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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If you wish to watch more of Tony Slydini’s magic tricks and to learn the secrets behind these magic tricks, you can find them in this almost 2-hour long Slydini Lecture by Jim Cellini – DVD .

In this DVD (Slydini Lecture), Jim Cellini (Slydini’s disciple) performed the following magic tricks designed by Slydini.

1. Slydini Silks Routine.
2. Cut and Restored Rope.
3. Vanishing Silk.
4. Chinese Linking Rings.
5. Paperbox and Balls Routine.
6. Coins Through Table.
7. Silk Fountain (performed by Jim Cellini’s wife).

You may want to get this 312-page book. “Slydini Book, Annotated Magic of” written by Lewis Gansons. There you may find the explanations of most of Slydini’s magic tricks or perhaps all of them.

Following these performances, Jim Cellini proceeded to explain each magic trick with the exception of the Chinese Linking Rings and the Silk Fountain. Anyway, the secret behind the Chinese Linking Rings is the same to any other magic performance using Chinese Linking Rings. In fact at one point, he carelessly exposed one of the ring’s opening at the early stage of the performance. The Silk Fountain performed by Jim Cellini’s wife was not skillful enough. For those who are fairly experienced with knowing how to do magic tricks will be able to figure out how this magic trick is done. If not, just watch closely several times and you will be able to figure them out by yourself. She is not experienced enough and her lack of proficiency in her sleight of hands actually gave away the secret of the magic trick. May be that was why the secret to this magic trick was not explained in this DVD. 

For the “Coins Through Table” magic trick, Jim Cellini explained in detail the ‘7 coins routine”, “6 coins routine”, “4 coins routine”, “2 coins routine” and “1 coin routine”. He covered the subtlety of the hand movements Slydini made and how he personally modified them for himself, as well as how to create the sound of the coins penetrating through the table and falling into the hand under the table. He went on to discuss an unpublished “Unique Coin Routine” which is the one where Slydini fooled Dai Vernon. I have left out the explanation in my earlier posting for this magic trick. Please refer to “How to do magic tricks #9 -  Slydini’s The Helicopter Card”.

The invaluable part of this DVD lies on the discussion that went beyond how each magic trick was performed. Jim Cellini covered quite a lot of important information on how Slydini taught him on his body, hands and legs movement on stage, how to sit in such a way so that the lapping technique can be done efficiently and effectively. These lessons are hard to illustrate in books and are seldom taught in any media. 

Jim Cellini explained many magic tricks performed by Slydini in which Jim Cellini did not perform in this DVD such as the cigarette magic tricks. He also told how these magic tricks came into existence.

Some unexpected bonuses are stories about Tony Slydini and Dai Vernon’s relationship, Slydini’s way of looking at magic and how he designed his magic tricks. Jim Cellini told how Slydini designed a card magic as Slydini performed it to Harry Lorayne by using his unique way of performing magic. It was quite hilarious.

The only pity is that you do not get to watch any footage of Slydini in this DVD. However, the materials in this DVD are first class. If you want to watch more of Slydini’s footage, you will get a lot of them in this two-disc DVD set, “As I Recall (2 DVD Set) – Tony Slydini”. You will also get to see Slydini’s students perform and explain some of Slydini’s tricks which include those other magic tricks by Slydini that are not performed in the “Slydini Lecture by Jim Cellini – DVD”. 

Here are some video clips from this 2-disc DVD set.

Perhaps you may ask, “Why can’t I find all of Slydini’s magic tricks performed and explained all in one DVD?” First of all, I did not produce them. And that is how the way the market operates. Have you ever found a CD of your favourite artiste’s with all his or her songs recorded in it? Never!  

If you really want to know all about Slydini’s magic trick, you may want to get this 312-page book. “The Annotated Magic of Slydini” written by Lewis Gansons. There you may find the explanations of most of Slydini’s magic tricks or perhaps all of them. I do believe that you can find the secret to Slydini’s “Helicopter Card” in here.

