anyone here ever do a trick where u ask the spectator to pick a card then replace it in the middle of the deck when actually u just lift the top card giving them the impression u lifted the top half? david blaine did this on one of his specials. i was wondering if people really fall for this most of the time. they seemed to when he did it.

That move is called the Bluff Pass. It is by Paul Le Paul, I believe.

what about the trick where you act like you put it in the middle but put it 2nd to top? Is that the marlo tilt? How do I make it convincing?

Although Marlo published a manuscript on the Tilt, I don't believe he invented it. But yes, that is what the move is called.

How do you make it look convincing? Practice in front of a mirror. If you can convince yourself that you're putting the card in the middle, you should be able to convince any audience.

Dai Vernon gets most credit for the "tilt".

Marlo worked a lot with it too.

The tilt is quite "angley". There are some good convincers for the tilt in Card College 4 by Giobbi and Books of Wonder by Tommy Wonder discusses some performance issues.

guys, wad alternatives do u do wen while attempting to do the bluff pass, n u ask the spec to say stop as u riffle, n he doesn't say it till u reach near the bottom of the deck? its pretty hard to do the bluff pass wen dat happens. am trying out a few shuffles n stuff, but wondering whether there are more direct moves to achieve the same effect, card to 2nd from top

the routine i'm speaking of is between the palms. the one blaine does in the dallas cowboys locker room. he has the guy pick a card from the fanned deck, show it around, then as he is doing that blaine only lifts off the top card but acts as if he lifted off about half. i think he even tells the guy something like "say stop" as if he is riffling the deck but he isn't. then the guy places the card on the deck and blaine just puts the one card on top. i was just wondering if any of u have tried this and if the spec has not noticed it.
thanks.

Just make the move. Talk about something, so they aren't concentrating fully on your hands. They are wanting to be entertained, not to figure it out. That would be a good time to work in a joke or something. Don't be slow or shy about it. Its amazing what you can do in the split second they look away from your hands.

The Bluff Pass is one move in my repetoire that I have lots of confidence in and it has yet to fail me. Here are a couple of key things that make this move so effective for me:

When riffling, I riffle the deck slow enough so that they'll stop me near the centre of the deck, no matter what. I even give them a good side view of the gap to psychologically put the thought in their mind that this is the precise point where I will cut the cards.

After the removal of the single card, I then turn the deck so that it is at an angle that is facing the spectator's eye line (so that they won't be able to see the thickness of the cards that will remain in my left hand). They kind of just see the top card, no side view of the deck. I offer this "half deck" to the spectator and tell them to "put your card in here". I also hold this "half deck" lower to the ground than usual (near my waist), so they can't really see that almost the entire deck is still in my left hand (this, in conjunction with the angle that I hold the deck at, enhances the illusion).

I then immediately replace the single card in my right hand back onto the deck and, at the same time, grab about half (or a bit less) of the deck with my right hand and dribble these cards back onto the rest of the deck in my left hand (did that make sense?). This gives the illusion that I was holding half of the deck in my right hand the whole time and I am just burying their card with this waterfall of cards (the dribble). This replacement step happens very quickly and passes by like the wind.

Be very casual about the move. The spectator should think that this is an unimportant part of a trick that is just getting started and that they're simply placing their card somewhere in the middle of the deck (no big deal). Practice this in front of a mirror or better yet, a webcam.

Those are good comments, JayPea, especially the dribble after the spec has replaced the card back. The only thing I would add is after the spec says stop and you take the top card off the deck, extend the "lower half" of the deck towards the spectator angling the deck as JayPea mentioned. Extending the deck towards the spectator does two things: 1. It forces the spec's attention to the deck and away from the single card, which is where you want her attention, and 2. the larger motion of extending the deck helps to cover the move and the single card. I use LaPaul's Bluff pass all the time and it works very well. But like many of the bolder sleights, I try to use it only once in each performance.

there was this instance wen i riffled the deck slowly, n the spectator didn say stop even way past e halfway point. i accidentally let my thumb slip n apologised, thinking dat if i restarted again, he might just stop earlier. but no! he had his mind set on putting it near the botttom... one way round this might be to get a break, cut n shuffle to control, but am wondering if there's another move dat can do this?

thanks everybody! great tips, as usual!

Peter Duffie has a nice touch on the tilt that is found in his book Card Compulsions......lol, not that anyone has this book who posts here. Sorry to reference such an obscure little book, but I love it!!!