Sarah writes: ‘Could Merchant of Magic give me some advice on how to palm playing cards and improve my top palm.’

‘I do have quite small hands, and I’m using a poker deck, but I don’t think small hands are the problem. I’m reluctant to use a bridge deck as all the decks I use are poker sized…

With the right misdirection, I can get away with my top palm, but not consistently. I’ve tried the method outlined in the Royal Road to card magic, and Dai Vernon’s method, but I still feel that it looks obvious that I’m palming a card and more often than not, I don’t get it into quite the right position and end up with edges showing! I feel I must be doing something wrong!

I understand that misdirection can make all the difference, but can you recommend any resources or suggest any ways that I can improve the technique itself? Thanks very much!’ – Sarah

How to palm playing cards without mistakes

Hi Sarah,

Of course, we can help, there is a tonne of different places to study palming playing cards, I will list a few great DVDs at the bottom of this page.

Firstly, let’s see if there is any advice that may be useful to you…

With regards to the top palm, it’s a bit like a pass, at first it is impossible to do, then it becomes something you can carry out under misdirection, then it becomes something that is invisible. I am glad that you have taken the time to lay a playing card on your hand to see if it is physically big enough to hide a playing card, not many people do this and swear it is the size of their hands and they cannot hide the card. However, usually it just needs an alteration to the position of the cards, or how they hold them that solves the issue, not stretching your hands!

The real secret of how to palm playing cards

First of all, practice as much as you can. When it comes to a sleight that can be helped by misdirection, it usually means that it can be harder to execute and potentially risky (which the top palm certainly is!). It is important to get the muscle memory down so that your hands can do the move without your brain thinking. Unfortunately, this only comes with time and repetition. The key is to be able to perform the move without thinking and whilst being able to do other things, it should become an automatic process like turning on an indicator whilst driving, or moving the mouse for your computer.

How I palm playing cards using the top palm

I don’t have an outstanding palm, but I do know when to misdirect, or I can easily orchestrate the misdirection needed. This is how I get into the moment where I can create some misdirection. Firstly, I top palm with two hands. I can one handed top palm but it is only 75% and I have never drilled it to 100% so I do not do it on gigs usually. I perform this top palm by getting ready into position, so that I am ready to palm. When I am ready with my hands in position I simply ask if they would be impressed if I had predicted what their card would be. The moment their eyes come up to me, I perform the top palm. It happens the moment their eyes move up to me, not once they have locked on me. You can wait until their eyes have ‘arrived’, but you run the risk of being too late and letting them catch up with you and spot the palm. As mentioned, my palming technique is not the best technique in the world as the thumb is a tell tale sign so I use misdirection rather than when being burned, but it is practical.

Spectators that don’t look away

Here is how to deal with an awkward spectator who just won’t look away. If anyone is burning my hands too much, I will tell them to watch harder! This is purely beneficial to me, not them. As they watch closely they will be focused intensely on your hands, I simply wait and make them wait for something… And I do nothing! I then break their concentration swiftly by saying sharply, ‘of course, I won’t do anything if you are looking!’ This is a joke, but it serves a purpose, the first sentence tells them to pull focus (on beat), the more a spectator focuses, the more they relax when their concentration is broken (off beat), this is a very basic explanation of the on beat and off beat. The stronger the On Beat, the stronger the Off Beat.

How to palm playing cards and make it look invisible

If you wish it to be invisible, then I am afraid, this will only happen over time as your fingers and muscles finesse the move. My advice for practicing would be to practice very slowly at first, analyze each move individually and try to see where the pressure in your hands causes an effect to the playing cards. If you can understand why sleights work, it is much better than simply understanding how they work. Again the goal is to have these sleights become an automatic process, which can only happen if it is drilled again and again and again.

Here are a couple of great sources to learn palming:

Practical Card Palming
Sleight of Hand Secrets With Cards
Encyclopedia of Card Sleights Volume 6 by Daryl – Download Now

Here is also a free eBook all about Misdirection Techniques should you wish to learn more about this area of magic.

5 Top Tips to Help Simplify Magic Tricks

by Dominic Reyes 1 Comment

By Ben Williams

Should we work to simplify magic tricks?

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs

be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count

half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” – Henry David Thoreau

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

This is a quote that fits the magic world perfectly!

Sometimes routines can be too over complicated and have far too much going on for a spectator to fully and truly appreciate what they are seeing.

Dai Vernon once famously said, “A great magic trick should be able to be explained in one or two sentences.” Which also ties in nicely with these thoughts on performance.

Here are my five top tips to simplify magic tricks, and streamlining them to make them not only more enjoyable and magical, but also more memorable for your spectators.

Try to explain what your effect is in one sentence

If this is impossible then you should remove some phases from your routine. This doesn’t mean your routines have to be short, they can be long routines, they just need clarity. Let me explain further.

For example, if you have a signed card that turned face up in the deck and then was found in your pocket, the back colour of the card changed and then it was found to be inside a block of ice; that is a LOT going on that cannot be explained in one sentence. In this example, it would be better to simply have the signed card vanish and reappear

Remove unnecessary patter

If you were to film yourself performing magic to an audience how much of your patter do you think that you could remove and still achieve the same effect? How many umms and errrrs are there? I think if you were honest with yourself then you would realise there is actually a lot of words that performers say that are not necessary at all.

