Magic Tricks

Depending on where you are in magic you may already do a version of this trick. I've done several versions of this trick, some of which have involved a Jonas card and some of them relied on the same principle behind this one.

This is not normally the type of trick which is sold separately. Normally you find these types of tricks as one of a compilation of tricks in a book DVD, or lecture, and usually this isn't the highlight.

He has two major changes over other versions of this trick that don't use a Jonas card (and therefore allow you to get four aces or a royal flush).
#1- He changed the number of card dealt at a time. I don't see any advantage of one way over the other.
#2- The way he deals with the last card. The way he deals with it is nice. I'm not convinced that his method is the best, but its decent. You do sometimes get a raised eyebrow when they say "bottom" which is something that doesn't happen in the better equivoques but its not that big of a deal especially considering its just one card and all the other ones were so fair. There are slight of hand versions which are better, but there's a time and place for each and its certainly worth knowing this one.

The one major thing I got from this was his tips on how to gather a top stock from a shuffled deck, his method to retain top stock in a casual shuffle and make them think they shuffled it, and his method to switch in his block of cards into a batch of useless cards.
For me the highlight was that last one. Its an obvious idea and I'm sure I came across it before but that's not the method I'm using now and his is better. I'm going to switch.

One thing I want to point out is that this does suffer from a little bit of an identity crisis, particularly in the extra tips. If you show you have 10 useless cards. The give you half of them and they're the royal flush what did you do? What is the trick? Is the trick that they gave you five random cards and you turned them into the royal flush? Then why are wasting so much time with the decisions of who gets which cards if you were just going to switch them anyway. Typically this trick is mentally framed as is I'm going to subtly influence you to give me the cards I want in which case you wouldn't want to show them the cards at all at the beginning or have them shuffled.

I'm not saying there isn't value to having more options, I'm just saying ideally you should decide exactly what this trick is and perform it like that.

Don't be like the old joke where the ventriloquist is pretending to be a psychic and making spirits talk from the crystal ball who then tries charging twice as much to do it while drinking a cup of water.

The whole time he was describing this trick I couldn't help wonder if all the other versions of this trick are really building on his and he was really the originator of a non-slight of hand non-Jonas card version of this.
If he was really the originator ten he has every right to release this. If not, I'm not really sure that he added all too much to this trick above the other versions.

If you don't already do a version of this trick, you should, and this is as good a version as any other. If you already do a version, you may still want to buy it for his tips on getting the cards you need into play with little difficulty.