Reviews: Read What Richard Weber Is Saying
The DWS Principle
Overall customer rating: ★★★★★reviewed by Richard Weber
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Tuesday 25 March, 2025)
I used the DWS Principle as the method for my closing effect in my audition act for The Magic Circle yesterday evening. It fooled a room full of magicians. I have been fooling magicians with this method for the past five months. Only once has a magician returned to tell me a close guess.
You can have a lot of fun with this. As I presented it, each of two spectators chose a card from a small packet. These cards were replaced in the deck in such a way that ruled out any possibility that I could have been using any standard methods, such as breaks, crimps, marks, etc. Then each of the spectators shuffled and cut the cards. The quality of my spectators' shuffles were varied. I spread the cards face up, and in about 5 seconds, I had cut the cards back into my hands with the spectators' cards top and bottom. I then produced them as I tossed the deck from one hand to the other. This was all wrapped up in a story about a trick I might have shown Queen Elizabeth II when I sat next to her at lunch. The cards were horses from Her Majesty's stable and we were simulating The Grand National steeplechase.
The Unnamed Magician was kind enough to share this creation with me and involve me in helping him to investigate its workings by computer simulation of shuffling.
The Exception
Overall customer rating: ★★★★★reviewed by Richard Weber (confirmed purchase)
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Friday 17 May, 2024)
I am familiar with many methods of working with cards, and locating a card, but the method used in this effect is one that I had not come across previously. I purchased this on the first day of release and have enjoyed reading the pdf. The method is indeed devious. The author goes into interesting discussions of why the method is so fooling, and how it compares to other effects using tangentially related ideas.
The effect is primarily designed to fool magicians. Lay spectators would perhaps not appreciate why the conditions are so much more challenging as in a run-of-the-mill card location trick (Dai Vernon's Emotional Reaction, for instance). However, I performed it today for a nonmagician friend and he was greatly entertained. He has seen many of my tricks and told me this is one I should definitely include in my repertoire when performing for friends. He truly believed that I must have been able to divine his card in an extra-sensory manner, especially since I revealed it just after saying "I hope you are still concentrating hard". The video of course only shows the bare-bones procedures of the effect. It can be dressed up to be more entertaining than the video might first suggest.