Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Ose's False Cut

This triple, tabled false-cut has been credited to Jay Ose, beginning with Harry Lorayne in Close-up Card Magic, 1962, p. 93. A remotely related procedure to the cut is described by F. W. Conradi in his Der Moderne Kartenkünstler, 1896, p. 19; and repeated in August Roterberg's New Era Card Tricks, 1897, p. 45. These three-, four- and five-pile cuts restore the deck to its cyclic order, and a final cut at the original bottom card brings the deck back to its initial order.

Prior to Conradi, Henri Decremps, in Testament de Jérome Sharp, 1785, p. 154 of the Hugard translation, describes another five-packet false cut, the pattern of which is different from that described by Conradi. The closest in concept to Ose's cut is Richard Himber's false cut in The Tarbell Course in Magic, Volume 3, 1943, p. 196, which is a two-packet version of the “Ose” cut.

And while Jim Swain has claimed the idea of having a spectator do the Ose cut (see 21st Century Card Magic, 1999, p. 24, and Magic, Vol. 12 No. 4, Dec. 2002, p. 97), he was preceded by a description in Paul Harris's The Art of Astonishment, Vol. 3, 1996, p. 300; the basic cut is claimed here to come from Expert Card Technique, although this seems an error. The text doesn't clarify whether the idea of a spectator-driven Ose cut was provided by Harris or Long, but in personal conversations with Long, he defers all credit to Harris.