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Ive got 2 things that I need some help with. The first thing basically is the best place to learn a one handed top palm from? Ive got Expert Card Technique but its quite a hard description of the sleight and I cant get it. The card spins right out of control and shoots out of the right side of my hand, Ive been practicing for hours but there isn't a change.

Also, I wouldn't say I'm not good at magic. I own a few books and 2 sets of DVD, royal road and David Stone DVDs. But, I've never performed for anybody, and when I do, I shake uncontrollably and sometime struggle sticking a card in the middle of the pack. I stutter and get all nervous, even though I'm pretty confident normally, when I do magic, Im a nervous wreck.

It's really putting me off and makes me wonder why I do it, but everyday I practice with whatever spare time I have and get annoyed when I can't have a deck of cards in my hands (!). Am I weird??

No you're not weird. You're like most people obsessed by magic!

I learnt the one hand top palm from Hugard's Card Manipulations No.1, but if you haven't performed yet, I would leave these kind of sleights aside and perform things you feel comfortable with.

I suggest performing some easy self-workers for people at first to get your confidence up. Once people have enjoyed what you are doing then the nerves will disappear. Magic is not all about knowing sleights. It's about entertaining people and if you are too nervous at the moment then performing something you know is foolproof for you is a good way to start to build up your performing confidence.
If you are thinking about sleights, misdirection, etc it will show as the effects you perform should be ones you could do in your sleep. You can then concentrate on performance.

I know PRECISELY how you feel when it comes to being a nervous wreck, everything feels cool until someone asks you to do a trick. You are NOT weired!

The only remedy for that is performing. seriously practice the effect, do it till you can do it PERFECTLY.
Try holding a pack of cards in your hands as often as you can at home, even if you aren't planning on doing any tricks. Casually do your false shuffles and stuff, even if they a watching you.
I don't mean you should be performing for family all the time, but doing many conjurations in front of them helps to break the ice.

Jittery hands are totally normal, somebody who doesn't get nervous is weired.(As a wise man once told me)

And like Lord Freddie said, its about entertaining them, -and thats a comforting thought- (quoting Gandalf)

Double check your RRTCM DVDs. It has a section on top palming single and multiple cards. Depending on the trick, you may be able to work around a palm by using a key card and/or a series of cuts and injogs which are also covered in RRTCM.

The shaky hands and nerves will go away as you gain confidence in your performance. There are some simple tricks that pack a big punch to the laymen in RRTCM that are great for confidence building. Topsy-turvy, Poker Player's Picnic, You Do As I Do and The Piano all come to mind. They can all be linked together as well.

No matter how much you practise in your room, you still will get nerves and shake.

You need to perform to people to get rid of the nerves. Once you start performing to people, your confidence will go up and your shaky hands will go away. I don't panic much nowadays after performing to loads of people. I used to shake for a good 5-10 minutes during the initial part of my performance.

For me, shaky hands went away after about 8-10 months or so, so you might use that as a goal. Start performing to people more and shaky hands will go away without you even noticing it (I didn't notice it until someone talked about shaky hands and I realised I'd stopped shaking!).

Wow thanks for the all the advice I'll definately be checking over some of the tricks in my royal road DVDs. What do you think the best source is for self working tricks?

Thanks again its really helpful

I, like most people, had the same problem initially, but after having performed only a couple of times to friends it was already much better, so just stick to technically not so demanding sleights to start with until you have the nerves to perform the more complex stuff flawlessly.

However, I had an - in my humble opinion anyway - interesting thought just now. Occasionally we find laymen do simply card tricks or so at parties, not with the intention of doing any real "magic", but just to do a card trick, say. And often they'll then after having friends guess how it works and repeating the trick a zillion times they'll expose the method and next time all the friends will do the trick for their friends at the next party and so on. You all know what I'm talking about.
They don't (normally) have shaking hands or are as nervous - but why not? Surely you have practised far more than they have, you have worked out your patter in detail, perhaps even how to respond to different questions etc from your audience. They haven't. And perhaps that's exactly the point: They just do a trick - if they mess up, oh well, it was just a trick, they don't claim to be a magician and thus feel no need to justify such a claim. We however, are different. We have seen great magicians perform our feats, have practised for hours that same simple card sleight, stood in front of a mirror every day trying to achieve perfection - but when it comes to it, we are nervous and concerned about messing up. We want to present ourselves as some kind of authority over our audience (and probably rightly so) and so we're afraid to maybe expose the key card, make the force too obvious or whatever, when there is, in fact, no danger of that actually happening. But why do we think that? I would think that the answer is that we see our own performance with a magician's eyes - knowing the method the sleight is of course easy to spot and too often we forget that the audience is in no such position! It is surprising how much one can get away with.
Anyway, it is no news that we sometimes have trouble remembering that we are performing for laymen who don't know the method and don't see the sleight which we thought we made so obvious.
But why do our hands shake, but the lay performer's, who knows a trick or two, performing it with no patter but just as a "Pick a card - this is your card" trick, doesn't? I think it's a similar reason: We're trying to be perfect, almost to be good enough to fool ourselves, they don't. We put our expectations for ourselves unnecessarily high and so are afraid not to achieve that high standard for which we have practised and as a beginner, it is unlikely that we can achieve perfection when having to focus on patter, method and our interaction with the audience at the same time. This only becomes possible with practice before a real audience. So if we don't set our goals too high initially, we will probably end up performing better than we would have done if we had.

Nerves will go the more you perform. Trust me. To start off just perform to family and then friends and then build it up from there.
Cant help with the top palm tho..

Well Iv been searching around and saw Scarne on Card Tricks review and it seems most people love it and its full of self working tricks so Im going to go ahead and get that. Thanks for all the help though guys cant wait to start performing!