In this video, you will watch how Tony Slydini performed 2 of his tricks, namely, the “6 Coins Routine” and “The Helicopter Card”. For each trick, he performed it twice, each time with a slight variation.
Slydini Breaking The Rules Of Magic
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.
Secret To Slydini’s “Helicopter Card” Trick
So what is the secret to the “6 Coins Routine”? I can tell you the secret to Slydini’s “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.
Slydini’s Use Of Psychology
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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