Deception Artistry

“The player who believes he cannot be deceived is in great danger. The knowledge that no one is safe is his best protection.”

- S.W. Erdnase, The Expert at the Card Table, 1902

During the pandemic, I wanted to learn some new abilities. Besides the usual skills people tend to add, I wanted to include something difficult that would not necessarily be “useful.” Something for its own sake. Something that I may not even share with others, but rather for satisfying my curiosity.

I found Daniel Madison’s take on sleight-of-hand with a deck of playing cards, which he calls Deception Artistry. I was fascinated by how impossible it all looked, and I was hooked.

I signed up for his masterclasses for exposing the philosophical frameworks, psychology, and misdirection skills of the professional card cheat. A ridiculous amount of hours / weeks / months later, I built my own abilities with a bunch of Madison’s techniques.

My ongoing journey of growing this skill constantly reinforces my view that things appearing to be “impossible” often are not. Learning Deception Artistry also provides deep insights on the workings of the human mind, and how it can be deceived. Knowing the misdirections and methods of the card manipulator can help protect us from being fooled, on and off the card table.

Check this guy out:

“Do not trust any shuffle but your own.”

— Daniel Madison, How to Cheat at Poker, 2019

How our minds get misdirected

The Misdirection Sessions, an online course by master magician James Brown, is amazing! The fascinating insights about how the human mind works, and how we really see the world blew my mind. The psychological principles discussed have applications well beyond the world of magic, and can help us be more humble, more wise, and more successful.

Some ideas from the course:

“How does reality work? How are we perceiving what's going on around us?

What are the factors involved in that process, that make us vulnerable ultimately as human beings ...to “getting it wrong?”

One of the starting points to any discussion about misdirection is to understand that we do not see the world in the “objective” way that we think. This very experience that we’re having of reality is an illusion in and of itself, because reality happens inside the black box inside our head.

Our sensory perceptions are just "best guesses" of what we're noticing. Our brain fills in the blanks of all the parts that are out of focus, delayed / unsynchronized with other senses, or can't be perceived at all.

And beyond that we have our the other information that we walked into the situation with: our beliefs, assumptions, personal narratives.

This means we literally have a subjective view of the world.”

“As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, magic is in the mind of the beholder.”

-James Brown