Magic Is Dead, page 11
After reading about Robert-Houdin and juxtaposing his influence with that of Ramsay and Madison, I saw that building a connection with an audience is reliant not only on the effect itself, but on the understanding that the magician and the audience have so much in common. And Instagram, a platform nearly everyone today is familiar with, made that requirement easier to obtain. Not only does a heightened sense of relatability make the art seem that much more impossible—Wait, this dude is just like me; how is he so good at magic?—but entirely more psychologically accessible to a contemporary audience. Part of Ramsay’s goal was to take the magician off his self-carved pedestal.
Instagram prompted a change not only in the general aesthetic of magic, but in the innovation of the field. With idea-sharing and chops-boasting no longer confined to members-only forums or private clubs, magic on Instagram (especially after the company integrated video in June 2013) became the main vein of inspiration for young magicians and, therefore, innovation in all areas of the craft. “When Instagram came around, it was a branch for magic,” Ramsay explained. “We could now use this platform to be creative and do things no one else had ever done before. A virtual audience brought in a whole new set of rules for how to operate as a magician.” Instagram did for magic what no stage or television screen had done before. Magic, previously structured like a monarchy, with kings and lords and princes and gatekeepers, had finally transformed, with the help of the internet, into a democracy.
In addition to content on Instagram, Ramsay also released performance compilation videos on YouTube, as a kind of moving-picture portfolio. His street magic video, from 2014, is still one of the first videos that pops up when you type “street magic” into the search bar (it has since garnered more than one million views). Ramsay didn’t know it yet, but being a “YouTuber” would eventually become his full-time job. Back then, though, social media prowess quickly became synonymous with the name Chris Ramsay.*
While pioneering the movement for high-quality, mainstream-friendly content on social media, Ramsay also kept pumping out for-sale projects—making sure to film and direct the videos himself. He released Slipshift, a highly technical color-change sleight—where one card instantly changes into another. Then came Red Pill with Murphy’s Magic, which, alongside his growing social media presence, made him a household name in the magic community—and prompted Murphy’s to present Ramsay with an offer: become a member of the team. In under two years, Ramsay now held a coveted position as a full-time employee of a magic retail company—an official creator—tasked with inventing effects and developing tactics to market, advertise, and brand them online, especially for Instagram. He would continue to make strides, and climb the professional ladder, but back then his quick ascent seemed remarkable.
Around this time, Ramsay also caught the eye of another trend-setter in his world: Daniel Madison. “He was the guy you wanted to know and be friends with, but who no one was actually friends with,” Ramsay told me. After linking up on Instagram, Ramsay and Madison chatted frequently over Skype, not necessarily about magic but about online branding. They both wanted to carve out strong personas through their social media feeds—with Madison more reliant on an alter ego—to help boost their reputations. They brainstormed in private and coached each other along as their individual influences began to grow. Over time, they became close friends.
One day in 2014, Ramsay sat down at his computer. His Skype pinged. It was a message from Madison: “Pick a card.” Ramsay knew what this meant. It was his invitation into the52. He typed back: “The Four of Spades.”
“Ah, good,” Madison responded. “The devil’s bedpost.”
11
Cardsharps
The middle-aged man wore a charcoal blazer. He stood in the back of the room and watched the younger magicians mingle about. He didn’t speak to anyone, just hung around with his hands in his pockets, quietly observing.
Jeremy Griffith hosts a weekly magician meet-up in Los Angeles called Monday Night Jams. After visiting the Magic Castle, the hangout was next on my SoCal to-do list. They hold court in a backroom section of the dining area at Mimi’s, a nondescript restaurant in a strip mall outside Irvine. It’s a big meet-and-greet for young magicians in Southern California, and more than two dozen upstart card junkies and illusionists normally roll through. They eat, drink, talk shop, and present their new moves. Many show up just to meet Jeremy—a local celebrity for magic geeks—but once in a while someone surprising makes an appearance.
