If anyone wants to learn card magic, there are an unbelievable amount of tutorials on YouTube.
All you need to do some very impressive tricks is a single move — the double lift.
As someone who has had a casual interest in card magic and sleight of hand, here’s an observation about how so many different tricks can come out of such a seemingly simple sleight.
There’s a fairly simple formula that makes it possible to be very creative and come up with endless new tricks and variations.
At the heart of any trick is some sleight, such as the double lift, where the illusionist creates a seemingly trivial rift between reality as the audience perceives it, and reality as it actually is.
The illusionist can then get creative with what to do with this difference.
Usually you maintain the facade and do things that would be possible in both realities. From the audience’s point of view, it’s like the trick hasn’t started, when in a sense it is already over. Then, at a safe distance from the original sleight of hand, in terms of time and attention, the illusionist can now seem to break the rules of the reality the audience believes in, simply by revealing the difference between the two realities.
This allows you to amplify an underwhelming “Ok, so I couldn’t see that you picked up two cards” to a very impressive “Wow, my card magically reappeared at the top of the deck after you put it into the middle of the deck and let me shuffle it”.
Here's a thing I still wonder about:
I used to practice forcing, so I get the general idea. What I used to do was mind-reading etc, but there's one particular event that stands out for me, here is what I think I saw:
A pro magician shows up in a birthday party showing a deck of cards, asks the host to think of a card, shuffles the deck and shows the card, confirming with the host that it is correct, then goes on to do all kinds of amazing tricks where this card shows up again and again.
In my mind, there are only a few options here:
- they agreed on it (too risky. This bloke does big jobs, won't do that in an ordinary birthday.)
- somehow influenced the host ahead of the selection process (how? when? Is this actually possible with NLP or something? Something about the setup of the deck?)
- maybe he tricked us into thinking he had a full deck and all there ever was was 4 of clubs? (Sounds crazy, bit not impossible for a guy who'll pickpocket the craziest things, walk around with a flying piece of furniture while exposed to 180 degrees of audience, non staff on the stage and a TV crew filming.)
- somehow guessed it based on eye movements (what I used to tell when I did stupid "mind reading" tricks that was only stupid forces)
- somehow tricked the host into thinking this was the chosen card even if it was another (again how?)
Anyone wants to share pointers? A few words, links to books, web sites, anything?
I don’t know how what you described was performed, but I know that magicians often leave themselves multiple outs in case the audience doesn’t do what they want them to.
But yes, I follow a few YouTube channels that have taught me a lot: Xavier Spade, Alex Pandrea, PigCake and a few others. There are some excellent ones, but I noticed that you do have to be careful, there's a lot of "reveals" or "tutorials" that are done by hobbyists and their quality is varied, some would teach bad handling or bad habits. They can be fine to get the concept, but maybe not as an absolute beginner. The ones done by magicians who perform professionally tend to be great quality though. But you probably know this better than I, since it sounds like you've been doing it longer :)
Its really easy to find tutorials and guides nowadays, you just gotta put the time in!
I personally don’t actually like the double lift because I find that 90% of them, even though they are perfectly executed, just don’t look natural — most laypeople simply would never turn cards over in the way most magicians do and it just looks fishy. Having said that, most laypeople don’t actually notice (it’s ibcredible what you can get away with sometimes!) but I notice it and it puts me off :)
[1] A side story on this book... I may have cost the publisher a bit of money... They have a "video edition" of the book, where many of the techniques and routines have a QR code linking to a video, but when I got it, all of the links were broken. So I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (UK) and about two months later, all of the QR codes started working. I noticed that they all directly linked to Rackspace CDN URLs (ie not to their own domain). I can't imagine it was fun or cheap to get the exact same identical URLs working again...
On a side note, revealed card tricks on YouTube were my pain in the butt for a long time, but I don’t care anymore.
From the other direction, a card shark might say that doing magic with cards makes it a practical skill and takes away the magic :)
If you could actually control probability and make small objects appear and disappear through physical manipulation then there would be much better uses for that then street magic.
There's also the school of thought that its dishonest to pretend you have real magical abilities and therefore you don't have to simulate real magic, instead treating it as the performance art that it is. Most people know its a trick and don't mind that its not totally believable. That said, you're probably right in that your way leaves a more lasting impression.
Re: youtube, magic is a really bad art for video, IF you're the kind of person who only enjoys magic if it baffles you and once you see how its done (even just partially) then it gets boring and with a video, where you can watch it 100 times, in slow motion, of course people will always see something they shouldn't. Sadly these people often see it as a challenge (I find the "pretend to have powers" magicians are largely at fault for this, IMHO) rather than as a performance art. Oh well.
But those are just my thoughts, I'm not a professional and have never performed for money or in front of more than a handful of people, so you know a lot more about it than I do!
I think the art of magic is ought to be performed live. There some guys who got it right on the TV, for instance Copperfield. The problem with YouTube on the other hand, is that you can replay the video anytime, so this kills misdirection entirely.
The way I get around this issue in my promotional materials is that I basically only show people’s reactions to my effects, so that people see what they buy. Entertainment, not tricks to figure out.
On a side note, I love how Derren Brown performs. He says up front, he has no psychic powers but provides some basic pseudoscience explanation to his audience which is a trick on its own!
> Entertainment, not tricks to figure out.
Exactly. I personally really enjoy figuring out how they work and, for example, I’ve learned how Shin Lim does (parts of) most of his routines (partly through watching them over and over and partly by buying his “52 shades of red” routine instructional — I learned so much from it, even if I’ll never perform his routine!), but it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of watching him perform, because he is a great showman and has incredible skill. I still enjoy watching him perform 52 shades and in some way even enjoy it more knowing how it’s done. Having said that, I do also enjoy the mystery too, so I don’t try to learn everything either.