The Principle of Force

Now I still remember that I am supposed to write on the Principle of Force in performing magic. Before I begin, let me quote myself once again that “the principle of force as the word implies, forces the audience to make a selection that is predetermined by the magician himself”. Another way of saying that is that the magician forces the audience to choose what the magician wants while giving the audience the illusion that he (the audience) is the one who makes the choice. There are many ways to execute a “force”. No matter which way it is done, a force is always based on one of these principles: the use of gimmicks, sleight of hands and verbal manipulation.

For today’s article, I will begin by what is known as “The Magician’s Choice”. This is one of the most basic lessons a magician has to learn to perform magic tricks. The Magician’s Choice is done merely by verbal manipulation although not all verbal manipulation in the performing of a magic trick necessarily constitutes a force.

The Magician’s Choice

In executing a Magician’s Choice, the magician will ask the audience to choose between 2 choices. These choices could be in the form of objects, words, or anything imaginable. However it is easier to illustrate here by referring to these choices as objects.

Say for example, the magician divide a deck of cards into 2 piles which I will refer to them here as the first and the second pile. Let’s say that the magician knows that the card that he wants to reveal at the end of the magic trick is in the first pile. In order to show that everything is done randomly and the final outcome is magical, he allows the audience to choose one of the 2 piles. The simplest statement the magician could say to the audience would be, “Choose one of the two piles.” If the audience chooses the first pile (which is the desired pile), the magician will take the first pile as chosen by the audience and continue with his routine and finally reveals the desired card in the “chosen” pile eventually. On the other hand, if the audience has chosen the second pile, then the magician will take the second pile and discard it by putting it aside. After discarding the second pile that the audience had chosen, the magician now picks up the first pile (which is the desired pile) and continues as in the first scenario.

Notice that the secret lies in what the magician says. He merely asked the audience to choose a pile of cards. But he did not ask the audience what audience want to do with the chosen pile of cards nor did he commit himself to saying what he (the magician) is going to do with the chosen pile of cards. The idea here is being vague with what he says. The magician never commits himself to what he is going to do.

Nasty Audiences

Now can anything go wrong in performing this routine? Yes! Especially if you are performing magic tricks to your friends and it is not an official magic show. In a magic show where you are the professional magician and the audience are usually strangers, they will show more respect to the performer and will not so called, “try to be funny with you” and try to ‘spoil’ your show and embarrass you. Even so, some professional magicians do experience uncooperative audience who try to be funny in more informal settings such as a close-up magic in a bar. So when you are performing magic tricks informally to friends, they tend to have a mindset to sabotage you, spoil your show or do whatever they can to figure out how you do your magic trick.

So now, how do the audience sabotage the magician? I believe that you probably know how to do that too and probably will be very guilty as you have done that very often to friends who performed magic tricks to you. Nevertheless, let me mention 2 very common scenarios here.

Scenario 1: “I want to change my mind”

After either the audience has chosen the first pile or the magician has discarded the second pile that the audience has chosen, the audience will say,

“Oh wait! Can I change my mind?”

“What if I change my mind? Would it make a difference if I have chosen the other pile?”

The audience may not have said all that, but just one of those things or anything to that effect. So now what should the magician do. Do you supposed that the magician is supposed to say,

“No! You can’t change your mind. You have already made your choice and that is final.”

A tug-of-war will occur between the magician and the audience and the whole magic trick is destroyed. Let me tell you what. The magician will be very pissed if this happens. There is only one conclusion. The audience is trying to be nasty. He will vow to himself that he will never show another magic trick to this person ever again.

Scenario 2: “I will decide for you what you are to do.”

In this other scenario, after either the audience had chosen the first pile or the magician had discarded the second pile that the audience had chosen, the audience would insist on what he (the audience) wants to do with the pile of cards he had chosen. If the audience had chosen the second pile of cards and the magician discarded the chosen pile, he would insist that the magician take the second pile that he has chosen. If the audience had chosen the first pile and the magician picked up the first pile that the audience had chosen, the audience would insist that the magician discard away the first pile or the audience insist on holding on to the first pile that he had chosen instead of giving it to the magician. In short, the audience will insist on forcing the magician to do the opposite of what the magician wants do.

