Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

So, how did she do it? When he told her for the first time that the card he chose was the 8 of diamonds, how did she know where it was in the deck?

First, when she was demonstrating what she wanted him to do with his half of the deck, she was looking at her half, and she was already calculating what cards he was holding.

By subtracting her cards from a full deck, she knew what he was holding. This trick was mostly mental. There was a little sleight of hand involved, but it was mostly mental, and Teller said so at the end. 

But, the sleight of hand came next. 

So, he is giving her his cards, and she is going to put the two halves back together. 

But, she never really mixes them, and the way she keeps them segregated is to flip his over, which she does right about here.

So, she winds up with her cards with the back side against her right hand, and his cards with the back side against her left hand. 

Then, when she starts shuffling, that is when the "magic" occurs:

The cards are marked. There is a subtle code on the back side which identifies each one. So, she can see what the card is just from seeing the back side. So, there she is shuffling, but she is only shuffling his cards, and what she is really doing is laying them into position. So, the first time, she may be laying 8 cards. Then on the next "shuffle" she lays in 8 more in front of them. Then, say, 8 more. We don't know that the two halves were equal. It was during this "shuffling" that she "saw" the cards and saw where they were going in the lineup. And Teller alluded to it at the end. He told her that her physical handling of the cards during the "shuffle" wasn't all that smooth, but her mental handling of it was very smooth. 

But then, she had to put the deck in his hand. But remember what I said: that the bottom of the deck, which should have shown the face of a card, actually showed the back side. So, she had to keep it covered to conceal it. 

The reason she kept her left hand there was to cover up the bottom of the deck. 

Look, I can prove it: Below, he is handing her the cards, and she is going to add those to hers. 

So, when she adds those cards to hers in her right hand, it means that the back sides of the cards are facing her right hand. But look:

Now, the back sides are facing her left hand. But, the fact is: the back sides are facing both hands. And that's why she had to cover up the bottom of the deck. 

And it was all to distinguish his cards from hers because all that mattered were his cards. She just had to line up his cards. For all practical purposes, she could have put her own cards down. She didn't need them. She was only working with his. So, to keep them segregated, she flipped his cards. And above, she is working only with his cards, and she can see what they are. She is visualizing the order as she lays them in. And in just a few seconds, she is memorizing and retaining the order of approximately 26 cards.

This is a very difficult trick. I couldn't do it because my mind couldn't register and hold that much information that fast. This young woman really is a genius. 

As for me, I have never studied card tricks. I've never read a book about it. I've never even an article about it. But, I'm not so smart in figuring it out. If I were really smart, I would have been able to figure it out in one viewing, and I didn't. It took me several. 

And, I will confess, that I cheated. By that, I mean that I slowed the video down. On Google Chrome, you can slow it down to 25% of speed, and I did. And that's how I figured it out. 

Would I have figured it out without slowing it down? Probably, but it would have taken me even longer. I admit that I have no special abilities at all. 

But, I would have persisted until I figured it out, and that's because I knew it was a trick. 

But, when people saw what happened to Oswald on 11/24/63,  they didn't know it was a trick, a magic trick. They didn't have their radar up the way I did for this. I knew there was a trick to this, but people on 11/24/63 didn't know there was a trick involved in what they were seeing. They didn't scrutinize it. They just believed what they seemed to see, which was Ruby shooting Oswald. But, it wasn't even so much seeing. It was more the hearing of it. It was because they were told that it was Ruby shooting Oswald that they believed it. WHAT THEY 'SAW' WAS COLORED BY WHAT THEY HEARD. The spiel from the government and the media was like the rose-colored glasses through which they "saw" the event. And it's that way to this day.