What’s up everybody, welcome to Magic For Beginners my name is Keith and today we’re going to be breaking down the cross cut force which is sometimes called the criss cross force. We’ll be talking about what it is, how and where it can be used, the theory and logic behind it along with showing you some routines where you can use this super easy force method when performing magic.
When I was researching the origins and history of this particular magic move, I believe it was first published in 1925 and described by Max Holden in a trick called ‘The New Knife And Selected Cards’ which appeared in Magical Monthly volume 2, number 10. However on another web site, it state that it was number 18 of the magical monthly it appeared in. If you have any further details on this, please let me and others know in the comments.
So it’s been around for nearly 100 years and is one of the easiest force methods available to a magician I think, but it does require some time misdirection to work effectively. I think due to this, it puts a lot of magicians off using this. The basic idea behind the force is that it’s a super simple way to force either the top card of the deck, the bottom card of the deck or sometimes you can use the effect to force both the top and bottom cards, depending on the routine you’re performing.
When you get into magic and you learn a number of different tricks, techniques and above all else… Knowledge. You can sometimes think that basic things won’t fool a spectator when you perform for them, but think back to before you knew magic, you have been fooled by a technique or move and possibly even still to this day get fooled by super simple things which you don’t know how they work. I know even though I’m fairly new to magic and know a vast amount of things, I still get fooled by things which I have the knowledge of, but it’s used in a different presentation or way that I know so catches me off guard.
These days there’s a cliché revolving around a ‘pick a card’ trick in that most people will have a guess at what will happen, which is usually they’ll pick a card and it’ll be lost in the deck and then magically found again. Spectators will assume that you’ve made them pick the card as the deck is in your hands, but the joys of a cross cut force is that the spectator can hold the deck, cut the cards and potentially have the choice of picking either the top stack or bottom stack of cards, which makes a card reveal or trick even more magical I think.
From this effect, the sky is the limit on where you can go with the trick, it can be a prediction effect, something where you can have a card appear at an impossible location or even just the start to an ambitious card routine which has an apparent free choice card selected by the spectator.
LET’S CHAT ABOUT THE EFFECT
So let’s have a quick chat about the effect and how to perform it and as there’s a few different variations and uses on this we’ll go for a basic version and cover alternatives and adaptions later on through this video. So firstly you need a deck of cards and it doesn’t even need to be a full deck, it can be done with a much smaller packet, but all you need to do is get a peek of the top or bottom card (Or even both if needed) and remember that card.
You can either then hand the deck to the spectator, place it on a surface or you can hold the deck, then you instruct the spectator to cut about half of the deck and then place that half down onto the table (Or even the card box to keep them from being put onto a sticky and wet surface) then once that’s done, you tell them to take the other half of the deck and place it at an angle or diagonally on-top of the cards they’ve just cut and that is the force complete.
So let’s break this down further and see what has happened. If you peeked at the top card and wanted to force that one, the top card of the deck is now the top card of the small pile of cards which was put down on the table first. So to force that one, you can pick up the top stack and get them to select the card on top of the stack left on the table and that’s your work done.
You can of course ask the spectator to make a choice if they want to select a card from the top or the bottom and using a magician’s choice force, you can make them pick that card. If they say top, then you remove the top packet and instruct them to take the top card from that stack. If they say bottom then you can say “Ok, we’re going to use this bottom packet to select a card, so take the first card on the top” and that’s how you force the top peeked card of the deck.
If you peeked at the bottom card, the theory behind it all is pretty much the same, apart from the peeked card is now on the bottom of the pile which is at a cross on top of the first selected pile which was placed on the table. So when you want to force that card, you can do it by picking up the pack on the top, showing them the bottom card and telling them to remember that card, or you can take the pack and flip it over and get them to take that first face up card which is the one you peeked at before they cut the cards. Super simple.
And again, you can also make it seem a bit more random and impossible by asking the spectator do they want to select a card from the top or the bottom. If they say top, then you pick up the top packet and tell them that we’re going to use this top packet as you said and show them the face card from the bottom which is the force card. If they say bottom, then you do the exact same thing and tell them that we’re going to pick up this packet of cards which you cut and we’re going to use this bottom card.
If you wanted to use two specific cards and peeked at both of them, then once the cut has been done and completed your two cards which you need to force are on the top of the first dealt down pile and on the bottom of the second pile which was crossed over the top packet. This can be used to get two spectators to get two specific cards which you can use as a prediction or can be used for a routine with one person.
Christian Grace has a fantastic trick called cross cut considerations where he uses the cross cut force and gets the spectator to use apparent free choice to select the number or face cards and then select a suit and freely choose a card from that suit using either the number or suits and when the spectator has chosen said card, the card which appears from the cross cut force is their card. This of course requires two cards to be known to the magician and then used in a fashion to be used as an out if and when needed. I saw this in a lecture with him last year, but I believe it appears on his magic monthly service too.
MORE CHAT ABOUT THE CROSS CUT
So that’s the basics behind the cross cut force and despite it being super easy, people don’t click on to what happened and think that the card that have ended up with was one from them cutting the cards and it could have been any card at all. There’s that huge debate about this in the magic community and it’s the thing of because it doesn’t fool you as a magician anymore, it won’t fool anyone, but remember that at one time in the past as a lay person, they would have fooled you and probably has fooled you in the past too.
From using this Cross Cut force, you can perform a massive range of different tricks and a wide variety of different predictions and can be used at anytime and with any deck of cards too which is perfect. You can borrow anyone’s deck, peek at the bottom card when you take the cards out of the box and you’re good to go with this and have that card forced, all within a matter of seconds you can have this done. You can even see the bottom card and give the spectator the deck, write down a prediction and place it on the table, do the cross cut force and then your written prediction is the card the spectator chooses.
One of the things to stipulate with this Cross Cut force is that when the spectator has cut the deck, you need some sort of mis-direction or something to take the spectators sight away from the deck to make them forget which deck was cut from where etc and you can do this just by talking to the spectator and they’ll usually make eye contact when being spoke to, so there is that mis-direction all done.
The thing with forcing a card is that you can make predictions well ahead of time to make things even more baffling. For example, you can write a prediction and give it to a spectator to keep in their pocket at the beginning of a routine. You can perform a few tricks and then you can go through with this, select the card you wrote as a prediction to force and then this seemingly impossible feat or magic is complete.
For this example, what I find easiest is when you’re looking through the cards for the card which you want to force on the spectator, you just spread along to that card, take all of the cards that are below that in the deck and then just so a cut to place those on the top of the deck. Once you’ve done this, that card you wanted is now on the top of the deck and it’s all done under the cover of just looking through the deck and cutting the cards. You can then also do any false shuffle or a riffle shuffle just maintaining that top card on top.
This is a highly rejected card move or force used by magicians these days I think and I don’t see why it should be frowned upon, as it’s a classic in magic and it does deceive people who you perform this on. Yes, you can have a riffle force, Hindu force or anything else, but sometimes the basics are basics for a reason as they work fine 100% of the time and fool people.
This was something a little different to the magic trick tutorials, but it still has some tutorial aspects in there, along with some history and breaking magic down which is something that I really enjoy watching and doing. If you want to see more videos like this breaking down some moves and things in magic such as predictions, the double lift, Marlo tilt, card controls, mentalism or whatever else you want to have broke down then let me know in the comments and until next time, cya!
