talkmagic.co.uk

hey people,

recently i have been practising the pass, as i am trying to move away from tricks involving DL's ,at one point all the tricks i did had dl's. Anyway, obviously the pass isnt the easiest of moves to perfect, but this got me thinking.

When i started in magic, my dl's and certain forces weren't amazing, but because i knew how to hold my spectators attention, and stop them from looking at the deck, i could usually prevent them from seeing the move. Im not saying i was that bad that you could obviously tell what i was doing, but the moves wasnt 'clean'. If you get me.

Anyway, here is my point, would you practise relentlessly until your moves were perfect so that you could fool most magicians, or would you practice to a sufficient level that you could fool every non magician and use good misdirection????

At the risk of sounding all Yoda on you - the choice is not mine to make but yours to discover.
I love the craft of magic and thanks to the guiding wisdom of plenty of folk on here you come to understand that it's all about presentation and entertainment mixed in with (not always as much as you thought you needed) "technical" skill.
If that involves a decent but not invisible pass with adequate "mis-direction" - all power to it.

You will NEVER fool a magician with a move. You will ALWAYS fool a magician with good misdirection.

As to practicing moves, whet you have to do is practice them until you feel comfortable with them. This stage differs from person to person, but the one thing that is for sure is, its not at the stage where a move is flawless. you must then concentrate on two things. when to execute the move, and how to make sure that they are not looking when they do this.

This rule goes for every move you do, Including the DL.

Hey there, Superman. I'm a fan of your coin bend. nyuk-nyuk.

Unless a room full of magicians is my paying audience, I could care less about fooling them. This whole "Magician Fooler" is BS marketing to sell us method number 1,856,903,277 of achieving the exact same result as the 1,856,903,276 methods before it.

Here's a secret about the Pass and it's variations- very rarely is it actually needed.

It's a bit like politics. There are extremists on both sides and neither of them make any sense.


You can drive around without changing gears. But nobody reccomends that you do it all the time just because its possible under certain circumstances. You can, if you only need to travel in a straight line, drive without having to turn the wheel. But if you want to be Moss you have to do both well.

Magicians aren't going to pay you - why do you need to fool them?

Why did you give up doing DLs - you've just thrown away about 15,000 different effects!

I'll be the one doing DL's for laymen, then.

on the subject of giving up lifts... It struck me this morning that you can not afford to give them up. I will explain.

you have a card placed into the middle of a deck. you perform a flawless pass, controling the card to the top of the deck......

now what? you wish to show the top card is not the chosen one..... what do you do?

you do a lift.

see.. A pass is not the be all and end all in card magic, It is meerly part of the journey that takes you to your destination.

You have to be a political extremist who is good at driving if you want to be Kate Moss? You learn something new every day.

firstly i havent stopped doing dls, sorry if it came across that way, just at one point every trick i had involved a dl. So, while dl's are still part of my tricks, currently im trying to do tricks which dont involve them.

Also, forgive me if this isn't the correct name, but isnt there the second card deal, where you take the second card instead of the first, so technically i could get away with not using a dl. i mean i dont think id use that but im just saying there is an alternative to the dl.

Staying on topic, looking at some magicians sleights, they are practically invisible and have no misdirection, and while they dont 'fool' me (assuming i can call myself a magician and not someone who knows a few tricks) i know something has happened at that moment im just not sure what it is until the effect occurs

for example card changes need to be 'perfect' otherwise it is easy to work out how they are done, and you cant really misdirect the viewers attention as you want them to see the card change.

furthermore, if someone is poor at misdirection, but they have a near perfect technique, it is still harder to catch them out as you will be looking at the deck but wont 'see' anything, however a magician with good misdirection but poor technique, is far easier to catch out, as, if you focus completely on the deck, and we know some people do that, then it would be impossible to do any sleights without being caught. Some of my friends who know a few tricks have this problem, they arent magicians because they dont have that same errrr 'obsessive' quality. They dont have the best technique, but they are very good at misdirection, and even by fluke, if i look at the deck the moment they are looking at their key card, or holding a break, i know how their trick was done.

off topic, upon learning of the pass, i have only recently thought of new or improved ways of doing tricks. maybe that is because of my lack of knowledge of magic. i know that basically the pass, is like a one handed cut, and i guess that if im going to misdirect the viewer while doing the pass, i could just as easily do a one handed cut or for that fact a two handed cut but then there are some magicians, who perform it amazingly, and as previously said sometimes doing the pass is the simplest way of doing some tricks.

also when i say obsessive quality of a magician i mean that we all know there is a certain 'quality' or 'reason' which brought us to magic, in my case... to impress the girls

sorry for the long response, enjoy the reading

The late, great Jerry Andrus was fond of saying, "Why do you want to try and move half a deck to change the position of one card, it has to be easier to just move the one card" or something to that effect.

I use a half pass to turn a card over, otherwise I DL or and top change. But to get to the real issue I use what is best to achieve the effect I am trying to accomplish, for me, and my spectators it is all about the effect, method is always just a means to an end. The easier, the better.

Politely, your thinking is flawed in many ways.

First and foremost, magic won't get you laid.

