To look at him, Jason Soll isn't always playing with a full deck of cards.
The CMC sophomore who plans on majoring in PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) and psychology, with a sequence in leadership, is a veritable wizard at manipulating playing cards with a grace and dexterity that brings to mind old movie clips of W.C. Fields (a world-famous juggler in Vaudeville) who could toss and stack bundles of cigar boxes like he was in a zero-gravity environment.
In fact, Jason can be seen doing his thing on YouTube to a plaintive music track from Imogen Heap. The combined effect of music and sleight of hand is stunning the end result of hours of practice (by Soll's reckoning: three hours a day for the last seven years).
"My ability to manipulate playing cards via magical (tricks) and eye-candy (flourishes) didn't happen overnight," Soll says. "In fact, in the beginning, my ability to manipulate cards was probably below average. It took me months to consistently cut a deck of cards with one hand. Now I can teach friends to do it in minutes. It was the persistent effort that fueled my progress."
Age 13 was a watershed year Soll says. That's when he began increasing his "magic trick arsenal" beyond the free, self-working tricks he could find on the Internet. "After a year of honing card magic skills, I stumbled upon videos of individuals manipulating playing cards in ways that I never thought possible," he says. "This art, known as card flourishing, was on the brink of becoming a widespread, social-media fueled art, and I wanted to be a part of its development."
See Him on YouTube
Soll, who claims he can practice flourishes in his left hand while doing homework in the other, says that card flourishing exposed him to the art of filmmaking which has led to his posting numerous videos on YouTube.
"I quickly discovered that most card flourishers created short films of themselves performing," he says. "As a result, I started to produce short films on a bi-weekly basis. Every time I learned a new technique with cards or a camera, I could not wait to produce another video."
Soll says that one of the free "tutorials" he posted on YouTube called "Buckeye" has accumulated over a quarter-million views to date. It's the kind of big assist that wasn't around when Soll was learning the ropes.
"When I was a beginner, I would spend months working on certain difficult moves," he says. "For example, a move known as the Cobra Cut used to be the most difficult feat possible with playing cards. The cut is a one-handed cut that involves balancing a packet of cards on the back of your middle finger, held high in the air while the hand is palm-down. The packet then performs a 180-degree spin before landing in the middle of the deck. Now it's considered to be an intermediate move."
Friend and classmate Michael Carroll '12 says Soll is often sitting at his desk, manipulating cards. "I gather that this constant manipulation greatly increases his affinity for handling the cards," Carroll says. "Occasionally, he will try out a new routine or trick on me, all of which have been mind-blowing."
According to Soll, the most difficult routines stem from improvisation. In January, he accidentally created a tutorial for a routine called The Stag which has garnered 30,000 YouTube views and is considered by many aficionados to be the best free card flourishing tutorial on the Internet.
As proof of the trick's difficulty, in 10 months, no one has produced a video of a person successfully performing the routine. Soll says the routine consists of a complex, two-handed cut.
"While the cards are being manipulated, a card suddenly fires in to the air and spins aggressively toward the right hand. The right hand, still manipulating in sync with the left hand, catches the card and weaves it back in to the two-handed manipulation." (The move can be seen at the end of "Jason Soll | Imogen Heap | Headlock YouTube link listed at the top of this story.)
"I have recently created a variation that allows the performer to fire out two cards at the same time, requiring each hand to catch one of the cards," Soll adds. "I believe this variation to currently be the most difficult card-flourishing routine in existence."
"Jason's card skills are phenomenal," Carroll adds. "Just by looking at another artist's routine, he can easily reproduce their results as good, or often better than they do not to mention that his original creations almost can't be replicated. Other artists in the community simply cannot reproduce his work.
"Most people Jason encounters are blown away by his card-handling skills," Caroll notes. "I don't think there's another person in Claremont that could learn his tricks (quickly, at least). People often ask how long it has taken for him to become so good, and are quite impressed by the number of years he's been at it."
Soll credits businessman and family friend Gordon Zacks, author of, Defining Moments: Stories of Courage, Character and Leadership, as a card-manipulating mentor.
"Mr. Zacks is a friend of Israel and a successful entrepreneur who volunteered to become a presidential advisor on Middle Eastern policies," Soll says. "Whenever he would come to my family's house for dinner, he would amaze my younger brothers and me with his performances. When I was about 8, he taught me how to cut a deck of cards with one hand. After months of practice, I finally could perform the move consistently."
World Records and X-Games?
Flash forward to this past summer and the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference in Oxford, England. Soll appeared in full prestidigitation mode at the exclusive, invitation-only event while describing the relationship card manipulation has to social media, online communities, and experiential education.
To say Soll, well, flourished, would be just a bad pun at this point but he just might have broken a world record.
"I am certain that I broke the world record for the most one-handed cuts in 30 seconds,'" he says. "I don't know how much I broke the record by because I have yet to see the footage from my TEDTalk! Hopefully, TED.com will release my talk soon. Once I have the footage, I will submit the request to the Guinness Book of World Records."
Soll estimates that he performed 35 to 45 cuts in a half-minute. The current record is 30 cuts.
Cutting cards at lightning speed isn't the only thing that Soll does fast. He's also a member of the CMS Track team specializing, of course, in sprinting events the 100m and 200m.
"The sprints give me a similar sensation to ski racing," he says. "I've been considering rekindling my passion for ski racing by weaving in skier cross-training with graduate school, in hopes of competing in the X Games."
And Soll might be just the guy to do it. In any event, we wouldn't bet against him. He holds all the aces, after all.