Magic Is Dead, page 12
He spent four years designing a marking system that gave the magician the unprecedented ability to know the exact position of any card in the deck, even when the deck had been shuffled by the spectator. It also allowed the magician to instantly know the identity of a card that had been removed from the deck. Or even better: a card that had been removed from the deck and put back in.
With his system, a spectator could literally pick any card, take a peek, put it back into the deck, shuffle the cards themselves, and hand the seemingly indecipherable mess back to Ondřej. He’d then be able to announce the chosen card without having to do anything but quickly glance at the stack. Seeing the face of an individual card wasn’t necessary. How beautifully simplistic is that? How supremely magical in its impossibility? How flat-out remarkable in its conception—that it came from the mind of one man, a magician with a goatee and round glasses and colorful socks?
It was a groundbreaking achievement—a contribution so ingenious that, once Laura London and Daniel Madison became aware of Ondřej’s invention, they immediately invited him into the52. Laura took Ondřej to get his ink while he was visiting England. He became the Ace of Hearts.
Magicians began adopting techniques pioneered by cardsharps as early as the 1860s—some even sold holdouts based on the Lucky Dutchman’s design—but it wasn’t until 1902, with the release of a curious book by an anonymous author, that sleight of hand pioneered by cheats completely changed how magicians approached the craft. The Expert at the Card Table, written under the pseudonym S. W. Erdnase, has stood for more than a century as magic’s most thorough and well-regarded text on playing card sleight of hand. If you are serious about magic, reading the book should be first on your to-do list.
The book is a hard-core instruction manual, as thorough and meticulous as any medical journal. “The wording is wonderfully precise, with every finger position of every sleight and move thoroughly described,” David Britland writes in Phantoms of the Card Table. “They are framed by many insights into the psychology of sleight of hand and the mind of a cheat. . . . It retains its position as one of the most detailed and rewarding books on cheating with cards ever written.”
The book did not set the world on fire. It wasn’t until 1909, when it was first featured in conjuring journals, that it began to gain traction within magic circles. But I’ll be completely honest: it’s damn hard to read. The prose is so chock-full of jargon that, when I first attempted to muscle through it after returning from Blackpool, I had to constantly refer to the list of nineteen technical terms at the start of the book to understand what the hell was going on: stock, run, jog, in-jog, out-jog, break, cull, blind, upper cut, under cut, crimp, and so on. I’d call up Jeremy or Ramsay, venting my irritation. “What the hell does this shit mean?” I’d say. It was like I was reading the Infinite Jest of magic. The prose was dry and clinical. I found practicing frustrating.
As I met more magicians, though, I saw the book’s influence. The terms Erdnase used, although originating with cardsharps, now form the backbone of card magic’s modern-day lexicon. The book created a pivotal shift in magicians’ approach to card magic, not only because of its precision as an educational tool, but also because, frankly, no one had any idea who the hell S. W. Erdnase was. Magicians were fascinated not only with the quality of the text, but the anonymity and elusiveness of its creator—and because no one understood what prompted the author to divulge his secrets.
After decades of obsessive digging by magicians, the widely accepted theory is that Erdnase’s real name was Milton Franklin Andrews and, shortly after publishing Expert, he was accused of murder and went on the lam, living as a down-and-out fugitive and squatting in a San Francisco halfway house. While there, he got into a scuffle with another man and tried bashing in his head with a hammer. But Andrews didn’t kill him, the cops were quickly on his trail, and they soon raided the building in which he was hiding. Before they could bust through his door, however, Andrews murdered his girlfriend before shooting himself in the head.* Because of his shadowy and untimely death, it cannot be wholly confirmed, even to this day, if Milton Franklin Andrews was really S. W. Erdnase. “He remains, however, a phantom at the card table, an anonymous figure who plays and wins and then takes his leave,” Britland writes in Phantoms. “And, as the door shuts behind him, like a great magician he keeps you guessing.” If anything is certain about an art form rooted in deception, it’s that S. W. Erdnase—a murderer, fugitive, and con man—changed magic forever.