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photo credit: sambeckwith

Hello world! It has been quite a while since I last updated my blog. Life is busy especially when you are working full-time. Let me get on with my article immediately.

So far in my articles, you may have noticed that I have presented the process of learning magic and the principles and techniques used in magic tricks progressively in a systematic manner. If you follow my articles carefully, you will have a clear and good understanding of the essentials of the secrets behind any magic trick. Subsequently, it will be easy for you to begin learning magic systematically, selecting the field of magic you like to specialize in instead of groping in the dark, learning random tricks which may be either too difficult or too easy but meaningless. That will save you lots of time and money.

Moreover, different magic tricks have different effects on the audience. So it is important for you to know what you are trying to achieve with your magic tricks. Are you trying to build rapport with someone? Or is it you want to break the ice with a stranger? Perhaps you are trying to focus the attention of a group of familiar or unfamiliar people on yourself or you are simply trying to entertain your family and friends. Using the wrong magic tricks and performing the right magic tricks with the wrong presentation will not bring you the desired effects. Thus picking up magic tricks randomly here and there, especially free magic tricks on the internet will not help you achieve your objectives.

Nevertheless, I will only touch on the general principles but not into the details as I do not wish to expose the secrets behind magic openly. These articles are meant to help those who are truly interested in investing into learning the art of magic and making the journey easier for them. This is to prevent exposing the secrets behind the art of magic to nosey curiosity seekers who do not respect the art of magic.

Magic is essentially an art of deception. The line is extremely thin between a con artist and a magician. A magician uses the art to entertain whereas a con artist uses the art to rip off his targets in order to benefit himself unethically. Unfortunately, there are many half baked magicians who are also part-time conmen. In the process of learning magic, I was unfortunate enough to come across a few of these. If you want to learn magic, you must be clear about your objectives and make a clear stand on how you are going to use what you learn from the art of magic.

The essential principles of performing magic tricks are

1. the force,
2. misdirection,
3. cunning phrasing of words and
4. sleights 

Understanding how these four principles work will enable you to know how more than 70 percent of all magic tricks work.

The principle of force as the name implies, forces the audience to make a choice that is predetermined by the magician. For example a magician let the audience pick a card at random. The card that the audience eventually pick is the card that the magician ‘forces’ the audience to pick. Of course the audience will not realize that if the magician is skilful in the execution of the force. The force can be executed by using props, sleights, mathematical principles or a sequence of instructions dictated by the magician to the audience. A magic trick that uses the principle of force is usually one where the magician predicts an outcome such as predicting the card chosen by the audience. The field of magic known as Mentalism (mind reading) uses the principle of force very often.

Misdirection simply means distracting the audience. Stage magic is composed heavily of stage props and misdirection. A very simple thing to do is to direct your audience to look at somewhere else away from what you are sneakily trying to do elsewhere. Directing the audience to look elsewhere is a visual misdirection. Besides that you can misdirect the audience by keeping them busy with something to do or engaging them in a conversation. I would like to call that mental misdirection. Another form of mental misdirection is to make the audience think that you have done something, say with your hands, when you have actually done something else. The master of misdirection is late Tony Slydini. To understand and appreciate how does misdirection works in magic tricks, it will benefit you greatly to watch Tony Slydini perform his magic tricks.

The third principle listed here involves a manipulation of words. I would like to call this double-talking. Whenever a magician engages the audience in a conversation, his instructions and predictions may seem to mean something but it could also mean another thing. Besides double-talking, he would possibly instruct the audience to do something subconsciously by a play of words.

Sleights are skilful manipulation of hands. Mastering sleights is the most time consuming task magicians have to spend their time on. Although it may not necessarily be true that the magician who is the most skilful at his sleights is the best magician but a magician must be skilful at his sleights in order to be a good magician. Thus I have always advocated beginner magicians or aspiring magicians to learn magic tricks that do not involve the use of sleights in the beginning but to perform simpler form of magic tricks while giving themselves time to practice their sleights.

In my next article, I will talk more about Misdirection in magic.

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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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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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