Knowing Who To Stay Away From

How do I know? As a hobbyist (a non-professional magician), I perform magic tricks to my friends frequently and I have experienced this many times. This is not meant to be a complaint here but to point out that it is useful to test out your performance first before you actually put on the real show. These annoying audiences will prepare you for the real thing and at the same time it teaches you who to avoid performing magic tricks to in real life. Don’t entertain these smart asses who are unappreciative. Talking about unappreciative audience, avoid such people at all cost. This kind of people who are all out to examine you as if they have set an examination for you to take or they are the police officers interrogating you as a suspect. They have forgotten that you are giving them a free entertainment. They will want to examine all your props and if possible strip search you. They will disrupt you in your routine and dictate to you how you should carry out your routine. And in the event that you manage to survive all the ordeals and still perform a miraculous ending, they will say things like, “I don’t believe that you can really read my mind. Surely there is a trick in it.” Of course there is a trick in it because it is a magic trick, not sorcery or witchcraft. And of course I am supposed to look like I can read your mind and not really read your mind. That’s why I am only a magician, not a wizard or sorcerer. If I am truly a mind reader, I would rather read somebody else’s mind who has more value and not yours. Some others might tell you that they have not seen such a magic trick before and therefore it is not a magic trick to them. They will insist that you should be pulling a rabbit out of a hat or saw a lady in half in order to call it a magic trick. Just tell yourself that these people are absolutely not worth your time and effort. They don’t deserve to be entertained as an audience. They should be abducted and chained up like monkeys by some aliens and made to perform like monkeys to the aliens. That is what I call ENTERTAINMENT!

Fine Tuning The Magician’s Choice

Alright! After that big side step, let’s get back to how to prevent those two nasty scenarios described above from occurring. A professional magician who is experienced will pre-empt something similar to the above two scenarios to happen. Therefore, he would qualify his words and actions a little more in order to seal off objections that may arise later. In using verbal manipulation, you need to gather enough experience to handle objections before they arise. How can this be done?

To avoid scenario 1, after the audience has chosen the first or second pile of cards, the magician could say, “Do you want to change your mind? Is that final? Now, notice that you could have changed your mind but you didn’t (or did). You could have chosen the other pile but you have decided to choose this pile.” All these are said so that the audience could no longer go back on his choice. At the same time, the magician elaborate at great length that the whole process was absolutely random and the audience was absolutely free in making his choice.

To avoid scenario 2, the magician could have chosen to be a little more specific in his instructions instead of being too vague. Let me elaborate on this point. When I first learned the Magician’s Force, I was taught to use the statement, “choose this or that”. More often than not, I encountered scenario 2. The open-endedness of the statement “… choose …” is left to too much interpretation and room for argument. So instead of just say, “choose”, it is better to instruct the audience to do something without any specification of what it is leading to. In our example of 2 piles of cards here, the magician could have said, “pick up a pile of cards”. If the audience pick up the first pile of card, then the magician will ask the audience to hand the pile of card to him (magician). If the audience picks up the second pile of card, then the magician will continue to instruct the audience to put that pile of cards aside elsewhere.

So now you may ask, which approach should I use then since I wouldn’t know which scenario will I encounter. I would suggest that you use the approach in scenario 2. And just in case the audience would say that he wants to change his mind after you have given the second instruction, it would be good to ask audience whether he wants to change his mind after he has picked up a pile of cards before giving him a second instruction such as “hand the pile of cards to me”.

Conclusion

That’s more than enough for today’s post on the Magician’s Choice. In my next post, I teach a simple magic trick that shows you how to apply the Magician’s Force.

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The first magic trick that lasted until 4:30, is some sort of a representation of the “Paper Balls in the Hat” trick using cigarettes. Notice the hand movement and body gesture are somewhat similar to those when he performed the “Paper Balls in the Hat” trick. The difference here is that the paper balls are replaced by cigarettes and there is no hat or box. What you see here are cigarettes appearing and disappearing from one hand to another. Apply all the principles that I have discussed in my earlier articles “How to do magic trick #8: Tony Slydini – The Master of Misdirection” and “How to do magic trick #9: Slydini’s Helicopter Card”. Try to figure out for yourself and do it as an exercise. Just like back in school, the actual learning takes place only when we do our homework.

