The No-Peek Box
by Oli Foster

Oli Foster leads an exciting double life as an underwriter by day and magic enthusiast the rest of the time. Ahem. When he's not pretending card stacks are work-related, he enjoys collecting old magic books and working out superfluous mental card routines, like the one you're about to read...

Imagine this: The magician hands the spectator a boxed deck and asks her to remove the cards from the box and shuffle them while he turns around. With his back to the spectator, he asks the spectator to spread the cards toward herself to check the random order of the shuffled deck and to cut the deck to bring any card she likes to the face.

The spectator stares at her chosen card to burn its image in her mind before removing the selection and placing it in her pocket. She replaces the rest of the cards in the box before the magician turns around again. The boxed deck is placed in the magician's pocket so that no cards are in sight and there is no visible clue to the spectator's selection.

Reiterating that he has not seen or touched the deck and the spectator could have pocketed any one of the 52 cards, the magician attempts to divine the card. Staring into the spectator's eyes and without a single question, he nods smugly, appearing to have read her mind.

The magician quickly scribbles something on the back of his business card and asks the spectator to remove her selection from her pocket for the first time. The spectator turns the business card over and finds the name of her selection inscribed across it.

She keeps the business card and recalls the story to a friend when she rediscovers it a later date….

Method

I've always liked the idea of the peek box as it allows the cards to be isolated and invisible in a way that suggests they can't help you in any way. It provides a strong signpost to the idea of the magician divining a selection without seeing or touching the cards. Combined with a stacked deck, this seems like a powerful tool. However, it is not without its own compromises.

For instance, you've got to be careful that the spectator does not discover the secret holes in the box and also that she replaces the deck in the right way (although this latter problem has been solved in a couple of designs - the one that springs to mind is Barrie Richardson's Double Sided Peek Box on page 52 of Act Two.

There's also the handling. The classic handling of holding the box to your head looks silly and also points to the truth - that the box is of some assistance. I wanted to improve both the handling and the box to the point where it didn't matter how the spectator replaced the deck - it was just put away for all concerned. Furthermore, the magician doesn't hold the box to his head or look down at it or in fact look at it all. He simply puts it straight in his pocket as though it's finished with. And it is finished with. And it doesn't matter how the cards are replaced. And it will withstand examination (although I think it would be a particularly low point if somebody asked to examine your box). The reason for all of this is that it is exactly what it seems - a completely ordinary box.

Having eliminated the idea that the box can help us in any way, let's do the same with the cards and have them shuffled. Why not? We are then left with a trick which can't be explained - but will be anyway…

The deck is stacked in an order which will enable you to instantly identify the card immediately before or after any card sighted. This sounds intimidating if you don't use stacks (I don't perform so I'm in exactly that position) but it's actually easy.

For our purposes, the old Eight Kings mnemonic will suffice nicely for the values. That is

Eight kings threatened to save ninety five queens for one sick knave.
[8 king 3-10 2 7 9 5 queen 4 1 6 jack]

It's easy because it's phonetic and if it's not already stuck in your head, it will be after saying it a couple of times to the point where asking for the salt turns into incoherent babbling about the wrecking of queens on sick knaves. That could just be me…

For the suits, we'll use our old pal Chased. That is

C H a S e D
Clubs Hearts Spades Diamonds

Start with the first eight of clubs, followed by king of clubs, three of spades, ten of diamonds, two of clubs…continuing to cycle through the suits and repeating the run of thirteen values starting with the eight of hearts, then starting the run again with the eight of spades, and finally a run starting with the eight of diamonds and ending with the jack of diamonds.

You won't instantly know exactly which card is where but, critically, if you're presented with a random card - let's say the six of diamonds, you'll know the two cards either side of it. In this example

One sick knave
Ace 6 jack

CHSD CHSD

Therefore Ace of Spades, Six of Diamonds, Jack of Clubs.

That's all you need to remember and, if you didn't already know these menemonics, I'll bet you could remember this already.

Now we're going to take the risky step of asking the spectator to shuffle the cards. If you happen to be performing for anyone likely to meet this request with six perfect faro shuffles, omit this step or ask them for one more.

Choose somebody who doesn't appear to be a card sharper, clever clogs magician or ****, and mime the actions of an overhand shuffle as you ask her to quickly shuffle the cards for you.

Hopefully, she'll take your mimed lead and give the deck four or five overhand running cuts. I think the emphasis here lies on the idea that the deck can be shuffled so nobody's really bothered about a particularly thorough job. The beauty of this tiny but significant step is that, whilst it corrupts any idea that the order of the cards matters in any way, there is actually very little chance that a run of three cards could be disrupted. If you think of it as four cuts - that's the stack being disrupted in four positions out of fifty two. You'd have to be particularly unlucky…

When you've seen the spectator shuffle the cards in this way, turn around to face away from her. Ask her to run through the cards to check she's happy they're in a completely random order and to cut the deck to bring any card she likes to the face.

Ask her to stare at this face card for a couple of seconds so that she can remember exactly what it looks like to retain a good visual image of it. When she's done this, have her remove her selection and place it in her pocket before replacing the rest of the deck in its box.

Turn around and put the box in your pocket. Reiterate that nobody has seen the cards. She's shuffled them and removed any card he liked while you've been facing away from her and there is therefore no natural way you could divine the card now in her pocket.

Look her in the eyes, squint in concentration before relaxing as though you had divined her card.

While you do this, let your hand slip into your pocket and find the crescent thumb notch your thumb, which you use to open the flap of the card box as illustrated in the pictures on the left.

Your thumb now returns to the thumb notch which now exposes a small portion of the top card. Pushing down on this top card forces it out of the box and into your awaiting fingers.

The whole action literally takes a second but you've just secretly removed the key card from the top of the deck.

If this card is face down in your hand as per the illustration, the spectator has replaced the deck face down in the box. This means that the card now resting on your hand inside your pocket would have fallen immediately after the spectator's selection, as you'll remember the selection was cut to the face of the deck before being removed.

If, however, the card falls face up in your hand, the spectator has replaced the deck face up in the box. This means that the card in your hand fell immediately before the selection, as the selection has been removed from in front of it.

If only we could see the card in our pocket and we'd know….

At this point, we create a pretext to secretly remove this removed keycard from your pocket and glimpse it. There are a number of dodges you could use, depending on what you carry on you. In this example, we're going to glimpse the card on removing a business card upon which to write the name of the selection, having apparently already divined it.

The decoy item, the wallet in this example, needs to be in the same pocket as the cards. Having worked the top card out of the box, the card is held behind the wallet as the wallet is openly removed from the pocket.

The wallet is opened to remove a business card and, in the process, you loosen your grip on the card so that either the face or the back is diagonally exposed as you look down on the wallet.

If the back is revealed, the fingers press the card against the wallet and you can glimpse the card by turning the wallet slightly as you replace it in your pocket.

Having established the orientation and identity of the card (leaving it feeling better-adjusted than the rest of the cards), you are now in a position to quickly work out what the selection was using the mnemonics mentioned earlier.

Scribble the selection across the back of your business card and hand your card, writing side down to the spectator. Reiterate the impossible conditions and have her remove the playing card from her pocket before turning over the business card. All done.

Oli Foster