Gambling and Practicing Card Magic | An Interview with Caleb Simpson

My process for deciding whether a gambling sleight is ready to perform is the same as for any other move. I need to feel comfortable doing the move without thinking about it and it needs to look as close to the real thing as possible. I also look at how the rest of my body behaves when I do the move, and I try and eliminate any small ticks or body language habits that might have come up during practice. And I just want to clarify, I use these moves in the context of magic tricks and sometimes gambling demos, not for real in a game. This gives me a bit of lee way to use misdirection to cover a new move that I’m trying to add. 

I practice card cheating techniques in pretty much the same way as regular sleights. In one interview, Jason England said that his practice takes three different forms. One is casual and mindless, he can practice while watching TV or doing something else, which is useful for getting thousands of repetitions in. The next is focused, where he puts aside distractions and drills a move or technique intentionally, which helps to get rid of flaws in the technique. And the last one is a full dress rehearsal. I try to use a mix of the first two methods to practice card cheating moves, the only difference from other sleights is that I practice gambling moves in isolation most of the time, instead of in the context of a trick. 

This is a great question. The main way I spot details I still have to work on is to video myself doing the moves from a variety of angles and look at what feels out of place. I’ll often slow the videos right down to frame by frame to spot any flashes, and look at other people’s work to see how I can cover them. Comparing the true action and the false action is key. As Erdnase writes, “The inviolable rule of the professional is uniformity of action.” 

I also ask some friends for their opinion on how to improve a move. I’m thankful to have friends that are way better than me who generously give me advice on how to get better, and who look at what I’m doing from a different perspective. 

Aside from teaching fantastic moves, gambling sleight of hand teaches some really important lessons that are very applicable to magic. One example is the constant pursuit for total excellence. In a card cheating context, making a mistake isn’t an option - if you mess up you’re dead or seriously injured. This means that you have to practice a move until it’s close to perfect before ever using it in the real world. As I said before, I don’t actually cheat at cards. But I try to have this mindset when I’m practicing magic sleights too so that I know I won’t make any mistakes in a live performance. 

However, the biggest lesson I’ve learnt from gambling sleight of hand is how to learn and practice really difficult techniques. There’s no doubt that the majority of the most difficult sleights possible with playing cards come from the card table. If you want to seriously pursue gambling sleight of hand as a hobby, there’s no getting away from learning some difficult things. When I started learning the bottom deal, I didn’t even have the finger strength required to push that bottom a card over. However, after a month of constant practice I managed it. Then after a couple more months I could do the whole deal. Years later I’m still heavily refining my technique but I’ve learnt to push through the difficult stage of learning sleight of hand and now I hardly consider how difficult a move is before learning it, not because I’m super good or anything, but because I know that anything is achievable with enough practice. 

In my opinion, the only difference between a useless technique and a good one is that I wouldn’t use a useless technique in performance. However that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t practice them. I would consider the center deal to be a pretty useless technique - there are hardly any legit applications for it aside from showing that you can center deal, and even then there are dozens of pseudo demonstrations that look much better. Nevertheless, I still practice it just because it’s an interesting technique (but I must confess that it is cool to be able to say that I can center deal).
 

Like many others I love to perform jazz magic, and get a thrill from putting myself in situations that I have to improvise my way out of. Having some gambling sleights in my toolbox gives me lots more options to control, switch, or peek cards when it looks like I have no way out of a situation. But aside from the obvious technical benefits, one thing I never considered when getting into gambling sleight of hand was how it could put me in touch with so many other people. I’ve met many friends through sharing my work on instagram, and all of them have been super generous in sharing moves and subtleties with me. So aside from all of the lessons I’ve learned from practicing gambling sleights, the friendships I’ve made are what have helped me the most by far. 

To be honest, I don’t think there are really any gambling sleights that are essential to know as a card magician, these moves require a good amount of practice and they aren’t really that important to know if you just want to perform some good card magic. However, if you’re interested card cheating techniques, here are five that you should learn:

• The Erdnase bottom deal. Why? Because bottom deals are super cool. Although the technique taught in The Expert at the Card Table shouldn’t be the one that you perform, I think it’s a good foundation to start with before finding a method that suits your hands.
• The gamblers triple cut. This is also known as the sting cut, and it’s a simple yet deceptive false cut on the table. It’s well within anyone’s skill level, and there are lots of places you can learn it from. I particularly recommend Real Ace Cutting by Ben Earl - that teaches the technique in detail as well as dozens of other methods for controlling stocks.
• The Push-through false shuffle. This is a good tabled false shuffle that’s easy to do badly and difficult to do well. But it’s well worth it.
• Riffle stacking. Riffle stacking is one of my favourite gambling sleights and it’s much easier to do than it sounds. It has a lot of utility in card magic but it is one of those moves that you’ve got to keep practicing if you don’t want to get rusty.
• The Push-off second deal. This is a very difficult technique, but it has a lot of use in card magic. The double push-off employed has a few other useful applications too, like the push-off double lift. 

The first person I saw doing card cheating moves was actually Daniel Madison. I took heavy inspiration from him in my early years of magic, and I learnt most of my first gambling sleights from his YouTube channel and masterclasses. I think the difficulty of the moves is what appealed to me the most, but I also loved the ‘underground card cheat’ vibe his videos gave off. 

As I said before, Daniel Madison was my earliest inspiration in terms of gambling sleight of hand, but more recently I’ve been inspired by Benjamin Earl (because of his effortless style and the simplicity of his methods), Jason England (because in my opinion he is one of the best teachers in card magic), Steve Forte (of course), and also a guy who goes by @the_phantom_at_the_card_table on instagram (who does some of the most beautiful shuffle work I've ever seen).