The Light Switch: An Everydayness Technique

This is a technique I’ve used for years. I’ve fooled dozens of laymen and a couple magicians with it as well. I’ve used it to switch in fully-stacked decks and memorized decks and I’ve never been caught with it. Even though it is the most blatant form of misdirection and switch that you could possibly imagine.

This is one of a number of techniques I use a lot but haven’t written up in the past because they are solely casual magic techniques, and they may sound kind of dumb if you’re thinking of them in any other context.

I can only tell you that in the dozens of times I’ve used this—as “obvious” as it may seem—people don’t pick up on it.

Here’s all it is. I have someone shuffle the deck. I take the deck back from them. I being to spread the deck, then I say, “Actually… let’s get more light. Can you turn that on?” They get up or turn away to flip on the light, and when they do, I switch decks.

Now for this to pass by unnoticed it has to feel like a genuine moment. And for that to happen, the room does need to be a little dim. And your spectator needs to be the closest person to the lamp or a light switch. (Or you can do the switch when you yourself go to turn on the lights.)

Again, it may sound stupidly simple, but it works. I came to this idea because I had a number of routines that were so much stronger if the spectator shuffled the deck first. But I didn’t really like any of the mechanical gimmicked deck switch methods. And the pure sleight-of-hand ones don’t work great when hanging out on a couch with someone.

I was doing a lot of deck switching behind couch cushions and in hoodie pockets, but I needed a good moment of misdirection. And I found that the moments of misdirection that seemed most invisible were those that weren’t directly part of the trick, but were prompted by what was going on in the trick. Turning on a light to see things more clearly was one of a few different moments of this type that I found.

Here’s another example. I used to do this with Out of This World using a spectator shuffled deck. She shuffles and immediately starts dealing into two piles. Because we’re sitting on the couch or the bed, the piles are sort of shifting around and becoming unsquared. After a dozen or so cards are dealt, and I’ve squared them once or twice, I pause, pick up the cards already dealt, take the deck from my friend, and put the dealt cards back in the deck. “Let’s go do this at the table,” I say. And on the way over to the table I switch the shuffled deck for a stacked deck in my hoodie pocket.

Again, this is another moment that is not part of the trick, but is necessitated by the trick. So it’s not coming out of the blue. The idea came to me because it was something that would happen frequently when performing on a couch or bed. It was hard to keep things neat. So this just took advantage of that moment.

Why don’t people question what happened during the 5 seconds it took to turn on the light, or the 15 seconds it took to walk to the table? I think it’s because it comes off as a normal, unplanned moment that fades into the background. Most people will turn on a light to see something better everyday. That’s not something that stands out. I’m not saying the moment would be forgotten if you were holding a red deck at first and it was a blue deck when they turned back. I’m saying in the flow of a trick it gets forgotten about.

This is the sort of thing I’ve been digging into deeper recently. Because most magic instructional material was geared for people performing professionally, it’s never looked too deeply into this type of deception. And that’s the type of deception that takes advantage of the innocence of the “everyday-ness” of an action. I have more of these that I’ll share in the future.