The second magic trick from 4:50 to 6:30 presented to a lady was the same magic trick Tony Slydini performed to Dai Vernon in the earlier posting “How to do magic trick #8: Tony Slydini – The Master of Misdirection”.

The third magic trick from 6:53 to the end of the video at 8:34 was the “Coin Through The Table” magic trick using 7 coins. Sadly, the video ended abruptly just before the end of this maigc trick. At the end of the video, you saw Tony Slydini put his right hand holding the 4 coins below the table while he put his left hand holding the 3 coins on top of the table. Tony Slydini slammed his left hand on the table and the 3 coins ‘penetrated’ the table and dropped into his right hand that was under the table. Slydini opened his left hand and there was no coin in his right hand or on the table because the 3 coins had supposedly penetrated through the table. As he brought forth his right hand from under the table, there were 7 coins in his right hand.

The “Coin Through The Table” magic trick using 7 coins could have been done with any number of coins, say only 6 coins. However, by having 4 coins in one hand and 3 coins in another hand creates a stronger misdirection that no coin have been passed from one hand to the other while he showed the 3 coins in the left hand the first time (7:54) and 4 coins in the right hand the second time (8:08).

I will make the explanation of this magic trick here short. The first time he revealed his left hand completely opened with 3 coins still in the left hand (7:54) was genuine. That was meant to convince the audience so as to make them let down their guard. The second time when he ‘dropped’ the 4 coins from the right hand (8:08) involved a sleight of hands. Notice that he did not turn his right hand faced up like he did previously with his left hand. 3 coins were clipped with his thumb in his right hand while the one and only unique coin (the English penny among the 7 coins) was dropped onto the table from his right hand. The other 3 coins that appeared on the table were dropped (slid through the bottom) from the left hand. The one coin from the right hand and 3 coins from the left hand totaled up to 4 coins on the table. Upon seeing 4 coins on the table, our minds deceive us that ALL the 4 coins are from the right hand. Right from beginning of the magic trick, Slydini had emphasized to the audience to watch the English penny (that was meant to fool them). He was setting up a mental trap for his audience. So when Slydini picked up the 4 coins from the table with his right hand (palm faced down hiding the 3 coins clipped in the right hand), he then have all the 7 coins in his right hand.

As a concluding statement, I would like to refer you to the movie “Swordfish” . John Travolta played the role of a ruthless terrorist when in actual fact he was a special government agent. He had fooled the police and the FBI agents time and time again, and in his final act, he faked his own death. Somewhere in the middle of the movie where he driving in his car, he said something like this (pardon me because I can’t remember the exact words):

“I love Houdini. He could make an elephant disappear from the stage. The keyword is – MISDIRECTION. What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.”

Meditate on that!

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It is a basic rule in performing magic that you do not repeat your performance of a magic trick to the same audience twice for the obvious reason that the audience will try to notice how you perform the magic trick particularly at your other actions which they did not notice previously. Tony Slydini broke this rule of magic and he is famous for challenging the audience. Nevertheless, he did repeat his performances with slight variations from his previous performances. These variations gave a fresh touch to the same magic tricks and at the same time, they gave the audience the feeling that he was doing something different from the previous performances. Tony Slydini was such a master at his sleight of hands and misdirection that he dared to break these rules. His sleight of hands were so neat that even if you knew how to do the magic tricks that he had performed, you still could not catch him doing it.

So what is the secret to the “6 Coins Routine”? If the legendary Dai Vernon (the man fooled by Tony Slydini) could not figure it out, how could I? However, I can tell you the secret to the “Helicopter Card”.

Notice again that Tony Slydini repeated a number of actions to the audience to wear down the audience’s alertness. The first few times Tony Slydini carried out these actions, he would either explicitly show the audience or subtly let the audience notice that he had not done anything tricky. Subsequently the last time Slydini repeated the same action was when he performed his sleight of hands. In the “Helicopter Card” magic trick, Slydini first drew the audience to a card he put sticking out of the rest of the cards he was holding in his hand. The card that was sticking out was not the audience’s chosen card. It was there to catch the audience’s attention so as to distract, frustrate and to confuse him. Slydini then went on to frustrate the audience by making him pick up card after card on the table to search for his chosen card. This action also served the purpose of giving a miraculous effect at the end when the chosen card appeared on the table as the audience believed that his chosen card was held together with the rest of the cards on Tony Slydini’s other hand. As Slydini did this, his hand would touch each card as he asked, “Is it this card?” The last time when Slydini pointed to a card on the table, he actually dropped the card held in his hand just slightly behind (from Tony Slydini’s perspective) the card he pointed to and this action is covered by his hand as he pointed to a card on the table. Slydini then finally directed the audience’s attention into the air and imagined a card had landed right where he had placed the audience’s chosen card earlier.

