This is a simple and deceptive false cut, begun with a Swing Cut and followed by tapping the edge of the bottom packet against the top of the top packet, which confuses the spectators' perception of which packet is which, so that the false cut can be successfully completed. General consensus attributes this false cut to Bobby Bernard. Although Bernard never published it in print, he did explain it on the third volume of Bobby Bernard: Video Lecture—Teach-in released by Videonics in 1980, and again in the videotaped lecture Magic Clinic, c. 1991. Also see R. Paul Wilson's Out of Your Mind, c. 2002, n.p., where Wilson states, “Bobby says he came up with it in the forties but it may date back further than that.” Jerry Sadowitz makes a similar attribution in Cut Controls, 2004, n.p. Sadowitz writes, “[Bernard] has been doing this after all, for nearly fifty years.”

Jon Racherbaumer, in Magie Duvivier, 1996, p. 15, credits the Tap False Cut to Dominic Duvivier and mentions 1976, which implies a date of creation in the early 1970s. This is likely an instance of independent invention, in which it appears, pending further evidence, Bernard preceded the French master.