Free Magic Trick: “Jacks Got Your Back”

July 23, 2008 · Filed Under tricks 

JACKS GOT YOUR BACK: A trick to practice the Royal Road to Card Magic XII.

Introduction: Ah yes, the good old XII. Either the most important card sleight in magic, or the most unnecessary, depending upon whom you ask. I’m not going to venture into that debate here — I’m just going to assume that you want to use it.

First, an aside. If you really want to do a trick that uses the XII under truly ideal conditions, get the Royal Road to Card Magic DVDs with R Paul Wilson and do the trick Roy Walton contributed called Pass At Red. The routine construction is ridiculously unfair — there is zero heat on the move. It’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel.

That said, later on, there might be those tricks when you want to be able to do the XII without being so far out of frame. That’s what this trick is meant to offer you.

Effect: The magician has a spectator stop at a random point, and the card at that point is removed. The magician then says he’s going to use the help of the Jacks, because “the Jacks Always Got Your Back” (meaning, they’re always there to help). He pulls out the two Black Jacks, and he says that he’s going to figure out what the spectator’s card is, by magically finding it. He says that because the Jacks got your back, they’re going to find the spectator’s card. He asks the spectator to determine which Jack is going to the leader. The spectator points at the Jack of Clubs to be the leader, and the magician places the Jack of Clubs on the bottom of the deck. He then places the Jack of Spades on top of the deck. He gives the deck a quick shake, and instantly the Jacks have disappeared from both the top and the bottom of the deck. They are actually deep in search of the spectator’s card. The magician then notices that the spectator is still holding their selected card. He pauses, before confidently stating “Well, like I said, the Jacks Always Got Your Back. Look, I won’t touch the deck. If I snap my fingers, they’ll give me the best clue I can possibly get, the mate of your selected card.” He snaps his fingers, and spreads the cards out, showing that one card is trapped between the two Jacks, and he pulls it out. “Wouldn’t it be incredible if the cards were mates?” He flips over the middle card, and it’s the Six of Hearts. “According to the Jacks, that means that you must be holding the Six of Diamonds. Please show everybody the card.” The spectator shows everybody that they are indeed holding the Six of Diamonds.

Explanation: The trick relies on a prearrangement. You need to take the pair of red sixes (or red nines, or black threes, whichever you want), and you’ll need one of them on top of the deck, and the other in a position to be XVIed. Now, you don’t actually have to use the XVI.1 if you don’t want. You might want to consider using the XVI.3 or the XVI.6 or perhaps another one of your own choosing. The only important thing is that after the XVI, the mate of the card you just XVIed is now in a position to be brought quickly to the top of the deck.

Let’s assume you’re going to do the XVI.6, and the mates are the two red eights. Place the eight of diamonds at the top of the deck, and then place the eight of hearts on top of it. Go through the motions of the XVI.6 as described in the book, and you’ll have XVIed the eight of hearts. Assuming you were holding the cards in your left hand originally, that means that at the top of the packet still in the left hand is the eight of diamonds. Place that packet on top of the other.

Next, you remove the two Black Jacks. I’m going to talk a whole lot about this later on. For the moment, just quickly scan through the deck and find the two black Jacks, the Jack of Clubs and the Jack of Spades. Toss them face up on the table. Square up the deck and turn it face down. At this point, place the Jack of Spades face up at the top of the deck. Ask, “Which would you like to be the leader Jack? The Jack of Clubs?” Pick it up and gesture with it, and then place it on the top of the deck, thumbing over the Jack of Spades that’s already there. “Or the Jack of Spades?”

At this point, you want to do an XI, but you are not going to actually turn it over. You’re going to keep it flat. Regardless of what the spectator’s answer is going to be, you’re going to place the Jack of Clubs[?] face up at the bottom of the deck, maintaining your XI. After, you’ll place the Jack of Spades at the top of the deck.

So, if they say they want the Jack of Clubs to be the leader, say “Great, it’ll go into position first.” Place it at the bottom of the deck. If they say they want the Jack of Spades be the leader, say “Great, we’ll put the Jack of Clubs on the bottom, and the Jack of Spades in the leader’s position.”

