Sessioning with Sal

The last time we caught up Sal fried me repeatedly with his insane memory abilities and cheating demonstrations. I managed to return the favour a couple of times that evening but one of the things I did which managed to fool Sal stood out in my memory, because it didn't involve the tools I know well (memory, estimation, sleight of hand), but instead came from an improvised effect with an equally improvised one-way deck. The improvised stunt resulted from having accidentally grabbed the wrong deck of cards from my desk on the way out the door before leaving to catch up with Sal. The deck I'd grabbed was a full deck of King of Spades that I'd been using to make gaffed cards for an effect called Dirty Tactics.

I'd actually grabbed two decks when leaving home, and I thought that the KS deck was a deck that was set up in my stack. At an opportune moment I'd switched the shuffled deck we'd been using for the KS deck, gave the cards a false shuffle and immediately realized my mistake upon glancing at the bottom card to check it was the bottom card of my stack. Glimpsing the top card helped me confirm what I'd suspected from seeing the KS on the bottom. Another KS. Not skipping a beat I handed the cards "back" to Sal and asked him to shuffle them. He did several riffle shuffles and I was sure he was going to turn them over at any moment.

Anyway, I can only roughly remember the effect that I improvised, but I tried my best to make the effect resemble something that looked "almost possible". After choosing a card and shuffling it into the deck, Sal cut cards multiple times following my precise instructions, freely eliminated cards and eventually arrived at a single card. It was his selected card. I could tell he'd been fooled, and he asked immediately if I'd been using a crimp, trying to backtrack through the steps I'd had him go through.

It was a moment to savour. I didn't tell Sal what had happened until a few months later.