“That’s David Malek,” Jeremy whispered, pointing to the back of the room. Malek was the man in the blazer. He was well dressed, with tailored jeans and leather shoes, his brown hair combed back, hands still in his pockets. He gazed around with wide, sharp eyes. After Jeremy introduced us, Malek sat me down at a booth in an adjoining room and took out a deck of cards.
“I spent the majority of my life as a cheat,” he said, gazing up at me, smiling. His teeth, wolfish and glazed, reflected the room’s light. He reminded me of a comic book villain, reveling in some sort of evil plan, always seeking a way to deceive the guy across from him. Malek, grown tired of grinding away at being crooked, had transitioned from hustling into the world of gambling protection, advising casinos across the country on the methods employed by cheats. He also performs magic professionally. Because of his history on the wrong side of the law, he has, like Daniel Madison, found himself a popular figure in the world of magic.
“Let me show you something,” Malek said. He began to shuffle the cards in casino fashion, riffle-style, which prevents the bottom card from being seen by players. He dealt a nine-hand Texas hold ’em game—two facedown cards for each player—and punched out the flop, which are the first three of five faceup communal cards used to make the best hand: seven, deuce, deuce. He turned over his two hole cards: pocket aces. He nodded for me to turn over mine: a seven and a two. I had a full house—a monster hand.
“What do you think the turn and river are going to be?” he asked, referring to the last two communal cards, beaming that sly grin again. I just smiled at him.
“You’re right,” he said, raising his eyebrows. He dealt the remaining cards: two aces. That gave him four of a kind, crushing my full house. He smiled again and said, “I never lose.”
Magicians have long held a fascination with card cheating. Despite both being around for the better part of a thousand years, with obvious overlaps in technique, it took centuries for the two to officially cross paths. Since the early twentieth century, though, sleight-of-hand moves that originated at the card table have been heavily adopted by magicians—for performance and showing off alike—and the lore of con men is delicious fodder for card-magic geeks. Many magicians don’t have the gall to sit down at a real card game, put a stack of cash on the table, and pull off a swindle. Utilizing the same techniques for entertainment, though, is the next-best thing. And for me, a guy with poker in his blood, magic’s overlap with card cheating is irresistible.
One of the earliest known references of card table artifice came in 1552 when English author Gilbert Walker wrote A Manifest Detection of Diceplay, an exposé and cautionary tale of duplicity at the dice counter and card table. He wrote that cheats “have such a sleight in sorting and shuffling of the cards that play at what game ye will, all is lost beforehand.” A cardsharp who wasn’t dexterous enough, however, was known to hire an old woman to sit behind the sucker and transmit the identity of his cards through the speed and style of her knitting. Back then, no game was safe.
Forty years later, in 1591, Robert Greene published A Notable Discovery of Cozenage, which likewise detailed the risks of play during Elizabethan England, an age where “high unemployment and scams were plentiful; thieves, rogues, vagabonds, gamblers, beggars, whores and madmen all lived by their wits and a well-turned trick,” writes David Britland in Phantoms of the Card Table: Confessions of a Cardsharp.*
In Greene’s book, he embellished a tale first told in Walker’s Diceplay about an Ocean’s 11–style con, in which a group of thieves targeted an oblivious farmer. The tale goes something like this:* While at a local tavern, one man in the group convinces the farmer to play a card game, under the guise that they are going to work together to cheat his friend, with the wager being a pot of wine from the bar. They have two runs at the game, with the man pulling off some sleight of hand for the benefit of the farmer. They win, and the second man buys a round of drinks. The first man then reveals to the second that he and the farmer had played a trick on him, and the three laugh it off. The stakes were fairly low, after all. But then another man, right on cue, saunters past the table and demands a try, himself betting a pot of wine. The farmer agrees, knowing that he will win because of the ruse. And he’s right: His friend, whom he has just met, pulls off the cheat for the farmer’s victory. But then the third man says he wants to play again and throws down a large cash wager. The farmer, coincidentally having just unloaded his crop in town, has a pocketful of money. His confidence boosted by a belly full of wine, he bets it all. But this time his “friend” does not pull off the ruse. The farmer loses everything. The three men, having successfully duped their mark, take their winnings and exit the tavern, leaving the farmer penniless and devastated.
