I had a thought last night: If you’re showing another magician a trick for the sole purpose of either showing off or trying to impress them, don’t ask them to shuffle the cards.

I was thinking about my performance at the hookah bar and remembered how the one guy who was showing me magic kept asking me if I wanted to shuffle the cards. If you’ve studied magic for more than a minute, you should know that if a magician asks you to shuffle, it does nothing. The card is already either glimpsed, forced, palmed, or crimped and no amount of shuffling is going to screw that up. I already know you’ve got the card under control, just get on with the trick.

The only time I can see an exception to this rule is if one magician is performing for another in order to get feedback for a particular trick or routine, in which case it would be helpful to be able to say “I saw the palm right before you asked me to shuffle. Work on that.” If you’re just performing for fun, lose the shuffle.

We could probably expand on this and say that, for the most part, controls aren’t really necessary either. If you ask me to put my card in the middle of the deck and then do a couple cuts, I’m not fooled. I know my card’s not in the middle anymore, and I know you know exactly where it is. If you have to pass the card to the top of the deck in order to later find it in an impossible location, I would be just as impressed if you had me put the card on top to begin with and just moved ahead with the location.

Maybe it’s just me.

Andster

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