I was performing a card routine at a small corporate gathering in Salzburg — one of those events where twenty people stand around cocktail tables and you move from group to group. At one table, I spread the cards face-up across the table to show they were all different. I said, “As you can see, these are all different cards, a regular deck, nothing is set up.”
A man at the table — mid-fifties, sharp eyes, the kind of person who got where he is by noticing what other people miss — looked at me and said, with perfect deadpan: “Well, now I think something is set up.”
He was smiling. He was not hostile. But his instinct was exactly right, and his comment exposed a mistake I had been making for years without realizing it.
When you tell someone that everything is normal, you invite them to wonder why you felt the need to say so. The verbal assertion of normality is inherently suspicious. It is the magician’s equivalent of a politician saying, “Let me be perfectly clear” — which, as anyone who has watched enough politics knows, is the phrase that precedes the least clear statement imaginable.
Dai Vernon understood this. His principle, as I encountered it through studying performers influenced by his work and through discussions referenced in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, is deceptively simple: show, don’t say. If the deck needs to appear mixed, spread it so the audience sees it is mixed. Do not announce it. Do not narrate it. Let the visual impression register at a subconscious level, where it is accepted without scrutiny.
The difference between showing and saying seems small. It is not small. It is the difference between conviction and suspicion, between an impression that supports the magic and a statement that undermines it.
The Psychology of the Unsaid
Why does saying create suspicion while showing does not? The answer lies in how the human mind processes information from different channels.
When you see something, it registers as observation. Your brain categorizes it as “something I noticed.” The information feels like it belongs to you — you saw it, you processed it, you concluded that the deck is mixed. This conclusion lives in your subconscious processing, below the level of critical analysis.
When you hear someone tell you something, it registers as a claim. Your brain categorizes it as “something someone told me.” The information feels like it belongs to them — they asserted it, they want me to believe it, they have a reason for telling me this. This triggers a completely different cognitive process: evaluation. Your critical faculty activates. You ask, consciously or unconsciously, “Why are they telling me this? What are they trying to establish? What am I supposed to be looking away from?”
Darwin Ortiz articulates a related principle in Strong Magic: “People tend to see what they expect to see.” This expectation-driven perception is your ally when you show things, because the audience sees what they expect to see (a mixed deck) and moves on. But when you verbally assert what they should see, you disrupt the natural flow of expectation. You draw conscious attention to something that should have remained in the background of their awareness.
The verbal assertion is a spotlight. It illuminates the very thing you want to remain in shadow.
The Proof Problem
There is a deeper issue here that goes beyond the specific question of mixed decks. It is what I call the proof problem: every time you attempt to prove something to the audience, you implicitly communicate that proof is necessary. And if proof is necessary, then the thing being proven is in doubt.
This creates a paradox that every performer must navigate. You need the audience to accept certain conditions as true — the deck is mixed, the envelope has not been tampered with, the prediction was written before the spectator’s choice. These conditions are essential for the effect to land. But the more aggressively you attempt to prove these conditions, the less the audience believes them.
The solution is Vernon’s principle, extended beyond card spreads to every element of presentation: let the conditions be observed rather than asserted. Let the audience draw their own conclusions rather than being told what to conclude.
In practice, this means designing moments where the necessary conditions are visible but not emphasized. The deck is spread casually, in the process of doing something else, and the audience sees the variety of cards without being directed to notice it. The envelope is handled in a way that communicates its ordinary nature without announcing it. The prediction is placed on the table with the same casual indifference you would use to put down a coffee cup.
Casualness is the key. The more casual the display, the more the audience accepts it as genuine. The more formal the proof, the more the audience suspects it is theater.
My Own Evolution
When I first started performing, I was a compulsive narrator of fairness. I would say things like, “This is just a regular deck of cards,” “You can see I have nothing in my hands,” “The cards have been thoroughly mixed,” and “This is completely free — you can pick any card you want.”
Every one of these statements is a mistake. Not because they are false, but because they are statements at all. Each one draws conscious attention to a condition that should be accepted unconsciously. Each one plants a seed of doubt that the condition itself does not plant.
I know exactly when I stopped doing this, because I remember the night vividly. I was in a hotel room in Klagenfurt, watching recordings of my own performances on my laptop. I had been filming myself at events to study my work, and on this particular recording, I counted the number of times I verbally asserted fairness in a single five-minute set.
Eleven times.