Over the years, the cultural myth of Erdnase and the technical advice he crafted slowly descended upon the world of magic and has never left. We see remnants of his influence on the skin of those in the52: Ramsay has one of the book’s figure diagrams tattooed on his arm, and Madison has the year in which it was published permanently scrawled on the faces of his knuckles. Madison and Laura admitted magician and professional (legal) forger Chris Dickson into the52 (the Five of Spades) because of his uncanny ability to reproduce duplicates of the book’s earliest known copies, or those with annotations written by famous magicians. He has gifted these reproductions to the likes of David Blaine, Ricky Jay, and the Magic Castle. Dickson also created the diary used for Laura’s show CHEAT.*
Finding the book was life changing for many magicians—especially Dai Vernon. One of the earliest and most aggressive evangelists of The Expert at the Card Table, he was obsessed with the lore and lifestyle of the cheat (not to mention the moves in the book, which he quickly mastered—and used to fool Houdini). The book was also the seed that grew into his philosophy toward magic, a point of view dedicated to the naturalness of action during a routine: no clues and no flashes, impeccably seamless movement, operating as if nothing were happening during a sleight. It was the same methodology that dictated a cheat’s behavior at the card table. “When you do a trick move of any kind, whether dealing a bottom card or making some kind of pass,” Vernon once said, “all eyes are focused on you and it has to be faultlessly executed or, needless to say, you will wind up in an alley with a broken hand.”
In the 1930s, Vernon became increasingly obsessed with finding cardsharps who would teach him sleights that could be applied to magic. Any rumor of a new cheat sent him off to far-flung destinations, including a jail cell in Wichita, Kansas, and the back roads of Missouri farm country. He frequently brought to New York those he corralled on the road and presented them to his friends as specimens of unusual skill. “I never aspired to be a gambler,” Vernon once said. “I never wanted to cheat anybody, but I was still fascinated by the work of these people.” Over the years, he counted many swindlers as friends. Although Vernon met many a cheat during his travels, another cardsharp made a more lasting impression on the magic community—a card mechanic so fluid, so devastatingly deceptive, that Vernon’s closest friends admitted that he may have bested the Professor. His name was Walter Irving Scott.
Scott lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and was a former cheat who could not only flawlessly handle a deck of cards across a spectrum of techniques but also had reportedly developed an approach to the second deal, where the card second from the top is dealt instead of the first, not seen in Erdnase. After hearing of his skills, the best magicians in New York City arranged a meeting for June 14, 1930. They wanted to see Scott work.
Scott was a slick-dressed man in his thirties, hair combed back, with a gentlemanly swagger that disarmed the skeptical magicians. Before the demonstration began, however, the gods of sleight of hand had one request: Scott had to show his skills with a black bag over his head. He had to do it blind. Scott warmed up, worked the cards a bit, and asked someone to shout out a number. “Six,” one of the magicians in attendance replied. Scott then dealt a six-handed game of five-card poker. After all the cards were laid out, they turned over Scott’s hand: four-of-a-kind aces with a king kicker. The magicians couldn’t believe their eyes.
“Without a doubt Walter Scott is the cleverest man with a pack of cards in the world,” The Sphinx, the most prominent magic journal at the time, wrote shortly after the meeting. “I am as much at sea as anyone. Can’t explain or give any clue. There is simply no explanation.” Two months later, the publication wrote of Scott again: “I cannot begin to tell you of the miracles of Scott. . . . Dai [Vernon] to me is the greatest in cards but now I have to pass the crown to Scott and the others all agree with me.” Vernon had, for at least the time being, been kicked off his throne as the king of cards.