Card cheating showed up again three hundred years later, this time on American soil, ushering in the advent of modern gambling subterfuge. Just before the Civil War took hold, vagrants and vagabonds boarded steamboats that cruised up and down the Mississippi River, playing perhaps the first incarnation of present-day poker. James McManus, in his book Cowboys Full: The History of Poker, writes that poker’s increased popularity was natural for the time, and was a game whose “rules favored a frontiersman’s initiative and cunning, an entrepreneur’s creative sense of risk, and a democratic openness to every class of player.” In many ways, McManus aruges, poker and the United States grew up together.
By the 1840s, poker emerged as a mainstream American pastime, and in 1875, the New York Times declared that “the national game is not base-ball, but poker.” Chester Arthur, president of the United States from 1881 to 1885, was an avid participant, and dozens of proceeding presidents likewise played the game competitively, including Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon. In 2007, when asked by the Associated Press to name a secret talent, then-senator Barack Obama replied, “I’m a pretty good poker player.”
By the mid-1800s, the rules of five-card draw became standardized, Mississippi River steamboats transformed into unregulated on-the-water casinos, and thousands of cardsharps flocked to America’s jugular vein, eager to put their deceptive practices to use. Most used sleight of hand, but some cheats, like P. J. “the Lucky Dutchman” Kepplinger, who hailed from San Francisco, developed intricate card-holding contraptions. Kepplinger wore a metal slide hidden within his sleeve that held high-value cards. The slide attached to a rod under his jacket, with wires running to his knees. By clamping his knees together, a card of his choosing would shoot from inside his sleeve and into his hand. This device, called a “holdout,” has for decades also been a popular utility for magicians, both to have an object appear in—and vanish from—the hand.
Swindlers like the Lucky Dutchman emptied the pockets of down-and-out travelers and well-to-do businessmen alike, sometimes with disastrously morbid effects. In Cowboys Full, McManus describes how, in 1845, a riverboat captain lost a two-thirds stake in his vessel to a cardsharp who beat his four-of-a-kind kings with four-of-a-kind aces. The captain left the table, went to his bedroom, and shot himself through the heart. Many men suspected of being cardsharps suffered a similar fate. In 1835, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, five hustlers were lynched by vigilantes. “Being hung, shot, stabbed, tarred and feathered, or thrown overboard were not uncommon fates for blacklegs,” McManus concludes.
No sooner after cheating became a rampant problem in American gambling were manuals published and speaking tours organized by reformed cardsharps detailing their immoral tactics. In 1843, former hustler Jonathan Harrington Green began giving gambling demonstrations across the country. These quickly transformed from a cautionary tale into magic-esque entertainment. “In its own way his performance was every bit as entertaining as watching a magician at the theatre,” David Britland writes in Phantoms of the Card Table. “Perhaps more so, because unlike the magician, Green let the audience into the secrets of his illusions.”
Aside from describing sleight-of-hand moves, divulging to audiences that cardsharps used marked decks was one of Green’s most captivating revelations. When a deck is marked, the design on the back of each card is inlaid with a coding system that reveals its suit and value, a secret language decipherable only by those privy to its alphabet and vocabulary. But cardsharps didn’t just come to a table with their own tricked-out deck. In the early days of American gambling, they flooded the entire market with coded cards.