His sleight of hands was so extremely neat that you won’t be able to notice it. Just take note that the chosen card appeared just slightly behind (from Tony Slydini’s perspective) the last card Tony Slydini pointed to the audience.

I would like to make a statement about Tony Slydini’s use of human psychology when he performed certain actions repeatedly. We repeatedly see something to be either present (true) or absent (false) frequently in our past experiences. As we make the same observations repeatedly, we become very confident that we know all about certain truth without examining and giving a thought about it. We all come to our own conclusion which is eventually wrong, such as “the world is flat”. And Tony Slydini has used this presumptious mindset very well against us.

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In the first video below, you will see Slydini performed his “Paper Balls in the Hat” magic trick. Slydini crushed and rolled up 3 to 4 pieces of paper into a ball each time and make them appear and disappear in his hand. He then put the ball held in his left hand invisibly into the hat with his right hand. As Slydini opened his left hand, the paper ball had disappeared. This routine is repeated 3 to 4 times and never once do you see him putting the ball into the hat. At the end of the performance, the hat which was shown to be empty at the beginning of the performance is then filled with paper balls.

The secret to the The Paper Balls in the Hat magic trick:

This is done by a combination of lapping, sleight of hands and misdirection.

Lapping is a skill where you use your lap (that is covered by the table) to serve as a platform where you use to drop items onto from your hands or from the table if you want to make the items vanish. You can also pick these items up again into your hands when you make them reappear. Slydini used this technique very often and Dai Vernon (a.k.a. Professor) commented that the powerful technique of lapping had not been utilized enough nor developed further beyond what Slydini had done with lapping.

Note that Slydini repeats his action over and over again. There are times when you taught that he was up to some trick but nothing actually happened. When he first opened his left hand, you expect to see the paper ball disappear but instead the paper ball is still there. The next time he repeated his action, the paper ball actually disappeared. Slydini used repeated actions to confuse the audience. When the audience see the same actions repeated many times without anything actually happening, they will lose their alertness when they see the same actions again and that is when he actually do something sneaky. I must really salute Slydini for his dexterity because even though I have already know his secret moves, I still can’t catch him doing his move at that exact moment when I’m watching out for it a hundred and one percent. Not only is his action so fast, but more admirably the action is so natural.

Watch the video again.

At 0:22, Slydini put his left hand down below the table for the first time. The first time he put his left hand down, there was absolutely no trick.

At 0:29, Slydini showed the ball was still in his left hand.

At 0:31, Slydini transferred the ball from the left hand to the right hand while the right hand was covering the left hand. He then dropped the ball from the right hand onto his lap.

From 0:47 to 0:51, Slydini put his left hand down below the table for the second time. This time he picked up the first ball dropped on his lap and transferred it to his right hand. This ball was held in the right hand and subsequently dropped into the hat while he repeated his previous actions. Even though the second ball remained in the left hand, the first ball which was in the right hand had been dropped into the hat. You may think that nothing was dropped into the hat because the ball was still in the left hand. Moreover, this series of action happened in the beginning and your memory reinforced you to think that the right hand is empty and nothing is put into the hat. You thought that it was nothing but some theatrical gesturing.

At 1:38, you will find that there is no more paper on the table to be rolled into paper ball nor are there any more balls in his hands. Nevertheless he repeated his routine again because he still has one more ball on his lap. This magic trick can never be completed with the same number of balls rolled up appearing in the hat unless he carries out his routine for one last time.

