choose the right trick Archives

Card Tricks for Beginners – Which Are Best?

One of the most frequent questions we get from people starting to learn card tricks, is how to begin. They want a first step, and ask us what card tricks for beginners we recommend. This is where the problem comes in:

Do we recommend a book or DVD on card tricks, that are self working and easy to perform, or do we suggest a beginners book that teaches the basic sleights used in card tricks?

Two Choices of card tricks for beginners:

Self working card tricks – There are some awesome books and DVD’s that will get the beginner doing card tricks right away. Our current favorite choices currently are these:

Ultimate Self Working Card Tricks
All the team are very impressed with a magic training DVD for total beginners, and also working pro’s. The whole team were instantly impressed with the guiding principles that started the project. To put together a set of very strong professional tricks, that are self working, and strip away all the complicated plots and abstract nonesense found in most collections of this nature. The project fits perfectly with the teaching principles MoM uses with magicians that come for personal tuition to the shop, and we now recommend this DVD to all our students doing training with us.

Born to Perform Card Magic
An idea stepping stone into card magic and the DVD Ben Williams always recommends to new students. It covers the basics’s but does so, by introducing actual tricks that use those principles.A good mix of card tricks, which progress the student though each stage of development, without simply jumping from new sleight to new sleight

Magic is all about performing. The study of magic is a means to an end, not the end itself. Starting with some very easy card tricks that you can go out and perform right away, builds confidence, and helps you to understand timing and presentation. The goal of magic practice isn’t to spend countless hours in solitary practice, although over time that will also be necessary. The sooner a beginner can start learning through real world performance the better.
We see far too many eager beginners get disheartened after spending hour after hour learning more and more new sleights and moves, with no purpose to them other than the thrill of mastery. After years of practice, it often dawn on them, that they don’t know a full set of interesting card tricks, to create a show, and at this point they often give up.

If you choose to learn card tricks rather than just card moves, you build your skill set over time, only as you need each move. In the end, you will slowly progress your sleight of hand anyway, but will have a group of tricks you can do, right from the start as a base to develop from.

Card Tricks with Sleights – The other route would be to suggest the beginner to study a book or DVD that focuses on the core moves required in most card tricks. We tend to recommend these:

Amazing Book of Cards
One of the clearest, and easy to follow books on card tricks we have found. As well as teaching how to do 52 tricks with a deck of cards, it combines friendly, concise text with full-color photos. It won our backing bu including an excellent full-length DVD that teaches the lessons and most importantly, shows the subtleties of performance. This is often lacking in beginners books.

Encyclopedia Of Card Sleights By Daryl
Stuffed full of juts about every core move a beginner needs, this is an ideal source of material for magicians wanting to perfect a move.
Daryl is a brilliant teacher, and his love for magic shows thoughout the series. Each volume has been carefully chaptered with clear menus to let you jump directly to any sleight or explanation you’re looking for. Unlike many other DVD’s on sleights, Daryl goes well beyond the mechanical process.Focusing your time on perfecting your sleights will really pay off in the long run. As long as you find a useful purpose for the technique, there is a beauty in making something perfect, that can be very addictive. Developing your techniques can also encourage creativity in magic. The move techniques you master, the easier it will be to adapt your existing card tricks and develop new ones. The key to progressing quickly, is to concentrate on just a few moves at a time, and work on them over a long period of time. Remember, that just because they are not routines, you will still need to perfect the timing and flow in exactly the same way you would with a full card trick routine.What do you recommend? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below:

Should Magicians Give Purpose to Magic

by Merchant of Magic 3 Comments

If you really could perform magic, what would you do? Would there be a purpose to magic you perform?

As magicians we spend the majority of our time losing and finding playing cards, making small predictions, or having things vanish and appear around us. The tricks lack any purpose other than to entertain and amaze. What is the point of making a coin bend in a spectators hand or making a ball vanish from under one cup and appear under another, followed by the appearance of some lemons under the cups? Great magic, but utterly pointless. We can increase the power of our performances by giving a purpose to magic.

