Replacing Palmed Cards

First Method

Second Method

The replacement of palmed cards upon the pack is much more difficult than is their secret abstraction. Let us say that you have palmed a card and handed the pack for shuffling. The shuffle completed, you ask for the return of the cards. If you take them with your right hand your awkwardness will betray the fact that you have a card palmed, and you will probably turn your hand so far that it will be seen. If you take the cards with your left hand, you must then have a good reason for placing your right hand over the pack. Moreover, since placing your right hand flat on the pack will tell your audience that you are replacing cards, how will you transfer them from the arched right palm to the flat pack?

First method

The palmed cards may be replaced as follows:

1. Extend your left hand, palm upwards, pointing to it with the forefinger of your right hand, and have the spectator place the pack on it. Hold the cards loosely as in Fig. 58.

2. Request the spectator to cut the cards. When he lifts the upper portion, bring the right hand over the remaining packet, the fingers slightly in front of it (Fig. 59), and grasp it with a little backward motion of the hand between the thumb and fingers. At the same time bend the index finger, pressing its nail downwards on the palmed card, flattening it and adding it to the packet (Fig. 60).

3. Immediately take the cards away with the right hand, and extend the left to take the spectator's cards. Drop those you hold in your right hand on top of those now in your left, saying, "You shuffled and cut the cards. Thank you."

This procedure is entirely natural, for, in assisting in making the cut, the right hand would move to the left to pick up the cards remaining in the left hand even if there were no sleight involved.

Second method

There are occasions when you will want to replace palmed cards and when it is not desirable to have the pack cut–as, for example, when performing the Card in Pocket, the next trick to be described. In such cases you use the procedure given in the first method, but the left hand with the pack is held at the centre of the body so that the two hands come together naturally. The left hand places the pack in the right, which adds the palmed cards as already described.

To understand the importance of placing the pack in the right hand, rather than reaching for it and taking it with the right, stand on someone's left and hand him an object. Next offer him another object. He will move his left hand to his right, which will move very little, then place the first object in the right hand, and move his left hand back to take the second object.

In making the replacement, you simulate this natural action.

The best way to gain complete confidence in your ability to palm cards successfully is to do tricks in which the palm is used. In the feats which follow, the sleight is executed under such favourable circumstances–the attention of the spectators being directed elsewhere–that the student need have no fear of being detected if he times his movements properly.