The second video shows 2 magic tricks by Slydini. This is of a much later date than the previous video. Slydini addressed the gentleman as Professor which is possibly Dai Vernon in his younger days. The first 4 minutes is again the “Hat and Paper Balls” magic trick. Note that at 2:04, when Slydini was transferring the previous paper ball in his left hand to his right hand, the ball was not crushed properly and some edges of the paper were visible during the transfer. At 3:17, when Slydini was putting the transferred paper ball in his right hand into the red box, you can notice some trace of yellow paper at the top of the red box while he dropped it into the box. From where Dai Vernon was sitting, he could actually see what was happening. Nevertheless, he pretended to be ignorant and amazed by the trick which helped to reinforce the audience’s amazement. The second magic trick entitled, “The Impossible Dream”, Slydini restored a handful of tobacco and paper into a cigarette. There is actually a third magic trick but it is rather short.

Notice how Slydini involves his audience in his performance. In this way, the audience’s attention is directed to what he has to do away from what he is doing in a split moment. It is also an important way to hold the audience’s attention and interest, another important aspect of performing magic. Obviously, Slydini could have done all those things himself instead of asking the audience to do so but still he chose to get the audience involved. At 5:09, Slydini picked up a cigarette on his lap and held it in his right hand as he rested his right hand at the edge of the table. At 5:14, Slydini dropped all the tobacco and paper on his left hand onto his lap as he turned his left hand to face downward while he pushed the cigarette held in his right hand to emerge from his left hand, giving the illusion that the torn cigarette had been restored. At 5:18, you can see Slydini dusting off the tobacco on his lap.

For the third magic trick where Slydini stretches two halves of a cigarette into two complete cigarettes, just watch when did Slydini put his hands below the table. Once you understand the principle of lapping, you will understand how he did this magic trick. And notice how he directed the audience’s attention away with his hand and eyes while the other hand made his sneaky move. This is the essence of misdirection. Nevertheless Slydini did it so well that even you are aware of the technique, you cannot help but follow his lead and his crucial sleight of hands are simply too fast and natural.

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photo credit: trialsanderrors

Start with some gimmicks. You can get a variety of magical gimmicks either from your local magic shops or purchase them from online magic shops. From gimmicks, you may want to progress on to self-working magic tricks using playing cards. Self-working tricks as the name implies are magic tricks where their effects happen naturally when you follow the procedures of the performance routines accordingly. Self-working magic tricks require little or no sleight of hands at all and are therefore relatively manageable.

Generally, professional magic tricks using playing cards or coins require many sleights that take a lifetime to master. Mentalism magic (mind reading) generally require relatively less sleights (or in fact none at all) as compared to card magic and coin magic. So you may want to begin with mentalism first instead of other types of magic such as card magic or coin magic.

For your personal education in magic, I would recommend that you watch the World’s Greatest Magic DVD series. Each World’s Greatest Magic DVD series features a particular magic trick performed by different magicians with their individual style of presentation. From watching these different presentations, they would enrich your experience with magic. That is the basis of how we learn and become an expert in any subject in any field – with continued exposure to the same thing, experiencing them again in a variety of ways.

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If you have watched David Copperfield’s performance, you would have noticed that he is able to perform very simple and standard routines interwoven into a dance with a storyline in it. David Copperfield is able to inject entertainment into his performance that makes his show more interesting than an amateur magician who merely performs the standard routines as performed by many other magicians.
My brief discussion on stage magic is to show that items used in stage magic is standard stage props which we would not be using. What I would like to focus on here are items used in close-up magic. Close-up magic is more relevant to the non-professional magicians (since we are only interested in amusing our friends and ourselves) whether you are just a hobbyist or someone who intend to pursue magic as a profession in the future. The most common objects used are:

1. Playing Cards
2. Coins
3. Balls and Cups
4. Sponge Balls
5. Rubber Bands
6. Ropes
7. Silks
8. ESP Cards
9. Business Cards (Name Cards)
10. Money
11. Handkerchief
12. Cutleries from dining tables
13. Almost any objects around you.

                                                                                                                   photo credit: keertmoed

Amazing Tricks w/ Everyday Objects – DVD

Among these items, playing cards and coins are among the most common followed by sponge balls, rubber bands. Many close-up magicians are dedicated particularly in the field of card magic and coin magic and the magic tricks devised for playing cards and coins accumulated since early 20th century are numerous and so are the sleights involved in these two types of magic. ESP Cards are more commonly used by mentalists (mind reading magicians) and magic tricks involving the use of ESP cards can be modified and replaced by normal playing cards generally.

