Let’s start this off by getting fundamental. Every magician is familiar with the original “reversed” or “turned over” card trick wherein the pack is held face up, but with a single card face down on top of it. When a spectator replaces a chosen card, it will naturally be found face up, later on. The magician’s one problem is to hide or get rid of the dummy card which he used on the “top” of the pack.

This trick not only gets rid of said card; it utilizes it to double the effect. The whole working is simplified to the limit, and has some sweet misdirection. If someone else has doped out something like it, I’m not surprised; contrarily, I’d be surprised if someone hadn’t. Whatever the case, the idea to be described is something that I stumbled over while meddling around with a pack.

The effect, briefly : A spectator shuffles the pack, and divides it into two heaps; he gives one half to a magician, and keeps the other. Taking his half, the magician fans the cards in front of himself and says : “I’ll pick a card and lay it down on the table. You do the same with your half. Lay your card face down, as I do.” Both turn away during the process so that all is very, very secret.

Result : Two cards are lying face down on the table, and the magician and spectator are each holding half a pack. Thereupon, the magician picks up the spectator’s card, and pushes it into the half pack that he – the magician – holds. Spectator picks up the magician’s card and shoves it into the other half.

Extending his right hand, the magician asks for the spectator’s half. Receiving it, the magician lays his half on top of it. He riffles, shuffles, or what not, and says : “My card was the nine of hearts — what was yours?” To which the spectator says “Five of Clubs.” The magician spreads the pack along the table, and there they are, face up, Nine of Hearts and Five of Clubs, well apart in the pack.

Here’s how : When the magician spreads the half given him, he notes the card on the face; that is, the card that was originally the bottom card in the pack. He turns that card down so that it is face to face with the others. He then draws ANY card from his heap WITHOUT noting it, and lays it face down on the table.

At that point, the magician is turning toward the table, and he holds the half-pack in his left hand, the thumb and fingers upward. That is, the half-pack is simply lying comfortably across the magician’s palm. But he is holding it so that the single card, the one he noted, is on “top”. The half-pack looks normal, but it is really composed of one card face downward, with the rest face up, beneath it. This “dummy” card, we may as well admit, is the Nine of Hearts.

When the magician takes the spectator’s card, and buries it in the half-pack, it is naturally reversed, because it goes in among face up cards. But when the spectator takes the unknown card that the magician laid on the table, and buries it, he loses it. For the spectator happens to be pushing that card face down into a normal group of cards.

Here comes the misdirection reaching with his right hand for the spectator’s half of the pack, the magician swings his left hand toward the right, simply turning over his hand, so the knuckles are up. The move is simplicity, totally unnoticed, because attention is on the right hand. Coolly, the magician adds the left hand’s heap to the right hand’s.

The magician now has the pack just as he wants it. Somewhere in the upper half is the spectator’s card (5C) face up. Midships in the pack is the 9H, otherwise the “dummy” card, also face up. A couple of cuts, a riffle or a shuffle, during which the magician obligingly names his own card. But he doesn’t name the card that he took from the pack; the one that the spectator pushed into a pile. The magician doesn’t even know that card. All he knows is 9H, so he says it was his card.

The spectator admits that his card was the 5C, and when the pack is spread, there are both the culprits, staring face up. The magician hasn’t worried about the dummy card at all. He has used it to get a doubled effect, of two reversals. As for the spectator, he can be very wise and still have a headache. No matter what he thinks about his own card, he can’t get over the fact that he, personally, buried the magician’s “card” in a pile; yet it turned up afterward.

Thus attention is divided, leaving two problems instead of one; and in this very simple routine, the use of half packs allows misdirection impossible with any of the older methods. Attention being divided between two persons, the trick offers no problem whatsoever, except to the witnesses.