Visual Sleight of Hand Techniques to do with Coins or Rings – Ratings

Clint asks:

'I would like some really visual slight of hand techniques that I can do with coins or rings. While I have some experience with cups and balls, linking rings, and card tricks, I am pretty new to pure slight of hand.'

Adding some a few routines or even a small 'bridge section' into your act, that involves some sure sleight of hand with everyday objects such as rings or coins, can both impress your audiance and add balance to your act. I'll suggest some of the best visual sleight of hand routines to consider adding to your act, but first, a warning..

Being Consistant

Visual sleight of hand techniques take a great deal of practice to master, so it's important to take the time to choose sleights or magic routines carefully, so your time is effectivly used.

Have you ever seen Derren Brown suddendy launch into a coin coin flourish routine in the middle of his show? How about Dynamo Magician Impossible performing Hippity Hoppity Rabbits? These magicians have a consistant image that they reinforce by the types of magic tricks they perform. In your magic, we recommend that you do the same. The magic tricks you choose to learn should complement your existing material. If your card magic tends to have a gambling theme, them adding in some coin magic, or poker chip tricks, will keep the act 'on theme'. Conversly, if you have a high degree of comedy running through your presentations, then a sudden display of card fourishing, whilst looking inpressive, will not 'fit' with your act. Make sure you choose magic tricks that work together to tell a greater story, or communicate a common message about your act in general.

Here's 5 of the most popular visual sleight of hand teaching guides that professional magicians order from the magic shop:

World Class Manipulation Jeff McBride

Jeff McBride is one of the most famous sleight of hand magicians in the world. His complete understanding of sleight of hand magic is first class. As a teacher, he is an engaging and enthusiastic speaker on the meaning of magic and its place the world. In this DVD, Jeff teaches techniques of the master sleight of hand experts. Jeff walks you step by step through a wide range of techniques. A lifetime of sleight of hand can be mastered with this DVD.

Ring Thing

Although this isn't hardcore sleight of hand, it gets the same reaction from the public. It's a fast and easy way to introduce sleight of hand manipulation into your working set. David Blaine, Jeff McBride and Gregory Wilson among others speak very highly of Ring Thing, with good reason!

It’s a fast, visual, ring magic routine that can be performed anywhere. You remove your finger ring, throw it back at your hand , and it instantly returns to your finger!

Sick – By Ponta the Smith

Fancy mastering some serious coin magic? This is a coin magic DVD teaching how to make coins smoothly disappear, reappear and change right in front of peoples faces. Working in just one of these sleight of hand techniques can lift the whole of your act to a new level.

De Ring

This without doubt the most awesome teaching guide for ring manipulation that you can own. De'vo's ring sleight of hand is simply stunning. De'vo has been performing ring manipulation for over 20 years. The style and technique taught will have you in disbelief! Finger ring magic, taught by the finest sleight of hand expert in the field.

Contact by Tyas Frantz – DVD

In Contact Juggling, balls are rolled across your hands and body in visually attractive patterns. Many magicians are starting to adopt this skill to build into their magic. Producing a ball by magic, then having it come to life and dance around the magician, before vanishing again.

Contact Jugglers use a range of objects from pens to tennis balls. The most common object is a 3" acrylic ball. Contact balls are clear, so they don't seem to be spinning. This allows the magician to produce a visual effect wherein the balls seem to be moving or floating across the body. It's that effect that sparks the interest of magicians to Contact Juggling.

What have we missed?

Those are the most popular training guides for sleight of hand with everyday objects. However, there is a huge range of excellent material on the market. What would you suggest? Leave a comment in the section below:

How to Learn Magic Tricks With Poker Chips – What the Magic Shop Recommends

by Dominic Reyes Leave a Comment

Want to learn some cool tricks with poker chips?

It's a great way to impress your poker friends, and also transfers nicely over to coin magic. Lets look at how to get started:

1) You need some poker chips.

We recommend you invest in good quality clay poker chips as you are going to be working with the chips over a long period of time. Cheap plastic poker chips can work fine, but the clay chips have a much better feel and weight. You can pick up packs of clay poker chips very easily from most online magic shops.

2) You need some expert tuition on tricks with poker chips

We recommend learning from Poker Columnist and Entertainment Award Winner, Rich Ferguson in his excellent DVD on the subject of tricks with poker chips. The DVD covers over 70 tricks with poker chips, often seen on TV or performed by professional poker players.

The DVD also includes a range of poker chip tricks by Rich that are his own unique creations!

3) Whilst learning the skills, cheat and take a shortcut.

There's nothing wrong with using a gimmick to start performing poker chip tricks right away. As long as you are also learning the sleight of hand poker chip tricks, it can get you performing and building up a reputation for poler chip skills right away. Imagine being able to spin a poker chip on the very tip of your finger.