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photo credit: cesarastudillo

1. a natural passion for magic especially developed since childhood;
2. to become a professional magician in order to learn a living;
3. to entertain family and friends;
4. to impress ladies.

The last three reasons are extrinsically motivated while the first is one is intrinsically motivated. Humans generally want to possess power beyond their physical abilities. Being able to perform magic not only gives the audience the impression but also satisfies the performer’s imagination that he/she possesses some supernatural powers beyond his/her natural self.

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In this movie, you will be told what kind of attitude magicians should have and the price and value behind every magic tricks. After watching a old Chinese magician performance, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) learned that to perfect the art of magic is to dedicate one’s life totally to the art of magic. The old Chinese magician would hide a fish bowl between his legs as he wobbled to-and-fro on stage and made a fish bowl appear on the table as he covered the table top with a piece of cloth. To hide the fact that he was hiding a fish bowl between his legs, he would wobble daily even when he was not performing.

This subsequently led Alfred Borden to share his life with his twin brother alternatively as one same person. In that way, the twin would act conveniently as the other person’s double which he used in his act, “the transported man”. In order to protect that secret, he was willing to sacrifice the sanity of his wife as they exchange identities with each other from time to time confusing the wife as she found her husband to love her on a certain day and not love her on another. He went as far as severing the fingers of the twin brother when one of them had lost his fingers.

On the other hand, Rupert Angier would stop at nothing to uncover Alfred’s secrets to his act. He would send his lady assistant who loved him to live with Alfred to steal his secrets as well as spend all his money traveling to meet Tesla (Thomas Edison’s rival as an inventor) to buy his ‘transportation machine’ which turned out to be a ‘cloning machine’.

In an earlier scene where Alfred was courting the lady who subsequently became his wife, he performed a coin trick to the lady’s nephew. After his performance, he whispered to the boy, “Never reveal the secret! They will beg you and flatter you but when you reveal the secret, you are nothing to them. The trick you used to fool everyone is everything.”

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So one obvious way where you can learn magic is from the internet. If you have found your way to this website, you would have already been surfing the internet in search of magic. Nevertheless, is that the only way you want to learn magic? It is not true to say that nothing comes free. However, things that come free and easy are usually not of much value, at least the people who receive them do not esteem them highly. Moreover, do you really want to perform magic tricks where the secrets are already made known to many other people who have learned about them from the internet? Instead of amazing others you will probably get the response, “I know that too! What is so amazing about that?”

The other common and easy way to learn magic tricks is to learn from a ‘magician’. This can be done by visiting your local magic shops and buy a magic trick from the shop if they provide that kind of service. Besides that, you may be fortunate or perhaps unfortunate enough to meet a ‘so-called magician’ who is willing to teach you magic tricks personally for a fee. I do believe in the benefit of having someone who is experienced in the craft of magic to guide you personally step by step. However not just anyone who claims to be a magician is truly a proficient magician. Even if they are, they may not necessarily be good teachers who know how to guide you. My biggest objection to learning from such ‘magicians’ is that the fees that they charge for teaching you are too unreasonable. In my early days of learning magic, I have personally paid as much as $100 for a magic trick which I find too unpractical to execute after learning its secret and have also paid several hundreds of dollars for just one or two hours of personal tuition for learning magic. The length of time is too short for you to master any difficult moves (called sleight of hands). You may want to learn these basic sleights and practice them on your own for a reasonable length of time and return to that person and ask for more guidance to perfect your moves. However that is not the deal you are getting. You certainly do not want to pay several hundreds of dollars and sit there for two hours practicing a particular move. In case you are thinking that you just want to learn a few simple tricks in that one or two hours instead of learning some difficult moves, then you might as well spend ten to twenty dollars buying a book and learn more than a dozen magic tricks in them. If you want something more visual, buy a DVD and watch it. And that brings me to my next point.

Having addressed the issue of free magic tricks on the internet, the most common avenues to learn magic nowadays is from books and videos in the form of DVDs. Although some magic books may be expensive, but there are also many magic books that are very cheap, costing less than $10.00. In fact you can find books that teach you as many as 50 magic tricks or more for an affordable price of less than $10.00. If you are serious about learning magic, you should consider investing some money into books. If you do not have much cash to spare, just get a book which you can afford. You will find that you need a considerable length of time just to master every single trick taught in the book.

