Random Thoughts

This is not a post arguing for or against learning how to perform a classic pass, or turnover pass or any of the other passes.  Learning to perform a pass is a good exercise to undertake, in part because learning to do a pass is also learning about misdirection and audience management.

But often it is just as mystifying to an audience to use a substitute for a pass, probably the most common one in use today is a double undercut.  But I remember one that I learned back when I first got into card magic.  It was from one of Blackstones books and was named the "Roly Poly Pass" as I recall.  It was basically a fancy cut of of the cards.  You can see it in my practice video below.

I first wrote this up in some lecture notes in 2001.  I figure it is time to get it online.

On one of my business trips to San Diego, I visited Brad Burt's Magic shop.  Brad showed my a one-handed multiple cut that he had worked out by studying a classic Houdini poster. Later on an airplane home I played around with multiple one-handed cuts and came up with this one.  It is a four way cut.  The criteria I gave myself was that it had to be a true cut with each of the four packets ending in a different position.  You can see a video of the cut below the tutorial.

Culling cards is the process of spreading a deck of card between the hands, and while spreading them moving one or more cards to the top or bottom of the deck. It is a very powerful tool. The Conjuring Archive lists almost 300 references to books and article on the technique.