Check out this poker ship trick in action:

The Worst Thing to See in Magic Trick Reviews and Adverts

by Merchant of Magic Leave a Comment

Magician Foolers in reviews of magic tricks

By Dominic Reyes

Before I discuss one of the worst things to see when magicians review or advertise magic tricks, I want to warn you about this post. The advice is geared towards magicians who want to perform for the general public. If you prefer to learn magic tricks for fun, perhaps to your family and friends, then this advice may not be for you. I just though I would save you some time reading the rest of the post.

Still with me? Good, lets get stuck in…

The Merchant of Magic hates this advertising line in magic trick reviews:

There’s a common sentence found in a LOT of magic trick reviews and adverts for props:

‘A real magician fooler‘

Let’s look at why this sentence has very little benefit in helping you decide if the magic trick is going to be worth learning. Why would this line be helpful in any magic trick reviews?

The Customer Persona.

I recommend that you spend time putting yourself into the shoes of their spectators. You need to understand exactly whom your magic is targeted towards. Are you performing for magicians or for a lay audience? They both have different expectations, knowledge, and appreciation of magic.

Performing magic isn’t just about you or me, or the things we enjoy. You create the magic FOR your spectators. The fun you get from it isn’t the most significant thing. If it were, there would be no reason to perform it in public, we could just sit at home and practice all day in front of a mirror.

Understanding how your audience feels, acts, and communicates is so critical. Identifying the type of person that your magic targets, allows you to choose exactly the right kinds of tricks, and the most effective presentations for them.

A ‘magicians customer persona’ is a brief outline of a typical spectator. It goes into detail about the spectator and their interests and behavior. By defining these typical spectators, you can create magic that is geared towards them.

Identifying your Customer Persona.

Take a moment to write down your typical spectators. Answer these questions:

Who is your typical spectator?
Where do they watch your magic?
What are their other interests?
What is their typical education level?
Which other forms of entertainment do their enjoy?
What cultural references will most resonate with them?
How do they dress?
What other events do they like to attend?

Why do we need to build a customer Persona?

There may not be much point developing a deep and meaningful mentalist act if your audience tends to be the nightclub and party scene. Mastering dark spiritual magic might not give you the best ‘reach’ if your plan is to perform at corporate cocktail parties.

That’s not to say you should be limited only by the audience you have access to. Magic is all about exploring and developing your skills. But, if you want to put in the effort to create a full commercial act, it’s wise to define exactly whom your audience is most likely to be, and create a ‘product’ to cater to them.

There’s no reason why you can’t create individual acts, each one designed for a different type of customer persona:

The city center bar crowd.
The local pub.
The family restaurant.
The society wedding.
The central London crowd.
Fellow magicians.

Each act should be designed for one customer persona. You can market yourself individually for each persona that you want to serve. This may be a unique section of your website, or even distinctly different websites for each customer persona.

A common mistake magicians make with customer personas in their marketing adverts online.

In just the same way, we see magicians making the mistake of using the wrong customer personas when marketing their performing websites. This happens most often when they write blogs or film themselves on Youtube. Many magicians write about performing magic, create magic trick reviews, discuss how to learn magic, and developing as a magician. They teach some magic tricks, or talk about the latest magic tricks they like. This content is targeting the wrong customer persona. It’s aimed at other magicians!

Magicians don’t hire magicians.

For example, The Merchant of Magic blog has a set of customer personas that dictate the type of subjects we write about. There aren’t any posts aimed at people wanting to hire a magician, or tips for clients on using a magician, these are not the kind of adverts we push out. We selected our customer persona’s to be different types of magicians wanting to improve their magic. Because of this, we write magic trick reviews, tips and performing advice to help our target audience: magicians.

If you want to get more work as a magician, make sure that you identify which customers you should try to attract, and direct the content of your marketing towards those people, rather than producing content directed to only interest your competitors.

Why ‘Magician Fooler’ is a terrible line in magic trick reviews and adverts.

Take a moment to watch this video recorded for me by professional magician Luca Volpe:

Wise words as usual from Luca. Unless you only perform for other magicians as a hobby, or you are constructing an act for the ‘magic club’ lecture circuit, it’s not much use building your magic to entertain other magicians. Adverts and reviews that promote magic, just for entertaining other magicians, it promoting you to target the wrong customer persona.

Seeing this ‘line’ in magic trick reviews and adverts means nothing. Magicians have a working knowledge of the technical aspects of magic. They look at magic tricks from a more analytical point of view. They are impressed by how unusual or unique a technique may be, the tricks value for THEM, and the creativity that took place in the development of the effect. These are of little concern to a typical lay audience.

Understand who you want to perform magic to, and forget about any magic that is designed for any other group. By doing this, you will be way ahead of most casual performers, and much more likely to find the audiences that you have designed your magic to delight.