A Cross-Cut Tweak Tweak
/For the first time in a long time, I got called out on the Cross Cut Force a couple of months ago. And then 10 days later, it happened again.
Now, normally if someone were to question the Cross Cut Force—if they were to say, “Wait, that’s the bottom card, not the card from the middle”—I would just play stupid.
“Huh? Wait… what are you saying? Oh…I see… yeah, it doesn’t really matter, but go ahead and look at whatever card you want.” And then I’d change course and go into a different trick.
This is one of the good things about the Cross Cut Force. If they are ever to question if they’re really looking at the card they cut to, you can just act like you lost track yourself, and then go forward with something else.
But I couldn’t really do that this time, for reasons I’ll discuss.
The thing which got me busted was a tweak from Benjamin Earl that I’ve endorsed in the past. And that is the idea of telling them to cut the deck, and then put the remaining cards on top “at a weird angle.”
This gets the deck in the position you want with very few words on your part. The bottom half is on top of the top half, without them being lined up.
But there’s a problem with this phrase, as I learned in my two recent failures.
Failure #1
“I know how you did that,” my friend Justin said. “You’ve used that before. The ‘weird angle’ thing. The card I looked at was actually the bottom card.”
At this point it was kind of too late to play dumb because he had called out the specific language I’d used that allows for the deception.
Failure #2
In Toronto, back in June, I was performing a trick for someone, and he paused me when I picked up the pack and told him to look at the card he cut to.
“That’s not the card I cut to,” he said.
At this point, because it was a testing situation, I didn’t want to try and cover for it. So instead, I asked him how he knew. Had he studied magic before? (Which is something we sometimes get.)
And he said, “No. But when you told me to put it on top in a weird way, or whatever you said, it just struck me as odd.”
What I think he was saying is that it caused him to pay more attention to that moment, and so he noticed the discrepancy later on.
These are the issues with telling someone to put it on top at a weird angle:
First, it’s a semi-memorable phrase. If they’re someone who sees you perform every now and again, and you use the Cross Cut Force frequently, it can cause suspicion if they hear it more than once.
Second, it’s a phrase that draws attention to itself. It requires interpretation and judgment. “Put it on top at a ‘weird’ angle? What does that mean? Is this ‘weird’ enough? Am I doing this right?” Perhaps those thoughts are only subconscious but still, I don’t think that’s the point of the trick where you want people doing any thinking.
So I’m not using that language anymore.
I haven’t settled on exactly what I’m going to say, but I’ve been using one of the following.
If they cut the deck from the table or from my hands, I take the remaining packet and set it on top myself.
I tell them to “turn that packet and set it on top” and I mime the action.
I tell them to place that packet on top “crossways.”
In any case, I immediately follow that up by saying, “And we’ll get back to that.”
This is, I think, the key phrase. I want the spectator to think: I’ve cut the deck into two packets. We didn’t coalesce the deck because we’re going to get back to it at some point later. In the world of magic, that’s fairly logical.
Again, I’m not suggesting this is some “huge flaw.” Out of the other three people who were helping out with testing in June, only one mentioned having an issue with the “weird angle” language in the past. But that being said, I just don’t see a reason to ask them to engage their mind in that moment for any reason.
Ben Earl has quite a few great subtleties for the Cross Cut Force in his work that I use often. But this is one tweak, that I will be re-tweaking. Or de-tweaking. Or un-tweaking. Or whatever the word should be.
