I have just concluded my series on misdirection and I was looking through my earlier postings, namely, “How To Do Magic Tricks #7 – Principles and Techniques Used in Performing Magic”. In that articles I mentioned about the four principles of how to do magic tricks, namely, “The Principle of Force”, “The Art of Misdirection”, “Verbal Manipulation” and “The Art of Sleight of Hands”. I have also submitted an article on that topic to Ezine Articles and upon comparison, I found that the article that was submitted to Ezine Articles was clearer and more concise. I am therefore re-posting my article here for reference.

How to Do Magic Tricks – Four Key Principles

Have you ever wondered how magic tricks work? As an ignorant child, I was told by my brother that magicians have very fast hands. The magician’s hands move so fast that you cannot see it. Otherwise, magic tricks are done by using camera tricks. To say that a magician uses camera tricks to perform his magic would have been one of the greatest insults directed at a magician. This is as good as saying that the magician is unskillful and uses the camera to deceive the audience. You do not need a magician to do that. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can perform magic using camera tricks.

Generally, magicians design and perform their magic tricks by operating according to a few principles. They are the principles of force, misdirection and verbal manipulation. Besides these, magicians spend a great amount of time practicing what is known as the sleight of hands. These are skillful hand movements used to conceal, deceive and confuse what the hands are actually doing. It is not true like what my brother told me that magicians have hands that move so fast to a point that the movement is invisible to the audience. Although certain sleight of hands do require the hand movements to be quick but most other sleights do not necessarily require quick hand movements. Sleights done skillfully can be performed before your very eyes and you will not notice what has been done. Some master magicians who possessed such skills are Tony Slydini and Dai Vernon.

The principle of force as the word implies, forces the audience to make a selection that is predetermined by the magician himself. This can be done in many ways. Where counting and mathematics is involved, the magician is using some mathematical formula that work out to a unique answer. Otherwise, it can be done using a gimmick such as a trick deck. Most of the time, it is pure sleight of hands where playing cards are involved. A force is used particularly in magic tricks where the magician tells you what you have selected such as a card or a word from certain pages of a book.

The principle of misdirection aims at directing the audience attention away from what the magician is actually doing. Simply said, it is misleading you to look away in another direction from where the magician is doing his stuff. The master of misdirection is the late Tony Slydini, possibly the only person who could still fool the late Dai Vernon (master of sleight of hands). One of the way where misdirection operates is to use big hand movement and looking at the movement of the hand intently. This is a body language that will naturally lead the audience to look in the same direction as you (the magician) are looking. At this moment, you (the magician) will be able to do what you need to do quickly with the other hand where the audience is not looking. I have noticed that Tony Slydini often confused his audience by making repeated hand movements. While the audience suspected him to do something with a certain hand movement, he had not done anything absolutely. However, during one of those times when he repeated the same movement, he would have done something sneaky when the audience had dropped their guard after seeing the same movement several times. Tony Slydini is known not to use any gimmicks in performing his magic tricks. He relies purely on misdirection and his sleight of hands.

Finally, magicians use verbal manipulation to talk you into doing what he wants you to do as well as convincing you of what he has done and predicted. It is like saying nothing and yet seems like having said everything at the same time. The use of verbal manipulation is also another way to operate the principle of force. Fortune tellers and spiritual mediums often use such skills to deceive people who seek guidance from them. Witches back in the dark ages who were burned may not necessarily truly know the art of black magic but merely convinces people of their power by using verbal manipulation as well as a combination of the above principles.

In my next posting, I will cover on the “Principle of Force” in how to do magic tricks.

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!

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.