Conjuring historians have traced the origins of the Ambitious Card plot back to a French conjuror named Alberti who performed in the early 1800’s but the idea of placing a card into the middle of the back and having it return to the top almost certainly occurred to card magicians prior to that. It definitely has intrigued magicians since then as just about every performer with cards since that time has included some version of this trick in their repertoire.
In this volume, you’ll meet a variety of performers who have taken this very basic yet magical idea of a single playing card constantly rising to the top of the pack in some very clever and decidedly different directions. For example, David Regal leads off with his routine which transmogrifies an ordinary playing card into a puppy that always responds to the voice of its master. You’ll see and learn Harry Lorayne’s routine which first saw print in his classic Close-Up Card Magic