Scott didn’t care much about being famous with magic’s in crowd; his true passion was music. Supremely deceptive feats of card handling were just things he had acquired throughout his life. He wasn’t necessarily secretive, either, just simply modest regarding his penchant for sleight of hand. After his short-lived foray into the world of magic, Walter Irving Scott vanished. His legend, however, lived on. His otherworldly abilities, and the lore associated with his demonstrations, continued to steal the hearts of card junkies and move monkeys for decades to come.
One magician who still idolizes Scott: Daniel Madison.
In 2011, Madison was invited onto Penn & Teller: Fool Us. It was the show’s first season, and Madison was one of magic’s rising stars. It was around this time, too, that he began solidifying the alter ego that would eventually encompass his entire public persona—the secretive and cryptic cheat, chock-full of internal demons.
Madison took the stage in a black short-sleeved button-up, its collar held tight to his neck by a matching black tie. He opened his skit by telling a story. “June 14, 1930. There was a card cheat called Walter Irving Scott,” he said. “He managed to fool some of the world’s most amazing magicians by demonstrating an ability to deal winning poker hands from a shuffled deck of cards. And he did this blindfolded. A lot of speculation followed these stories as to whether the deck that he used was borrowed or his own. Any magician can deal aces or a winning poker hand from his own deck, but tonight I am going to attempt to deal a winning poker hand from a deck of cards that I’ve never handled before. And in honor of Walter Irving Scott,” he continued, pausing to take a large black object out of his back pocket, “I am going to attempt to do it wearing a blindfold.”
Madison had Penn & Teller join him at the card table onstage. The duo inspected and approved of Madison’s blindfold, took out their own deck of cards, and gave it a thorough shuffle. Madison strapped the blindfold to his face and took the deck from Penn. He began dealing cards into a single pile, one by one, pausing intermittently to deal himself one card as he went through the deck. His actions were slow and methodical, as if he were trying to read the identity of the cards through touch alone. A minute later, Madison had a five-card hand in front of him, the rest of the cards discarded to his right. “If I’ve done this correctly, the five cards that I’ve dealt to the table will be a Royal Flush, all diamonds.” Penn flipped them over: ten through ace, all diamonds.
“Wow,” Penn started. “I think we might be more impressed because we know what you did. A good friend of mine, Jerry Camaro, did the move that you did when you were dealing out the cards. And his move was so perfect, he would teach it to magicians, but they could never learn it, and the reason they could never learn it was because he spent fourteen years in prison for Murder One and practiced every day.” The crowd laughed. “I have never seen anyone who did not do hard time in prison do that move that well.”
Madison later confessed to me that he never intended to fool Penn & Teller. What he was really trying to communicate with the performance was his idolization of Walter Irving Scott and his own, hopefully comparable skill with a deck of cards. All he wanted was for Penn & Teller to know what he was doing, and he wanted them to respect him for doing it so well. In some ways, you can win that show without necessarily fooling its hosts. But it’s slightly unclear, at least to me, if Penn & Teller truly knew the method behind the trick.
The secret behind the performance is really quite simple and rooted entirely in nineteenth-century card cheating: Madison stashed the winning hand in his pocket before coming onstage and secretly placed it on the bottom of the deck when Penn handed him the cards. He dealt the Royal Flush from the bottom of the deck. Called bottom-dealing, it’s a classic move taught in The Expert at the Card Table. But there was one crucial glitch in his plan.
“I had no idea if they were going to give me a red Bicycle deck or a blue one!” Madison told me, laughing. Seconds before he went out onstage, a producer tipped him off on the deck’s color, and Madison strode out and dealt the impossible. It was a quasi-landmark moment for Madison as a magician (he personally couldn’t give a shit if he’s on television), but also one of very few instances where he would make such a public appearance. After that, he went back underground, continuing to practice his mechanics in private, and presenting himself exclusively through his well-curated social media feeds. The performance, however, nodded to the thing that got Madison into magic in the first place: cheating at cards.