This is a pretty rudimentary example of equivoque. It’s main purpose isn’t all that important from a logical standpoint (it’s not like one of the Jacks is going to figure more prominently than the other by the time the trick is done), but the sequence, however trivial it might seem, does motivate the placement of the Jack of Clubs on the top of the deck before it apparently goes to the bottom. That said, don’t treat it like a big deal. In the spectator’s eyes, the trick shouldn’t have even begun yet.

The situation should now be this. Face up black jack on the top of the deck. The mate of the selected card at the bottom of the deck, face-down. The other face up black jack on top of it, the rest of the deck in the middle.

Now announce that the Black Jacks are about to go in search of the spectator’s cards, and give the deck a small shake, using that as cover for the XII. The nice thing about this application is that you really don’t need to maintain a break, any XII somewhere in the middle will do the job fine. Now square up and set the deck down, and proudly announce that the Jacks are going to help you figure out the selected card by trapping it. At this point, bring attention to the fact that the spectator is still holding their selected card.

At this point, don’t go into a whole theatrical production about how much trouble you’re in. In all honesty, just stare at the card in their hand with a blank expression, blink once or twice, count to three in your head. The trick has been botched, let people project their own expectations of how you must be feeling onto your blank face.

Then smile as if nothing has gone wrong, and state, “Well, this is fine, I can still use the Jacks to determine what that card is in your hand. If I snap my fingers like this, they can actually trap the mate of that card, the only other card in the deck that has the same rank and colour as your selected card.”

Snap your fingers, and then immediately ribbon spread the cards to show a single card indeed is now trapped between the face up Jacks. Push all three cards out, and then push the face-down card a little further. “If I am correct, this card will match your card in rank and suit.” Flip it over to show the eight of diamonds. “If the Jacks are correct, then your card must be the only other red eight in the deck, the eight of hearts. Please show everybody your card?” The spectator shows everybody the Eight of Hearts.

Notes: This trick has two major influences, John Bannon and Jay Sankey. Plot-wise, this is basically John Bannon’s Play It Straight Triumph but done in a sandwich effect rather than a Triumph effect, so all credit for the basic presentation goes to him (or else to whomever he was inspired by). The great thing about this trick is that all the moves are done before the magician is apparently boxed into a position whereby they must change the effect and still emerge victorious. Now, PIS Triumph has the nice advantage of a more impressive outcome than the one originally promised. In JGYB, you’re simply making good on the original promise, that the Jacks will be able to help you find their card. You just change the way in which it’s done. That said, there are some nice features that are specific to this trick.

Now, I wrote earlier that I’d talk more about the initial “taking out of the black Jacks”. In the explanation above, you’re just going through the deck to find the Black Jacks (arguably, if you were to do it that way, once could skip the XVI altogether, V the selected card, go through the deck looking for the Black Jacks, and control the selection’s mate into position as you remove the Black Jacks… but let’s keep it easy for now). Here’s the thing. Since you’re working with a prearrangement of two cards anyways, you might as well also prearrange the Jacks into a position whereby they can be produced in an impressive fashion. For instance, the prearrangement could be Eight of Hearts, Two Black Jacks, Eight of Diamonds. You XVI.6 the Eight of Hearts. Then you perform two slip cuts to skillfully find the two Black Jacks, or else you could use the various spin-outs that require the spun-out card to be in that position. So now look what you’ve got. If you do a basic false shuffle beforehand, then with each appearance of the Black Jacks, so long as you call it beforehand, you’re essentially getting two extra magic moments out of the trick. This also adds a certain element of comedy in the fact that, despite all your impressive powers, you’ve still apparently botched the trick. This is where the Jay Sankey influence comes in. He wanted to create a card opener whereby you start by showing a great deal of impressive skill — this is used to establish your ability, create some instant prestige, etc. which is helpful for strolling performers. I can’t remember the specific effect Sankey did — it was the thinking behind it that stayed with me rather than the actual trick — but I do remember flourishes were involved to some degree. Then he wanted to create a moment where things go wrong. This adds conflict, which usually gives the performer a chance to reveal a bit of character, as well as suspense, which is a nice dynamic in the trick. Finally, you get to succeed despite the odds against you.

