John Scarne is legend for his skill with a deck of cards.
In his heyday, he was called the greatest card manipulator of all time, and renowned as “The World’s Foremost Gambling Authority.” His hands appeared in place of Paul Newman’s in 1973’s “The Sting,” for which he was also a technical advisor. He consulted with U.S. Army bases around the world, warning soldiers about sleight of hand scams and dice cheats. His routine Scarne’s Aces remains an inspirational mystery to card workers. The plot is nothing short of a holy grail: Cut to the aces in a borrowed, shuffled deck; no prep, no setup, no stooge, only skill. Some say Scarne took his secret to the grave as others such as Bill Malone worked out their own methods.
So why did he write a book with nothing but self-working card tricks?
Our last post about the math behind shuffling got us thinking about the math tricks, the self-workers, where a magician just has to run through a set of instructions. No sleight of hand is used, just logic, misdirection and presentation. In 1950 Scarne published “Scarne on Card Tricks,” a compendium of self-workers adapted from presentations by Harlan Tarbell, Dai Vernon, Blackstone, Cardini and more. There’s more than 150 self-working tricks in this book, and none of them use any form of advanced sleight of hand.
Why would Scarne be interested in any of that? And why would anyone who was inspired by Scarne’s skill give any amount of serious thought to that philosophy?
Simple: Scarne was a magician.
“Five years ago, I decided that the card trick enthusiasts deserved a better grade of card tricks than they had been accustomed to performing. On the whole, the tricks performed by the non-sleight of hand card enthusiasts at that time were so simple that the secret was easily discovered by the person or persons they were intended to mystify.”
As mentioned above, he put out the call to other magicians for routines, but the routines he got still used some sleight of hand. So Scarne reworked them to replace it. Replacing moves with new formulas, dodges, subtleties, ruses, psychology, misdirection and feints, he re-created those submissions into routines that still produced the intended effect.
In case that last paragraph didn’t floor you, here’s the recap: A master manipulator reworked more than 150 tricks to be performed without sleight of hand.
The book is filled with advanced deception techniques and subterfuge. There’s no passes, but there are some deadly peeks. There are no sideslips, but there is a great use of salt. And it’s filled with Scarne’s thoughts, wisdom and plans for misdirection. Incredible stuff here.
We don’t hear much scorn or disdain from our customers anymore about self-workers, and that makes us smile. It takes a different kind of skill to successfully perform a self-worker, after all.
Do you have it?