Ta-da!

So I finally did it. I finally fooled my girlfriend really good with a magic trick.

See, I have been really into sleight-of-hand card tricks recently and have been practicing them a lot. But every time I had shown my girlfriend such a trick, she had noticed how it was done or had found some other flaw.

At issue most of the time was how smoothly I was executing a double lift. When a magician does a double lift, he fools the spectators into thinking that he has only lifted one card off the top of the deck, when in reality he has skimmed off two. Thus, when the magician returns his “card” to the top of the deck, the one that the audience saw is actually the second from the top.

It’s Magic 101, really, but every time I would try to do a double lift during a card trick on my girlfriend, she'd be like, “Uh-uh. I saw that...You really have two cards there.” Or she'd say, “Almost.”

Until today. Today I executed the technique on her perfectly, and here’s how I know.  After commencing the trick with some banter, I flipped over a card -- the Jack of Hearts -- and told her to remember it. When she said OK, I flipped the card back over. When I turned the card over again, it was the Jack of Spades. “Ta-da! Magic,” I exclaimed, half serious and expecting her to criticize me. But she didn't. Instead, she said, “What are you talking about?  That’s the same card you just turned over."

“Ah, but it isn't,” I said, and then flipped over the second card on my stack, revealing the card she had originally seen, the Jack of Hearts.

Ta-da!