Eleven times I told the audience that things were normal, regular, unmixed, fair, free, ordinary, or genuine. Eleven times I invited suspicion. Eleven times I drew the conscious mind’s attention to conditions that should have been accepted by the subconscious.
I watched the recording again, this time watching the audience’s faces at each assertion. And I saw it — a slight narrowing of the eyes, a micro-expression of skepticism, a barely perceptible lean back. Not from everyone. Not every time. But enough to confirm what Vernon knew and what the man in Salzburg demonstrated: telling people that everything is normal makes them think it is not.
The Subtraction Method
My process for eliminating verbal assertions was simpler than I expected. I went through every script I had and highlighted every statement that asserted fairness, normality, or freedom of choice. Then I deleted them. All of them.
In their place, I put nothing. No replacement lines. Just silence, or a continuation of whatever conversational thread was already running.
The results were immediate and dramatic. Without the verbal assertions, the routines felt more natural. The flow was smoother. The audience seemed more relaxed, more willing to go along with the experience. And — here is the part that surprised me — the effects landed harder.
The effects landed harder because the conditions of impossibility were being established subconsciously rather than consciously. When the audience sees a mixed deck without being told it is mixed, they accept the mixed condition as a given — an unremarkable fact of the environment, like the color of the tablecloth. When the impossible moment arrives, the mixed condition is recalled from subconscious storage with the certainty of something they observed themselves, not something they were told.
This subconscious certainty is far stronger than conscious certainty. Conscious certainty can be questioned. (“He told me the deck was mixed, but maybe it wasn’t.”) Subconscious certainty is taken as personal observation. (“I saw the deck was mixed. I know it was.”) The audience becomes a witness to their own observations rather than a receiver of your claims.
Where Saying Still Works
I want to be careful not to overcorrect. There are moments in performance where verbal statements are not just acceptable but necessary.
Verbal statements work when they provide context the audience cannot observe visually. If the audience cannot see the faces of all the cards, you may need to describe what is there. If a condition is invisible — a sealed envelope, a prediction written on a hidden piece of paper — you may need to establish it verbally.
Verbal statements also work when they are phrased as invitations to verify rather than assertions to accept. “Would you like to check that the cards are all different?” is fundamentally different from “As you can see, the cards are all different.” The first invites the audience to draw their own conclusion. The second tells them what their conclusion should be.
And verbal statements work when they are embedded in a story or conversation that provides natural cover. If you are telling a personal anecdote and mention, in passing, that you were using a regular deck of cards, the mention is absorbed as part of the story rather than flagged as a suspicious assertion. The narrative context provides camouflage.
The principle is not “never speak about conditions.” The principle is “never assert conditions that can be shown instead.” Show first. Speak only when showing is impossible. And when you must speak, frame the statement as an invitation to observe rather than an instruction to believe.
The Business Parallel
I encounter this same dynamic in my consulting work. When a company announces, unprompted, that they are committed to quality, my immediate thought is: “What quality problems are they trying to hide?” The unsolicited assertion of virtue creates suspicion of the opposite.
The companies that actually deliver quality do not talk about quality. They show it — in their products, their service, their attention to detail. The quality is observable. It does not need to be announced.
The same is true for trust, transparency, innovation, and every other corporate virtue. The companies that talk about these things the most are usually the ones that have them the least. The companies that have them the most do not talk about them at all.
Vernon’s principle is not just a magic principle. It is a communication principle. In every domain, showing is more convincing than saying. Observation is more trusted than assertion. Subconscious conclusions are stronger than conscious claims.
The Discipline of Silence
The hardest part of this shift is not technical. It is emotional. When you have something you need the audience to accept — a condition that the entire effect depends on — the natural instinct is to reinforce it verbally. To make sure they know. To leave nothing to chance.
But this instinct is counterproductive. The verbal reinforcement does not strengthen the condition in the audience’s mind. It weakens it. Every assertion is a crack in the wall of believability.
Vernon had the discipline to stay silent when silence served the magic. He had the confidence to let the visual impression do its work without verbal backup. He understood that the audience’s own perception is the strongest foundation you can build on, and that adding your verbal assertions on top of that foundation does not reinforce it — it undermines it.
Show without saying. Let them see. Let them conclude. Trust the audience’s perception more than your own words.
The man in Salzburg taught me this with one sentence and a knowing smile. Vernon knew it decades before either of us was born. And every time I catch myself about to say “as you can see,” I stop, close my mouth, and simply show.