talkmagic.co.uk

Crazy Man's Handcuffs

Enough said, really.

V.E. Day wrote:Yes I find that most tricks with banknotes can be performed completely surrounded, but always carry a baseball bat under your skirt just incase the audience try to rob you.

lmfao, where i live we carry baseball bats on a regular basis if we don't get paid!

there is a load of mentalism things you could do using billets, and other secret techniques all found in the wonderful 13 steps to mentalism. I have done tried some mentalism rotines in shops etc on strangers and they get more of a wow factor for me than my card tricks in which i specialize in!!

bmat wrote:I'm curious, why no cards and coins? Audiences love cards and coin magic.

No they don't. Cards in particular bore them.

I find that a balloon swallow, followed by the production of a mouth coil, hits the bill.

TonyB wrote:

bmat wrote:I'm curious, why no cards and coins? Audiences love cards and coin magic.

No they don't. Cards in particular bore them.

I find that a balloon swallow, followed by the production of a mouth coil, hits the bill.

I'm going to be petty and start a silly argument with someone far more experienced with me, because, after all, thats what forums are for. Here I go:

I have asked members of my audience, and they always say that the cards were their favourite. It's mainly the magician that gets bored in my opinion. But then again, all audiences are different, so that was a rubbish argument by me.

I think audiences like card magic - they like my magic anyway.
They get bored with too much card magic, as does the magician performing all day - but hey, i could do card magic all day, all week if you kept paying for it.

What kind of card magic do laymen like?

Is it visual stuff, like Card through window/manipulations;
Flashy stuff, like gambling routines;
mentalist or memory demonstrations or
good old fashioned card locations?

I like to catergorise card tricks, and I guess all magicians do. It doesn't make us bad people.

Doves. Use pigeons for that impromptu effect.

What kind of card magic do laymen like?

The answer is routines. Magic that builds, good, better, best.
Not just a single card location.
Gambling routines are usually quite drawn out, but you can incorporate that theme into the script, for people who play card games, poker, blackjack, etc...
For a group of guys who play cards, I will put in some seemingly more difficult card effects.
Manipulations are for the stage.

In my experience audiences are very polite and tell us what we want to hear. So you have to look beyond the obvious. I personally look for the eyes glazing over when the magician moves on to the second card trick. I see it all the time.

Not from my own performances, of course. I don't do card tricks.

I have seen it so often; a magician performs some good stuff, the audience applaudes loudly, then when he is gone they really say what they feel. And it is rarely complimentary. You are fooling yourself if you think otherwise.

I stayed in a cabin with a group of people last year, and one magician kept telling me how well his tricks were going down. Funny thing is that once he began peforming, people found excuses to go to bed. Card tricks are far less popular than you imagine.

Tony you could not be further from the truth.All through the forums have you been bashing card tricks saying they're boring.They're far from it especially my ones anyway.I do mainly card effects and dabble with bits of other things.

Just a few weeks ago was i table hopping and blew a table away with just card effects so much so that they told me to go over to their friends table afterwards.When I went to the friends table,one of the lads rushed over to see the card tricks again and then gave me a tenner for doing his table.Later on in the night i was at the bar and a blonde from the second table rushed over to me to give me another tenner and said ''that's from that table'' and pointed at the second table.

The same night I had a ginger bloke come up to me and say ''I need to know how you did that four ace trick.I loved all the other ones but that four ace one was amazing.Where did you learn them.I'll have to google it when I get home''

I got all that feedback on one night of table hopping with cards alone.Needless to say the tables were immensely entertained and one table did ask me to come back at the end of the night too.

If you think card tricks are boring it's probably because you have no belief in what you are doing.Bill Malone in my oppinion is the best example of how card tricks are not boring once a bit of personality is injected into the performance.

I'm sorry but I'm not having it.Card tricks are bloody amazing done well and there is no ifs or buts about it.Audiences love card tricks performed well.If they didn't,I wouldn't have so much confidence and self belief when approaching strangers with a deck in my hand.Having said that,they are skeptical at the start as the though of someone doing card tricks while your trying to have your dinner can seem daunting.That is until you have seen mine of course.As a man's dinner was served I said ''I'll let you enjoy your dinner'' to which he replied''No no f*&k the dinner show me more.

I'm rambling now but that's just my experience and I just wish it not to be undermined

Tony, you are right that you have to look to your audience to see if they enjoy it.

However, as with 'Flood' - I perform card effects, and get good reactions - As I stated I feel it is important to have a wide range of effects though, differing styles of card effects and non-card magic too.

Yes there are some magicians who perform magic only for themselves without any hint of thought for the audience.

But if I thought that cards did not fit into my working performances, then I would drop them immediately - the fact that so many working magicians do perform with cards, is testament to their ability to entertain lay audiences.

Sometimes the best thing to do with a deck of cards is to put them back in the box, put them away and do something else. Sorry guys but card tricks are almost always boring but magic with cards ... now that's a different story..

I don't just perform card tricks solidly, but my audiences always enjoy the ones I do perform. Tricks like "design for laughter" always get a great reaction. Although I do believe that just because there are thousands of tricks possible with cards, you do not have to do all of them!

Has anyone seen Ricky Jays '52 Assistants?'

The show is performed almost exclusively with cards.
I can rarely engage with card performances, but '52 Assistants' is one of my all time favorite magic shows ever.

I don't know why that particular show is so good. Maybe because the focus isn't so much on the card tricks, as on the theatre or story that surrounds them?

I have seen extracts from Paul Daniels 'Magic of Max Malini' where he uses cards twice. He performs Malinis 'Card Stab' and uses the cards to form a question mark as an introduction to the famous block of ice effect. I like these two, maybe because they dont feel like 'card tricks' as much as a kind of theatre with cards.

Im sounding pretentious now. I shall be muttering about symbolism soon, if you dont stop me.