Ye Olde Magick Blogge

This is neat. Jon Racherbaumer did a small feature on Jay Ose, and included this video showing Jay Ose doing a gambling demonstration for Joan Blondell in a promotional film for “The Cinncinati Kid”, where he was a performer and consultant. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that, for that film, he actually was a hand double for Blondell, wearing nail-polish so that she could appear to have the necessary card skills.

Anyways, aside from the background information on Ose, there’s also some card work tipped in there, including his Ose false cut, and a trick that makes use of the general dynamic. I won’t republish that stuff here, as it’s not mine, but you can check it out here on the stevensmagic.com website.

I will say a couple of things, though. The cut itself might seem rudimentary, but I saw a pretty nice trick using it once, and I was told that it was published in Sadowitz’s magazine, the Crimp. Won’t tell you which trick, exactly, but I will mention that it involves the spectator handling the deck. Assuming the information that I got was good (I’m not a subscriber so I’m taking the guy’s word on it), and assuming you think Sadowitz knows his way around a deck of cards, then you might want to take a good look at the technique.

A second thing… I actually came up with a variant of the Jay Ose false cut on my own, only to discover the original later on in my studies. I still use it from time to time as a follow-up to a false shuffle. I’ll pass along the specific variances here… First, make sure to hold the deck in the right hand, setting the packets down with the left, but pick up only with the right hand afterwards. Second, rather than going left to right (or vice versa), I actually went center-left-right, and picked up accordingly, which in my view offers a more difficult path to backtrack. Anyway, something for you to play with if you’re so inclined.

Finally, check out this index of stevensmagic.com’s Personally Speaking articles, which has something from Ted Lesley further down the page, which includes two of his approaches to the pseudo-psychometry realm of mentalism. Hopefully there’ll be more articles like this in the future…