The next day, in California, Jeremy was scheduled to film his second official offering to the magic community.* Ellusionist asked that he compile nine moves detailing the secrets and methodology behind his most famous tricks—all of which were first seen on Instagram. We traveled down to San Diego to film the project, and Ramsay, having just been hired by Ellusionist and tasked with producing the segment, flew in from Montreal to meet us. Dan and Dave Buck, the San Diego–based twin-brother duo who own their own magic retail companies Art of Play and Art of Magic,* let us use their studio for the day. Jeremy sat down and got to work.
They called the project the Instagram Sessions.
I was always in awe of Jeremy’s skill, but seeing him work for the camera was mesmerizing. The moves were raw sleight of hand, many of which were contemporary riffs on old cheating techniques: mucking, where a single card on the table is replaced with another after a quick swipe of the hand; ditching, where one or more cards—or the entire deck—is dumped into the lap; the one-handed top palm, where the top card is seamlessly taken from the deck and hidden in the hand; and the Arthur Finley Steal, a variation of the Diagonal Palm Shift—a move first taught in The Expert at the Card Table—where a card is secretly removed from the middle of the deck. The project was a perfect example of the evolution of card-cheating moves, and how they’ve found a place in magic’s contemporary, social-media-fueled landscape.*
The day after we filmed Jeremy’s project, we piled into his car and pointed east, careening along Route 15, past Barstow and into the desert. The road boiled in the heat and stretched out to the horizon like a piece of hot black taffy—110 degrees outside, the sun sinking in front of us like a ship ablaze, lighting the scrubby expanse on fire. I sat in the back while Ramsay took the front seat. Just after the sun fell beneath the hard black line of the horizon, we saw the lights: a sea of flickering white and green and red, the Las Vegas Strip, an oasis of degradation stuck in the middle of nowhere. At that very moment, thousands of magicians from all over the world were flying to Sin City for Magic Live, the largest annual convention in the country. I stared out the window knowing that, at some point in the next few days, it would be official: me, the journalist who stumbled upon this world, would become a member of the52. But the most delicious part of the whole thing was that Ramsay didn’t have a clue.
All I would have to do, I told myself, was stick to the plan.
12
At the Table
Two years ago, my mother and I took a weekend trip to Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut. It’s pretty convenient for both of us. She drives down from Massachusetts and I take a bus up from Brooklyn. She begins her time at the casino playing slots, the cheap ones, a penny or nickel per spin. It’s really just an excuse to smoke cigarettes and have a few free beers. (Maybe she’ll even win some easy cash.) You can’t smoke cigarettes in the poker room, which is the real reason why we make these trips. We try to get together at least once a year and play some cards. It has almost become a pilgrimage, a ritual we’ve allowed ourselves since my father died. It’s our time together.
The poker room is in the basement, away from the buzzing slot machines and crowded blackjack tables. It’s a wide, low-ceilinged room with red carpet. We try to not sit at the same table but every couple of hours I’ll take a break and walk over to watch her play, to see if her stack has grown. Halfway through our second day, she was on a cold streak and, folding most of her hands, spent her time observing the other players. What were their tics? Their personality traits? How could she figure out things about them that, despite being at the poker table, they couldn’t hide from other players—that they couldn’t take away from themselves? At the poker table, people try their best to conceal who they are from those around them, but a lot of the time, the poker table is where the truest form of you is revealed.
It’s strange to think that she’s been playing since before I was born—back in her Houston days. It must’ve been a strange sight, my mother in those dimly lit rooms, stacking chips with her slender fingers. But she enjoyed proving people wrong, I think, and, in a way, when she sat down at those tables she was able to become someone else, if even for just one night. She grew up in a strict, no-nonsense household, an environment where she couldn’t break the rules or engage in risky behavior. But when she first found poker, she realized she could shed that good-girl veneer. She could be the villain and get rewarded for it. “The biggest draw for me with this game was that I could go out there and be blatantly deceptive, which is very unlike me,” she told me once. “But, with poker, the entire premise is to sit down and lie to other people. It’s almost liberating. There’s just something about it that speaks to me. And I’m good at it.”