In this modern era where videos are available in abundance, DVDs have become the media of choice particularly it stimulates both your visual and auditory senses. As a result, secrets to magic tricks are released in the form of DVDs more than they are released in the form of books. DVDs certainly have the edge over books. You can learn magic tricks from DVDs visually as well as replay them over and over again.

Nevertheless, there are several drawbacks if you compare DVDs with books. DVDs are commercial media produced for commercial purposes and so they are relatively more expensive than books in terms of value. If you buy a book on magic with the same price of a DVD, you would have access to many more magic tricks than you would from a DVD. Since DVD is the media of choice, whatever magic tricks you learn from the DVD are also known to many other people who have bought the same DVD as you have. It is easy to watch every magic tricks presented in a DVD but it is not easy to read and learn every magic tricks in a book. So the secrets to the magic tricks found on DVD are not as exclusive as those magic tricks found in books on magic. In fact, there were premium magic tricks that were usually released in the form of books first before they were released on DVDs. Magic tricks that are taught in DVDs are usually taken from books that were published long ago. Professional magician Michael Close says in his DVD that he is an old school magician in that he believes in learning magic from books on magic instead of from DVDs. He explained that magic books explain more clearly on many subtleties of a magic trick needed for learning whereas DVDs do not. Another local magician I met told me that the really good magic tricks are found in books and not in DVDs because magicians write books to leave behind a legacy. It is understandable that it requires time and effort to read and understand from books on magic but the real gems are buried deep within the book. So if you want to find real gems for magic, you will have to dig for it from the books.

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 In this blog, I intend to share what I have learned about magic. The types of magic, where to learn magic, the process of learning magic and how to perform magic.

If you intend to learn magic, you will first have to choose what kind of magic do you want to learn and perform. Weird as it may sound, there are people who only intend to learn but not perform them. These are merely curiosity seekers who are merely interested in the know-hows, or perhaps worse, people who seek to expose tricks where professional magicians spend their time and money to learn, and perform to earn their living. On the other hand, it could be hobbyists who love magic but are too busy to put in the necessary time to master the tricks well enough in order to perform them.

Enough said! As an introduction to those who are new to magic, magics are categorised into the following:

(1) Stage magic are magics performed on a stage to a big audience easily from a number of 50 to hundreds. We are largely familiar with such magic when we first watched magic shows broadcasted on television. Such acts rely heavily on props and more often than not, require a stage assistant. Some common props are the magic wand, hats, doves and rings. Hypnotism followed by levitation and sawing of a lady assistant are common stage magic we have witnessed since childhood.

(2) Close-up magic are performed to a very small number of audience most suitably on a one-to-one basis. Unlike stage magic where the magician is kept at a distance high up on a stage, far away from the audience, there is a lot of interaction between the magician and the audience in a close-up magic. A close-up magician is usually engaged by organisers of dinner-and-dance or a cocktail party to entertain the guests. The magician would have to walk around and mingle with the guests, strike up conversation with them and entertain them with magic. This is the kind of magic that non-professional or hobbyists are interested in learning. Being a hobbyist myself, we are not seeking to perform magic for a living except to entertain ourselves and our friends. However I would not deny that at a certain point in time, a hobbyist may have refined his/her skills well enough to perform them in public.

(3) Parlour magic is quite similar to close-up magic except that it is meant for a slightly bigger crowd of 10 to 20 audience. The magic tricks employed could be those used for close-up magic as well. The difference depends very much on how the magician manage his/her audience.

(4) Street magic as it is called are magic tricks performed to strangers on the street. In performing street magic, you may approach just one stranger one-to-one or perhaps a group of people. In the process, you may even attract a big crowd. The magic tricks employed are usually that of close-up magic. In the event that you manage to attract a big crowd, make sure that you are not performing tricks where the execution of your sleight of hands are proficient enough where it cannot be seen from all angles.

(5) Illusions are magic tricks usually involving some disappearing act followed by some reappearance somewhere else. As the name implied, an illusion act is merely an … illusion. Famous acts such as “The Disappearance of the Statue of Liberty” and “Crossing of the Great Wall of China” by David Copperfield are examples of illusions. However, the employment of camera tricks in an illusion is frowned upon by professional magicians.

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