beginners Archives

How Magicians Use Misdirection

The new magic tricks you have ordered have finally arrived! That package is just waiting to be ripped open and it’s secrets consumed! You play with the props and have a go at working out how the trick is done, then settle down to read or watch the instructions. If you picked wisely, you have a great magic routine to practice and perform. If not.. well, there’s always something to learn from any magic trick. Chances are, even a magic trick that did not live up to your expectations can help you develop your skills and understanding. But there is almost always something missing…

What they never teach you

There’s a group of core skills that will set a magician apart from someone who only buys and performs tricks from a magic shop. It’s not included in the instruction DVD’s that come with the tricks, yet is probably the most important to learn. It’s misdirection techniques.

Understanding how magicians use misdirection will allow you to make your magic more powerful. It is vital to successfully fooling your audience. Misdirection makes magic stronger. It makes you a better performer. However, it is the ‘unspoken’ art within magic, and finding good theory and resources on the topic is hard to come by.

How magicians use misdirection

This may surprise you, but there really are some people who find the term ‘misdirection’ offensive. They argue that to use the prefix ‘mis’ generally has negative connotations. Words such as ‘mistake’, ‘misfortune’, ‘misunderstand’ and ‘misuse’ all suggest negative aspects of the technique. So ‘misdirection’ implies that you have failed at ‘directing’. So if we want to keep everyone happy and can’t call it ‘misdirection’, what do we call it? We don’t have any problem with the term ‘misdirection’; however, some people prefer to call it ‘Direction of Attention’. In a way this does express its meaning much more clearly, and doesn’t have the negative connotations of using ‘mis’. Whatever you like to call it, the great news is that it’s not hard to do at all, if you know what you are doing.

‘Misdirection has nothing to do with distraction. It has everything to do with controlling audience attention, at all times.’ – Gary Kurtz

“Not only shouldn’t they see anything, they shouldn’t suspect anything” – Erdnase

As a magician, you must learn how magicians use misdirection to make sure your spectators don’t see the things you do not want them to see. It’s not about hiding moves. It’s not about turning your back while you do a suspicious half pass; it’s about controlling audience attention so that when you are going to make a move, the audience is not only focused somewhere else, but they don’t even suspect you are doing anything. It is about making sure that suspicion doesn’t even cross your spectator’s mind. ‘A sleight is not perfect when the spectators are unable to tell what you’re doing. Only when they’re completely unaware that you did anything at all, will they experience magic.’ – Jarle Leirpoll

Better than a poke in the eye

You’ve heard the old expression “the quickness of the hand deceives the eye” right? Well, guess what, it’s wrong! Eyes have the power to track you hand movements a lot faster than your hands are able to move. Quick moves done in full view only create suspicion, and we really do not want suspicion at all. The hand is not quicker than the eye. Misdirection is quicker than the eye!

Want to learn more? Clint Baron and The Merchant of Magic Team have put together a guide to help you understand how magicians use misdirection and ways to build it into your own performance. The free ebook will teach you the core principles to help improve your magic.

Overcoming Nervousness – Techniques for Magicians

by Merchant of Magic 17 Comments

By Ben Williams & Dominic Reyes

First of all before we begin looking at techniques for overcoming nervousness, I would like you to read this and really think about what it means:

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself”
– Inspirational words used in the inaugural address of Franklin D Roosevelt

When fully understood and appreciated this saying can be a hugely positive force on your performance. Nervousness when performing is a perfectly natural thing to experience, a certain amount of nervousness is good, it can keep you on your toes and shows you care about your performance, the problem arises when you allow that nervousness to become fear. Fear can seriously hinder your performance, people skills and can also destroy the impression that you are a master of your craft in a blink of an eye. If you find yourself getting nervous just at the prospect of showing some magic tricks there are many ways to help combat this and stop it becoming a flaw in your performance.

When I began performing magic to friends and family I found that even though I had practiced my magic tricks behind closed doors I could immediately feel my heart rate increase and hands begin to tremble. This feeling would overcome me like a crippling illness almost making me freeze with fear; my mind would go blank and you could clearly see my hands shaking as I offered spectators cards. This can be very common when putting yourself in the limelight, it is a form of stage fright that is perfectly natural, the problem only really occurs when overcoming nervousness is difficult and you begin to let it take control of you.

I have put together here my top tips for beating stage fright to help you enjoy every performance that comes your way.

Be Prepared

When I say be prepared, I don’t just mean practice your tricks in front of a mirror. I mean practice everything, practice making sure you have everything set out in your correct pockets, practice your patter, practice any jokes or funny lines you add into your performance to create misdirection. I practice my whole magic routines from start to finish so I can understand how they flow into each other and I can see what happens to my pocket management along the way.

I also write a list of the tricks I am prepared to perform. For me a visual aid that I can reference back to in my mind really helps. If you find your memory works better with audio, record yourself listing the tricks you want to perform and play it back to yourself a few times before you go out to freak out your spectators.

Start with very easy tricks

It can help to start with an easy trick, maybe not a self worker (although it could be) as this will help you gauge what sort of audience you have. Do they love magic, react well, or are they quiet yet appreciative. Because you chose an easy trick, you don’t have to worry if you have controlled the playing cards correctly or whether they saw your pass etc. I begin with Chicago Opener as it is a great two phase card routine that the first phase is almost self working, (no controls needed) and the second phase implies you have got something wrong and then smacks them between the eyes with a surprise finish. This routine quickly establishes my skill level with some quick and visual magic and it also allows me to make sure I am concentrating on making sure they like me and are having a good time.

