In one of his projects, Peter Turner told a story about someone complaining that an effect was not “angle proof”. He said to the person: “Well, tell them to move then! Just move them with your mouth.” I found that amusing but also profound. I have since endeavored to look for potential weaknesses in my methods and ways to enhance my presentations in such a way that corrects the weakness.

For example, have you ever switched a card for a dummy card, only for your friend to turn it over? This happened to me once years ago during my epic 87-phase ACR, so I said to myself: Instead of just crossing my fingers and hoping they won’t look or insisting they hold it in some awkward manner that makes turning it over difficult, why don’t I just tell them not to turn it over? What follows is a presentational ruse that I’ve used for years to justify doing exactly this.

All you have to do is add another dummy card to the mix. To keep things simple, let’s imagine you’ve just tabled a dummy card that your participant believes to be their own card, which is in turn retained on top of the deck. Now take a random card or two from the middle of the deck and toss them down with the dummy card. Instruct your participant to mix the cards so that they lose track of where “their card” is.

You can have this done under the table or turn away while it happens. You could even have a third party do the mixing. You could also follow what was once the trend in the 1930s and tell them to do the mixing behind their back, but then you risk having them accidentally turn the cards face up, thus ruining everything.

As they are doing this, you explain that this is to create “double blind” conditions, so that neither of you could know for sure which card is the selection. Thus, you are implicitly telling the participant not to look at the cards. If you’re not into subtlety, you could just say it outright – it’s perfectly justified.

Next, have the cards inserted into different places in the middle of the deck, explaining “If you had simply placed your card by itself in the deck, you might’ve had a rough estimate of where it was. This way you have no more idea than I do.”

This technique would work with any switch you prefer to use, the only advice I’d give is to keep the time frame between the switch and the mixing procedure short. Dani DaOrtiz once said that after you have switched a card, the longer you take to reveal it the less amazing it is. Likewise, with this technique, if you don’t go straight into the mixing procedure, you open the door to doubt: “Wait, is my 3 of Diamonds really still there?”

But if you immediately have the participant take control of the cards, mix them, and lose them into the deck themselves, there’s no reasonable doubt that it’s lost – there’s no heat on you at all.

The Double Blind Control could be useful in an array of billet routines. Replace the card example above with a peek, it’s the same structure. Say you’re holding a stack of blank billets. They take one, and write something on it. After switching it with a dummy, you can give them more blank billets and have them mixed. Lewis Le Val uses a similar strategy in a Q&A routine, but there’s no reason all the mixed billets can’t be dummies.

But more important than this specific technique is the idea of looking for ways to take heat away from your sleights, gimmicks, gaffs, etc. through purely presentational methods. Find a way to simply ask your participants to do – or not do – what you want. Paint your methods’ weaknesses red and turn them into strengths.

Move them with your mouth.