Eliminate sentences like, ‘If I just take the cards out of the box..' ‘if I turn over the top card..’ or even sentences like ‘As you can see my hands are empty.' These sentences do not add anything to your performance and are easily understood by the spectator as they can clearly see what you are doing. Think about it, what is better, if something were to vanish and the magician stands there turning his hands up and down whilst saying, ‘and as you can see my hands are totally empty’ or if something were to vanish, watching the magician slows down and simply holds his hands out in the open slowly turning them back and forth without saying a word. The latter is by far the more theatrical and magical of the two presentations.

Go Slowly

Try to slow everything down, performing at speed is usually linked to insecurity and guilt in the magic world. If you feel like something you are about to do might be figured out or they may catch something then the tendency is to speed up your performance. This is very natural and you must fight it. You know how these effects work, but trust me, when your spectators are seeing magic for the first time they are miles away from the method. They have a billion confusing thoughts occupying their brain when you are performing. When you speed up you are actually doing more harm than good, you are telegraphing to the spectators that there is something dodgy going on. They will subconsciously pick up on this and will not necessarily know where to look and pay attention, but they do know when and this alone increases the odds of them catching you out. Do not let the guilt of deceiving people overcome you, stay calm and composed.

Another reason for speeding up is insecurity, you may feel like you should have got a great reaction for something and instead of getting ‘WOWs’ and ‘what the’s’ you may get a more deadpan reaction, this can make you feel like you have to go quickly into another phase or effect to get that big WOW you are looking for to let you know your magic is good! People react in many different ways, I cannot tell you how many times I have felt at a gig that someone has not reacted well and I have looked at how I performed only to be contacted by them the day after or a couple of days later wanting to book me because they were so impressed. Sometimes just pausing after an effect can give the spectator time to process what has happened and let their brain catch up so they can react. Try it out.

Focus your spectator on just the key points in your routine.

This will begin to happen naturally as you eliminate the filler in your performances. As you remove unnecessary patter and sleights, you are concentrating the magic down to make it more potent. The less they have to misdirect them and concentrate on the better the magic will be received. Another way to make spectators focus on the key points is to recap briefly before a reveal. Sometimes this is really not needed, but other times it can totally enhance the moment of magic and inflate the reaction you receive. For example, if you had a word selected from a book and you read their mind and said, ‘concentrate, ok, now the word I am getting is… Tree, is that right?’ You will get a strong reaction but if instead you said, ‘Please concentrate, ok, I think I have it. Now, just think about this for a moment, you freely chose any page in that book, all the pages are different and there are about 300 words to each page. There are 225 pages in the book so that is an average of 67,500 words in that book correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of all these possibilities I am certain that the word you are thinking of is… Tree.’

Briefly recapping, you are elevating the impossible nature of the effect and making them focus on key points, the free selection of page and the fact that there are an enormous amount of words in the book. Even though they may have been instructed to look at the first word on the page and not ANY word, this sort of reprogramming can really help elevate the impossibility factor and prevent backtracking when a spectator tries to remember what happened.

Leave your spectators with a clear memory of the magic you performed.

There are many ways to do this, one way is to leave them with an impossible souvenir that they can keep and tell their friends about. This could also be a business card with a word reveal or drawing duplication you performed for them. Something they can take away and show when they tell the tale of the conjuror who captured their heart!

You don’t have to leave them with something though, you can create a moment with your spectators. If you watch Bill Malone he has a chant that he gets the spectators to do when he performs as part of the celebration and reaction, this can be very memorable. By framing your routines up near your face, for example, holding a signed card up near your face with a cheeky grin when you reveal it is actually their card. Small images like this can stick in people's minds and can increase the chances of them thinking of you next time they need a magician or are talking about a magician. Using techniques like this can help elevate areas of your routine without adding extra patter lines or actions that will cloud up the performance

So there you have it, these are my top 5 tips for simplifying your magic. Remember by doing this it not only helps you but it helps the spectators to appreciate your magic more and in turn your reactions and the general response to your magic will be more rewarding.

How do Magicians Force Playing Cards – Questions and Answers

by Dominic Reyes Leave a Comment

Paul sent us the following question about how to learn to force playing cards:

'When reading instructions and finding something like 'use a force of your choice' or 'control the card to the bottom of the deck'. In theory, I know what both of those mean, but I'm yet to find a resource – particularly for forcing – for learning techniques that seem genuinely convincing.

Can you suggest something to me from which to learn some convincing forces and also a good tutorial on card controls? Thank you!' – Paul H

Paul, You're not along getting frustrated when you come across the phrase 'use a force of your choice' or 'use your favourite force'. We think that a magic tricks instructions should explain at least a basic force if the magic trick requires it.

The good news is that there are loads of ways to learn how to force playing cards correctly.

Solution 1 : Download this Magic Hands Tuition Download : Essential Forces

Solution 2 : Learn from a DVD. There are many good DVDs that cover the basic forces. A good one that will teach you a large range of controls, as well as the right way to use a hindu and riffle force is Born to Perform.

Solution 3 : Learn from a book : Just like DVD's there are a huge range of magic books that will teach you the basic forces. We tend to go with the most highly regarded source for beginners to learn the core sleights of card magic The Royal Road to Card Magic

You have a huge range of forces to choose from, but we would sugest learning and mastering the riffle force as your first project. Follow that up with the Hindu Force, before moving on to work on mastering a Classic Force over time. Thise three forces should provide you will all the technique you need for almost any force condition.