Get as much experience as you can

Perform whenever you can, the more you perform the better you will be at overcoming nervousness, period. And I don’t mean perform in front of a mirror or to a webcam, I mean perform for real people. Everyone has experienced that annoying feeling when you practice something and get it looking really good in front of a mirror to then go and show someone and it goes wrong and that polished move you were doing so well now looks like you haven’t practiced at all. The reason this happens is that when you perform in front of a camera or mirror it is an introverted performance, you are performing in your head critiquing things as you go along and even though it feels like you are doing things ‘real time’ there are pauses and you repeat things when they don’t look smooth without realizing you are repeating the moves. When you step up in front of a real person the performance needs to be outgoing and extroverted, you are no longer looking at your hands, you have to look at someone’s face and talk to them as well!

When you practice you never get the feeling that the mirror has just seen something and figured it out. When performing for real people they may look at your hands when you make a move and you may immediately feel exposed. This will cause you to speed up and get more nervous, which is a very bad thing. Experience will tell you that most people (even if they are looking in the wrong place at the wrong time) will not be able to tell what is going on, they have their own inner monologue to deal with and their methods may be completely wrong. Go slowly and deliberately and this will help create larger moments of misdirection which will give you breathing space vital for overcoming nervousness.

Breathing Techniques

This is one of the best tips I can give any performer and it is the tip that helped me the most in overcoming nervousness.

Breath properly and deliberately.

I cannot stress how much this will help you when you perform your magic. When you next become nervous, stop and take a moment to think about how you are breathing. I will bet you are hardly breathing at all, of course you are breathing or else you would die, but you are not breathing properly. Your breath’s become shallow and few and far between, you’ll have the tendency to hold your breaths longer than you should.

This is REALLY BAD for overcoming nervousness.

Breathing is directly linked to your heart rate, the less you breath the more your heart desperately pumps the blood around your body to maximize its withdrawal of oxygen from your blood supply. This in turn increases the heart rate and gives an overpowering feeling that you are unsettled, not good for overcoming nervousness! The heart beat increasing will also add to the shakes which can present itself with a vicious circle:

You don’t want to perform because you feel nervous…
The more nervous you get, the more you want to hide…
The more you hide away the less you perform…
The less you perform, the more intense the nervousness can get…

It is important to tackle this feeling head on and try your best to push it from your mind. Before performing I give myself a couple of minutes where I breath deeply and slowly, I just empty my mind and focus on the feeling inside my body. If my heart rate is high I breath deeply and concentrate on it lowering, I simply imagine my heart rate getting slower and more relaxed, as long as you are breathing deeply this is exactly what will happen. Once I am centered I know I am ready to perform, everything else will flow naturally.

Please read this saying again and apply it to your thought process.

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself”

Be the confident performer you want to be. You have practiced your magic, you have practiced your patter, and you know your moves are slick so there is nothing to worry about. Go out and have fun with people and they will have fun in turn. Remember people’s lives are not at risk, your life’s savings are not on the line, you won’t cause a major catastrophe if anything goes wrong so what is there really to worry about?

10 Quick Tips to Improve Your Sleight of Hand

by Merchant of Magic 15 Comments

1) Choose just one trick at a time.
Most magic shops would love you to constantly buy each new trick they market. But unless you are already at an intermediate or advanced skill level, this may not be the wisest move. Choose just one trick, and work on nothing else until it’s mastered. Only then, should you move onto your next trick to master.

2) Practice.
Every day, in small, quick sessions. Many experts recommend the practice drill principle: Running through the moves 15 times in the morning and 15 times at night for 20 days. If you can’t do that, just try to do 10 minutes practice every day. Short, regular sessions are best.

3) Don’t practice sleight of hand in silence.
Make sure you talk as you practice. Do you find you tend to ‘freeze’ when you perform a move in front of people? Saying the words provides cues for the moves and really helps prevent this.

4) Rehearse.
Don’t just run through the moves quickly. Perform the whole magic trick from start to finish, imagining its a real performance. Do this just as much as you practice the mechanics of the trick.

5) Slow it all down.
Slow is far better than fast. Sudden quick moves raise suspicion. Chances are, the speed you feel naturally comfortable at is still too fast.

6) Check your sleight of hand looks real.
When considering learning a new sleight, make sure it looks natural. Do the action for real, then adjust the sleight to match your real gesture or movement as much as possible. For example: Really turn a playing card over, then make sure it looks the same when you just pretend to do so. Avoid obscure moves that look pretty but nothing like real life actions.

7) Check your sleight of hand looks effortless.
Work on looking relaxed and happy when you execute a move. Make sure you don’t hesitate, close your eyes or look guilty as you perform it. Videoing your performance is a great way to spot this.

8) Make sure your sleight of hand is clear and visible.
Look at your hand positions. Are you covering up the action with your fingers or the backs of your hands? Work on a light touch, showing as much as possible to all around you.

9) Reduce all unneeded movements.
Go over your routine, removing pauses that don’t add to the trick.
Cut out and gestures or movements that may be totally innocent, but actually make the spectator think something suspicious may have happened.

10) Actually perform your sleight of hand live.
Seriously, you will develop your technique way beyond anything you can learn in private, once you start showing people your magic live. Don’t fall into the trap of performing only on YouTube. That will stop you getting real feedback from your audience’s reactions. Instead, show your family and friends, your work, once it’s ready and you will improve it way beyond what you thought was possible.

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