For the vast majority of people, the second deal and even more so the pass are much more complicated that the DL. If the DL is giving you a problem that day, the simplest solution is to take the top card and bring it up to your face, keeping the back to the spec. Miscall it. Wait for the "Nope, not it." Place it back in/on the deck and go from there.

Adding sleights to a trick does not make it easier. One of the small handful of things that the masters, the wannabes and everyone in between have in common is eliminating as many sleights as possible up until the point of doing so means losing the desired effect and/or response.

Misdirection doesn't mean suddenly pointing and yelling something about a polka dotted elephant. Misdirection is usually rather subtle. You don't want them to know that you are leading them.

If the specs are burning your hands then you are doing it wrong. You may have presented your trick as a challenge or puzzle. You may be performing it for the second time. You may be fumbling. You may be coming across as a lil' too nervous. This is assuming that you are performing for the average person. If you are performing for someone familiar with some methods then that's up to them, really. Why do they want to burn your hands rather than simply enjoy the effect? So they can work it out? Why do they want to do that? They have no idea if they'll actually want to know since they haven't bothered to put themselves in the role of the spec to begin with. Are they wanting to do nothing more than dangle that they know the method in front of you? If that's the case, why on Earth would you want to perform for them to begin with?

If your friends that know a couple of tricks are able to back track your method based off of one live performance then, quite frankly, you don't need "Magician Fooler" material. You need to get the basics down first.

"Magician Fooler", what a bunch of marketing c*** (not the best) that is. You want to fool the type of magician who is worried about that c*** (not the best)? Do a short but sweet self-worker that doesn't use any gaffs. Let 'em search the big name online sites until their fingers bleed. They'll never find it because they've already dismissed the book that it came out of as being a "kids" book by some guy named Fulves or an "outdated" book by some guy named Scarne. They can burn your hands and inspect the cards all that they want.

V.E. Day wrote:You have to be a political extremist who is good at driving if you want to be Kate Moss? You learn something new every day.

Well, we all know what Kate Moss is like

[ insert some explanation about 'technical ability' and 'misdirection' as being slanderously depicted as mutually exclusive polar opposites... ]

I think it was Ascanio who said something along of: one needs technique perfected enough to not need misdirection and misdirection perfected enough to not need perfect technique.

also when i say obsessive quality of a magician i mean that we all know there is a certain 'quality' or 'reason' which brought us to magic, in my case... to impress the girls

Quite a few customers come in the shop thinking they can meet a stunning woman by doing a DL or two but I always give them this sage like advice:

'Learn the guitar instead and join a band'

It's all because of that book 'The Game'. Which I've read out of curiosity (didn't tell the missus mind ) and I'm a bit dubious about the authors 'exploits' myself. Embellished possibly for the market? But of course he uses magic in the book to pull women. Apparently. He probably didn't.

I hope however that since discovering magic you have fell in love with the craft and don't use it for the sole purpose of getting Mr Winkle a bit of loving.

Misdirection is a subtlety. In the same way padding your pockets for a Shapie a magician should never make a song and dance about it, by actually saying "where's my Sharpie?", the misdirection of invariably using this ploy to ditch or load works much better without drawing attention to it.

As to magic and attraction, I always find the banter whenever you see Peter Nardi and Marc Spelman on a DVD where typically Nardi does an effect and with tongue firmly placed in irreverent cheek, Spelman will say: "that's now made me want to sleep with you". But I think some magicians do lack social skills and for the own shortcomings invest a lot of their time and practice in the vain and shallow hope that the Spelman situation would materialise. It's reiterated when a magician character in Skins does a few tricks and his friend says: "now will you sleep with him?" Which is funny.

I do blame The Game and all of the associated MTV culture of pick up artists, as on occasion I have hand a handful of times when guys will raise the subject of how magic is a form of "peacocking" and "sarging", yes, I read The Game too :-s

Ha ha as to learning the guitar and joining a band, I am the frontman of a band and met my ex girlfriend shortly after playing the set and doing magic, but it honestly wasn't like that. Of course, one's charm was the prevailing quality.

My hobbies, magic included is purely because I adore them, although truth be told, I accept it can be a great icebreaker, although I think the perspective of pulling with magic is incredibly cheesy and cheap. If anything, now that I am newly single, I'd like to think that if I did use magic in any way shape or form as a shallow attempt to attract the opposite sex it would be in the context of perhaps mid dialogue as opposed to the outset. Such as in answer to the question what one does, to tell a barefaced lie and pretend to be a magician. Of course, whether by DLs or otherwise, the art of astonishment would be the path to substantiating such a claim...

As a newly single person, however, there is a certain element of nights out being one big playground, and the clamour is often to go on the monkey bars as one does a stupid magic monkey dance. Certainly part of the playground to avoid.

As to the original question of double lifts, invariably, in a lot of effects, the DL would be performed when attention is on the deck. Of course you could routine it so that heat is not burning your hands, but the fun of magic is often to perform moves right under spectators' noses invisibly, and that includes the use of gimmicks which are in full view, but as a magician you have the secret pleasure of relishing in the fact that you are stealthily bending their signed coin right before them.

I say all this but am I still going to bring a pack of cards out for NYE? Bien sur!