If you study Gazzo's routine you'll notice that the cup always goes to the load. He actually dips the cup down below the lip of the pouch to cover the angles and magicians cringe when they see it, but the audience doesn't seem to care.

Also, every move to the pouch is justified. The hand goes into the pouch to dump a small ball and cradles the load waiting for the cup to arrive. One of the biggest faults of students in his class was to lift the load to meet the cup. They flashed every time and Gazzo chided them mercilessly for it. Resist the temptation to lift the load to meet the cup and instead dip the cup over the stationary load hidden in the pouch and then lift it into view using the hand that was cradling the lemon.

This hand to hand transfer also serves to cover the motion to the pouch as if all you were doing was moving the cup out of your right hand to free it up to show something on the table. It makes perfect sense for the cup to go to the pouch because that's where your left hand is. The left hand should wait for the cup to arrive and then lift into view with the mouth down cup covering the load. Then FREEZE for a beat as the attention is directed to the table and whatever the right hand is doing. All angles are covered by your hand, forearm, body. The only person who could possibly see anything is if they were laying on the ground at your feet.

You have all the time in the world at this point to set the loaded cup back on the table with no heat at all.

Great description, Dave!

Tom

How you handle the load depends on a number of factors:

1) Size of the load -- if you can cover it with your hand, or if you can cover the upper half of it with your hand, you can hide the load better.

2) Orientation of the pouch -- If the load is too big for you to conceal it in your hand, then the pouch needs to be in front, not to the side.

3) Orientation of the table top -- I got the best concealment of the work when I had the table top in such a position that the upper edge of the pouch was located between the upper and lower edge of the table top. This meant that there was no flash of my wrist between the tabletop and the pouch if the spectators were looking under the table top.

The action of the loading (left) hand was as follows:
1) The loading hand pivots at the wrist and the fingertips go into the pouch to snag the load.

2) The fingers roll the load into the hand, which pivots back up and rests near the edge of the table. The side of the pouch conceals the bottom part of the load from the left side. The pouch and tabletop conceal the load from the front. The top of the load is concealed by the thumb lying along the side of the index finger, which is curled slightly around the load. The load is actually held by the middle, ring and little fingers.

3) The right hand picks up a cup, revealing the ball underneath it, and transfers it to the left hand, sliding the cup between the thumb and index finger. This covers the load.

4) The motivation for this movement is that the right hand is going to display the ball that has just been revealed. So, the right hand picks up the ball, while the left little finger adjusts the load into the cup with as little tipping of the cup as possible.

5) The left hand places the loaded cup on the table and returns to the "rest" position above the pouch.

Note: I used a two compartment pouch and did only three loads. For more loads, you would probably need to use both hands to do loading. It won't be that hard to change hands, though. I could do four loads comfortably out of one pouch.