When I need a shot of history and help in clarifying the credit for a concept, sleight, effect, or routine, the first stop on my digital dig is always conjuringcredits.com. Created by Denis Behr, much of this remarkable website is based on the writings and the research done by Behr and Stephen Minch, as well as Max Maven before his lamented demise. Others help as well. This past July at FISM, Denis won a well-deserved Max Maven Award for history and scholarship precisely because of Conjuring Credits, as well as conjuringarchive.com.
What did I learn there? While we celebrate Dai Vernon for creating Triumph, and his method was the first to use a false shuffle without having half the deck reversed in advance, he did not create the plot. My old friend Theodore DeLand seems to have originated the notion of mixing cards face up and face down, then having them right themselves, with his trick Inverto in 1914. It requires 26 double-backed cards and is notable both for its ground-breaking plot as well as its simplicity. The first to add a selected card to the trick may have been Art Altman with his marketed Altman’s Upside Down Trick from 1928.
It uses a regular deck and requires no sleight of hand, but cards are already secretly reversed when the trick starts. The next year John Northern Hilliard recorded a method by Stewart Judah, using DeLand’s Inverto deck, in his notebooks. While it was destined for Greater Magic, the notebook was lost for many decades. Judah’s method may well have been invented before Altman’s.
John Bannon’s Play It Straight, a handling of Triumph that requires no sleight of hand, first appeared in his book Impossibilia in 1990. The trick became popular because it is simple to do. The climax consists of the entire 13-card suit, matching that of a chosen card, turning face up in the face-down deck. Predecessors of this type of climax for a Triumph effect start with Ernst Schösser, who published Triumph im Triumph in ZauBerlin (Issue 2, 1979), in which the suit appears together face up in the middle of the face-down deck at the end of Triumph, with the selection reversed. A simplified handling called Super Triumph by Michael J. Gerhardt appears in Best of Friends (Lorayne, 1982). Bannon’s handling of this plot stands out because it uses no sleight of hand and is extremely clever, though with one large drawback: a 13-card setup.
Suppose, on the other hand, that you could borrow a shuffled deck, or simply allow the spectator to shuffle the cards, and then perform the trick?