The Bottom Deal by Earl Nelson

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The mystery begins with the appearance of a package left at the Magic Castle for Earl Nelson. Within Earl’s package: this video and booklet. The subject of the mystery: The Bottom Deal. Earl mentions this in response to an inquiry on The Second Deal website. I pursue the tape, and voilá.

There are certainly many references to the Bottom Deal in magic literature and on tape, and if you haven’t absorbed at least several of these, the present set will not be of interest to you. The seminal work is Ed Marlo’s Seconds, Centers and Bottoms, and I think the best source is a book I edited, Gene Maze and the Art of Bottom Dealing by Stephen Hobbs. There is also a wonderful section on the move in The Annotated Erdnase by Darwin Ortiz and material by Vernon in Revelations and Ultimate Secrets of Card Magic. The move is touched on in Card College Vol. 4, there’s a useful booklet put out by Tony Giorgio called The Bottom Deal, Walter Scott’s work is described in Eddie McGuire’s Phantom of the Card Table, and . . . well, you get the idea. On tape, you can study the move on Darwin Ortiz’s Cardshark and Darwin Ortiz on Card Cheating videos, Gene Maze’s video, the Steve Forte videos, Vernon’s Revelations videos (where it’s demonstrated by Steve Freeman) and . . . well, you get the idea.

But if you must, really must, have more, this set provides an excellent demonstration and explanation. The grip used is a sleight variation of the one taught by Gene Maze, the intent being to increase the ease in dealing the cards prior to “sailing” them to the table. This may or may not be true for the individual handler, but I did find it interesting. The eight page booklet is meant to be used with the tape, with brief but clear descriptions. In addition to the standard deal, a Bottom Stud deal is taught, as well as a Double Deal (used here exclusively as a practice exercise).

The booklet and six-minute video (silent except for a musical soundtrack) are anonymously presented, with the camera focused only on the hands. At $55 it is priced to keep out the merely curious, and the website makes it clear that this is a “limited offer.” Mr. Leuders strongly states in his letter to me that he is not the person on the tape. It is clear from the booklet that the author/performer is what is known as an advantage player, not a magician, although he acknowledges that the tape will be of interest to magicians.