There’s one other nice feature about the trick. I originally designed this trick to be a part of a full-deck stack I was working on a while ago. If you consider the dynamics of the trick, if you start with a full deck false shuffle, XVI.3 the card (rather than XVI.6), then “magically” produce the two Black Jacks as described above, and then proceed into the XI, followed by the XII, followed by the trick’s climax, you’ve just done a pretty good trick that also doesn’t upset the order of the rest of the deck. Sneaky, eh? For some people that might not mean anything, but for others it might be useful, since it’ll allow you to maintain a bank of cards elsewhere in the deck for another effect. (You might even decide to replace the Jacks with Jokers so that 50 of the 52 cards remain in some sort of order — although that would take away the nifty little rhyme in the “Jacks Got Your Back” motif… ok, moving right along.) Also, if you’re smart about the way you gather up the two Jacks and the two red eights (or whatever your mates were), then you can just put them back on the deck and you’re reset. (A false shuffle might be warranted just to throw people off the scent.)

Now, this is a magician-in-trouble trick, and it’s worth pointing out that these sorts of tricks can get old pretty quickly. Tommy Wonder was a master of this sort of plot dynamic, and he wrote at length about it in his Books of Wonder in the section on “failureffects”. I very much encourage you to either buy those books or else find some other way to hunt that passage down and read it. Without going into too much detail, the concept of the magician being in trouble is something that can very easily come across as cliche’d if they’re unconvinced that you’re in trouble, or as incredibly manipulative if they ARE convinced that you’re in trouble. Failureffects are great in that they inject conflict into a trick, so it’s easy to get seduced into overdoing them, or else overplaying your hand to the extent that the audience feels that you must have been in control all along. Personally, I think treating the effect as a light-hearted opener is the way to go.

And finally, consider the context that you’re doing the XII in. It’s quite advantageous. You don’t need a break, you’re “shaking” the deck to lose the Jokers in the middle (this creates a covering action that if done right can cover the smaller action of the XII), you’re doing it before you’ve established specifically what the Jokers are going to, and the trick is apparently about to take a turn for the worse, meaning that ostensibly, you’re forced to stop doing the trick you were planning to do, and you’re starting a whole new trick. This is essentially a shift of the Critical Interval (Darwin Ortiz’s principle from Designing Miracles and which I’ve blabbed at length about elsewhere). If you think about it, if you’re successful in convincing the spectator that the XVI.6 was fair, and you’re successful in convincing the spectator that the mistake was unintended, then if the rest of your handling was good, you could have simply cut the deck instead of XIIing, and it still couldn’t explain how the mate appeared between the Jacks. Meaning, if you do your job correctly on the rest of the trick, there’s no need to panic if you’re worried that your XII isn’t as perfect as Denis Behr’s or whatever.

Now, that said, don’t take that as an excuse for doing a poor job on the XII. What I’m saying is that the design of the trick is to take the heat off you when you do it, so if you’ve got an XII that you feel is fast and reasonably deceptive and you want to take it live, then this trick ought to give you a safe context to do it in. Gradually, you can reduce the “shake” so that it becomes less prominent as your XII improves, thereby potentially making it a much more magical vanish of both Jacks. I think that when you reach that point, and you’ve got an understanding of how your XII plays live, you might be ready to consider applying it to different tricks.

A brief aside for the series thus far… because that point I made earlier is important enough to broaden it to the context of this series. There’s one thing I want to be clear about with these tricks — they’re meant to provide an ideal situation and context within which to practice performing a given sleight. That said, the routine construction isn’t there to serve as a crutch for those who haven’t yet put the work in to make the sleight deceptive. If you’re still having trouble keeping the thumb from kicking out like you’re a hitchhiker during a RRTCM VII, for instance, then in my opinion you’re not ready to take that particular sleight live yet. Instead, it’s meant instead for those who’ve practiced it to the point that they’re positive they can’t get it any better, but they’re still nervous about doing it when the heat is on. Truth is, we can always get better, but one has to cut the cord at some point and take a sleight live. That’s what these routine constructions are for, to provide the safest possible context (that I can think of, anyway) to do a sleight that you’re sure you can do well in front of the mirror, but you’re still nervous about doing for live audiences. They’re NOT to serve as a substitute for poor technique.

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.