By 1860, an estimated 25 percent of all cards used in America were marked during manufacturing. In 1895, the Fort Wayne News reported that a gang of cheats, posing as card salesmen, disseminated large quantities of marked decks to general stores across Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and West Virginia. The group amassed $15,000 in winnings during a three-week run in Indianapolis alone—more than $400,000 in today’s money. In 1844, after one of Green’s marked-deck demonstrations, the New York Anti-Gambling Society sent out a newsletter proclaiming that Green showed “that all, or nearly all cards are marked by the manufacturer, some of which were so strongly marked that he told the suit at the distance of twelve or fifteen feet by gaslight.”*
Even more so than holdouts or similar devices, marked decks became a staple for magicians. Today the majority of custom decks designed and produced by magic companies implement some sort of intricate marking system. But very few tricks demand marked cards as a core element of its method, so now they are implemented more for nostalgic commodity rather than logistical asset. Still, the level of detail and pure ingenuity that goes into these systems is jaw-droppingly impressive.
While at his house, Jeremy took a deck of cards from his bookshelf (he had hundreds of them, both collectibles and those used for practice), opened it, removed an ace, and told me to stand ten feet away. “David Malek designed this deck—just look.” He slowly oscillated the card so its back caught the sunlight coming from the window. “You see that?” he asked. I did—it was plain as day: an obvious band appeared every time the ray of light hit the card. The system of incorporating these markings, which are faint lenticular treatments, is called “juicing.” This system is even more covert than traditional markings because it can only be detected if the object is in motion—like when a dealer tosses cards across the table, or a player lifts his hand to take a peek.
Design-based coding systems, however, are more common, and the first set of marked cards produced for magicians was released by Theodore DeLand in 1907. Called Devil’s Own, it was a ten-card product used for a specific trick. Six years later, in 1913, DeLand came out with DeLand’s Dollar Deck, the first fully marked deck of traditional playing cards. Since then, dozens of custom marking systems have been invented, all using different methods to decipher a card’s identity, developed both for custom designs and standardized decks.*
Aftermarket tools for secretly modifying honest cards are also used by both cardsharps and magicians. There’s punching, also known as pegging, where a small indentation is placed on a given card via a small pin secretly affixed to the thumb. If a cheat receives an ace from the dealer, they’d punch the card. A few hands later, when it was their turn to deal, they could feel the card’s identity—a kind of swindler’s brail—and do with it as they wish. A magician can utilize the same process during an effect, or pre-peg specific cards before a routine.
There’s also daubing, a system where special goop is secretly smeared on a chosen card before or during play. It creates a slight discoloration that is virtually invisible to the untrained eye. After David Malek demonstrated his skill as an advantage dealer at Mimi’s, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “Let me show you something,” he said. He opened a text message. It was from a man who was in search for a special kind of daub.*
“You see that?” Malek said, standing up, swiveling around, pointing at the message. “He wants me to make him a daub that can only be seen through special glasses. You’d make out any card you want, clear as day. You wouldn’t even have to try. This guy plays for big money in Monaco—big.”
“But I thought you helped casinos?” I asked him. He beamed a sly, glazed-over grin.
“Sometimes, my friend,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, his voice falling to just above a whisper, “you have to play both sides.”
Some contemporary magicians use daub, and many more implement old-school marking systems into their custom designs. Jeremy’s first deck, Royal Reserve, which was sold through Ellusionist, utilized the juicing system for value range only, a system best used in blackjack rather than poker: the aces are marked with a single band through the middle; ten through king are marked with two bands that are close together; seven through nine are marked with two bands that are far apart; and two through six have no marking on them at all. Almost all of Madison’s namesake decks—the Dealers, Rounders, and Gamblers, to name a few—use simple marking systems popularized by cardsharps in the 1800s. Even David Blaine’s decks are secretly coded. It was believed for a long time that all the different ways a deck could be marked had already been invented. There was only so much you could do to covertly code fifty-two pieces of paper, right? But, in 2016, Ondřej Pšenička, a young magician from Prague, Czech Republic, came out with Butterfly Playing Cards.