Creating purpose to magic we perform has been one of the ‘themes’ of the second series of Dynamo Magician Impossible. Let’s look at a few examples:

Dynamo is talking to the DJ in a nightclub. However, the club is packed and he can’t get out past the crowds. What would he do if he really could perform magic? He would simply fly over the crowd to the exit. That’s exactly what he did.
Dynamo visits HMV to meet his fans. It all gets too much and he needs to escape. What would a magic user do? Simply disappear. That’s exactly what he did.
Dynamo watched a street performer and wants to reward him. He notices the performer has images of money printed on his clothes, so he turns one of the pictures real so he can give the performer a tip.

Dynamo used magic to solve his problems. That’s the purpose of magic shown on the show. How can you design your magic tricks to be useful in this way?

Purpose to Magic

I expect you may feel going from table to table entertaining people would be quite a low priority for most true magic users. So why WOULD you be an entertainer?

Perhaps, to make people believe again?

Most people believed in magic when they were kids, but then life got in the way and they came to believe what the world told them, that magic was just pretend. Could making people question this belief, be the real role of a magician?

“What would I have to do right now to make you believe in magic?”

If you ask that question whenever you next perform close up magic you will start to notice you get the same sets of answers over and over again.

Make a bottle of wine appear
Turn this £10 note into a £50 note
Fly
Make xxx disappear
Bend a wine glass
Read my mind like Derren Brown

If you collected all the questions over a period of time you will get a group of the most frequently asked questions, many of which you could have tricks ready to perform.

There would also be some answers which you couldn’t do. For example: “Make a tiger appear” or “Make my wife disappear” but it would be easy to create a set of funny answers for each of those suggestions.

You could construct an act which allows you to perform most of those requests. You would then simply pick a suggestion from the group that ‘hits’ and actually DO it for them. Powerful stuff!

When asking the group, you ideally want to get suggestions from several different people at the table. This way you will be likely to hit upon a request that you can actually do. If you don’t get a ‘hit’ you can turn it into a joke or an aside, as you move into your normal routine set. Don’t tell them you intend to perform their suggestions until after they give them, so you have a perfect ‘out’ by changing the subject if a hit doesn’t happen.

If you decide to try this out please let me know how you get on. You can do this in the comments section below:

Creators of Magic Tricks and Why You Should Contact Them

by Merchant of Magic 3 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

Magic is a very small community, and being a magic creator is not a mass market activity. The magicians who develop great tricks tend to be obsessed by magic! Many of them put a huge amount of time and effort into creating an effect, for very little financial reward. They do it because they love inventing tricks, and seeing their creation being used by magicians. They don’t get to be millionaires from their creations, and as a rule tend not to be business minded.

Why do the creators of magic tricks do it?

They are simply magicians like you and me, who came up with a great idea and want to share it. They LOVE getting feedback from people who are using their tricks. As they tend to also be magicians, they are very easy to contact directly. Shoot an email over to the creator of the trick you are learning. A quick Google search should bring up their website. Let him or her know you are seriously learning their trick.

Avoiding the dangers of magic forum reviews

When a new trick is released, within a few days the magic forums become full of ‘user reviews’ of the trick. These early reviews are really just ‘first impressions’ as the reviewers have not had time to learn and perform the trick they are ‘reviewing’. Because of this, they tend to be based largely on the production value of the product and the first impressions of the gimmicks included. Often they are written after just a quick watch of the DVD and a little play with the props. These ‘reviews’ make up much of the feedback creators of magic tricks receives about their magic release.

When an email comes in from someone seriously interested in learning how to perform the trick, it’s a real breath of fresh air to the creators of magic tricks, and they tend to help that person as much as possible. Their advice and guidance is very valuable to you!

Would you like to learn more about getting the best out of the next new magic trick you plan to learn? We have produced a free 36 page ebook on the subject (This post content was actually taken from one of the pages of the ebook). You can download the free ebook below: