Thanks Richard. I've been using the Hamman technique since I learned it in Secrets Of.
A great Item from a great book.
Thanks for the Tenkai info.

I think there's one angle that hasn't been covered in this thread. And that's the "look and feel" of the DL. Here's Harry Lorayne's Ambitious Card presentation:


It's extremely fast talkey, but that's how many classic card magicians presented it, just a wall of words underneath all of it.

Here's a more modern presentation by Jason Ladanye:


It's slightly more relaxed, Jason recognizes the safe phases and gives them a bit of more breathing space, but anytime he's taken the top card and is about to insert it into the pack he interjects with some statement in order to leave no space for the spectators to interject.

The next logical step is to give the spectators that space at a carefully chosen moment when you are in fact placing their card into the middle of the pack, which Tommy Wonder does here successfully:


The point is, as a magician you can't trust the double lift to work on its own with a group of spectators. You can't even trust your misdirection. Very often somebody in the group will not be buying it and from time to time you'll get somebody rude enough to interject. That's why you either have to fast talk or do your own interjections to leave no space for interruptions or have that one place in your routine where you let them interrupt.

In any case you are kind of assuming someone is not buying it. I think this is why Eugene Burger disliked the double lift.

This is not to say that all spectators see through it. You all do these routines and get great reactions and will continue doing them. But the look and feel of a DL heavy routine can be contrary to what other magicians are going for.

There is nothing wrong with the double lift.
A problem occurs in context and multiple use cases that conflict.

The double lift is one of those moves that isn’t really practiced and refined as much as it could considering how much heavy lifting it does in many card magicians repertoire.

It is considered easy so not many put in the work to refine it. Regardless of how you feel about using/ it this is true.

That was a nice Ambitious Card routine Pop!

Jamy Ian Swiss wrote a longish article on the double lift that’s very worth reading. Getting rid of the “get ready” moment makes a big difference. If you follow with another method that accomplishes the same effect in a totally different way, you can effectively defuse the idea that a double lift was used. Sorry to be obvious…