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In The Royal Road to Card Magic, you are instructed right from the get go to make your moves slowly, and at a natural pace. This makes good sense, because a hurried approach suggests you are rushing only in order to hide something, and if you need to hide something then either you're not doing the sleight effectively, or you ought to be hiding the sleight through misdirection instead.

However, I do feel that there is something to be said for running through moves as quickly as possible when you're practicing. I don't think you should exclusively do so, but I think hurrying through a trick is a great way of convincing yourself that you have the moves down, and the more comfortable you are with doing it at speed, the more comfortable you ought to be when doing it at a more natural tempo. I'm currently working on a deck stacking bit, which allows four cards at the bottom of the deck to end up stacked in the fourth and final hand of a four card deal (listed in 7 by Peter Duffie). I know that if and when I perform this for someone, I don't want to hesitate when it comes to running on the cards for the stack. I'm not there yet, but "hurrying through" has put me much closer.

Some intresting ideas there. This thread maybe usefull

http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic15488

Interesting reading. Thanks.

The analogy I meant to put in the above post was that of an actor learning his lines - he'll run through them as quickly as possible when memorising the lines themselves, and once he has them down, he can start to worry about how best to deliver them.

When we saw Paul Daniels at Ipswich last year he advocated doing things the other way round. Run through the routine and moves in slow motion and then gradually get faster until you reach performance speed. I guess it all depends on what works for each individual but it's nice to get the feel of the whole thing and then work on the individual aspects - at least you'll know which bit goes where and the importance/relevance of each part.

I find that practicing fast causes my to rush when I come to perform.

I tend to start off doing everything slowly, when I'm happy with everything I build up to performance speed, but never faster than that.

Practice is one of them personal things what may be good for some may be bad for others. Some people will take a rountine and do it in 30 seconds some will take the same one and make it last two minutes. But if you do a routine really fast all your others will have to be, other wise the tempo of your act will be up and down.

True, and as I said originally, I'm not advocating just practicing fast. A case in point is with another Duffie routine, The Laughing Queens, where I was so intent on pulling off the moves "well" that I forgot the reveal of the queens at the end was supposed to be a surprise for my delightfully patient audience. The trick's a beauty as well in that that final reveal happens long after the work has been done, so the reveal itself should be devoted entirely to showmanship (and not done almost as an afterthought made in the relief of not cocking up the count). I guess I'm trying to decouple the mechanics of the trick from the presentation.