card to call the very first card indicated. Does anyone follow me? How would you get out of that pinch? The only thing I can think of is that you'd want to be careful in the patter in the setup, saying "we'll scramble all the cards, you point to any one, and I'll name it", (rather than saying "you'll point to a number of them, this other fellow will write down the names as I call them...") so that if you have to stop at one card, it's still a successful trick (naming any one out of 52 cards blindly isn't TOO bad), just one much shorter than you'd planned. And if you don't get unlucky, then after several cards you could THEN ask a 2nd feller to start writing down the ones you've called so far...
So, if they name your special card as the first or first of 2-3, what's your save other than cutting the trick short?
You could of course restructure it completely by limiting the deck to a small (sigh!) stack of, say, a dozen cards, so that at least you'd be able to name every card, even if they ended up out of order (a quick shuffle of the stack you end up in your hand before you hand it to the 'checker' could take care of that, although you'd be unable to explain why you needed to shuffle it)
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On another note, his Aces from the Pocket seems obvious enough for my 8-year-old to see through (p.11). You’d have to alter it a bit to make it credible. Fortunately in this case I can think of one solution, which the composer David Rose would approve of. Does anyone else have a suggested improvement on that trick? Of course, we could just skip learning that one and move on to the countless others...
In Calling the Cards, pp. 9-11, for those with that book, the magician appears to rely on the assumption that the card he’s keeping an eye on and will choose for himself at the end will not be among the first several of the unspecified number of cards which the spectator will first point to for him to name, until the mage steps in to end the trick by choosing one (the card of interest) for himself "just for fun".
But if, say, a spectator just so happens, very early on, to indicate the very one you have then no paving stone awaits for you to stand on for the next indicated card, since you’ve already milked that first Holstein, so to speak. If they happened to indicate, as the very FIRST card, the one you peeked, you'd really be screwed. The trick would have to end right there, if I understand it correctly, which would be fine if it were already, say, card six out of 52, as that's impressive enough and you'd no longer need to pick a card yourself 'for fun', as they'd have done it for you, and you could move it to the bottom of your in-hand collection and end the trick there. But if they name it as e.g. the first card or one of just the first two or so, you’re stuck, unable to go on to a card after it because you've already used this card to call the very first card indicated. Does anyone follow me? How would you get out of that pinch? The only thing I can think of is that you'd want to be careful in the patter in the setup, saying "we'll scramble all the cards, you point to any one, and I'll name it", (rather than saying "you'll point to a number of them, this other fellow will write down the names as I call them...") so that if you have to stop at one card, it's still a successful trick (naming any one out of 52 cards blindly isn't TOO bad), just one much shorter than you'd planned. And if you don't get unlucky, then after several cards you could THEN ask a 2nd feller to start writing down the ones you've called so far...
So, if they name your special card as the first or first of 2-3, what's your save other than cutting the trick short?
You could of course restructure it completely by limiting the deck to a small (sigh!) stack of, say, a dozen cards, so that at least you'd be able to name every card, even if they ended up out of order (a quick shuffle of the stack you end up in your hand before you hand it to the 'checker' could take care of that, although you'd be unable to explain why you needed to shuffle it)
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On another note, his Aces from the Pocket seems obvious enough for my 8-year-old to see through (p.11). You’d have to alter it a bit to make it credible. Fortunately in this case I can think of one solution, which the composer David Rose would approve of. Does anyone else have a suggested improvement on that trick? Of course, we could just skip learning that one and move on to the countless others...