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I’d like to ear from other guys (ladies) about the first beginning work on magic: did you begin to practice just and only one specific trick, a specific area (cards, coins, etc.) or started to do everything at the same time?
Is there a methodology to start on the right way? Any book or articles about it?
Sometimes I find myself trying to do everything in a couple of hours – cards flourishes, coin sleights, experimenting new tricks just arrived from the shops – a mess.
Can you share your experiences, please?

Medeiros

Unless you have loads of free time to practise, I would recommend choosing one direction for a starter (cards or coins or spounge balls - whatever you like best). Later, you can move on to something else. If you try to do everything at the same time, you are right - it's a mess. You'll progress very slowly, and it's really discouriging.

Now about tricks vs. sleights. The most productive way, imo, is to build your practice around learning sleights, starting from the basics and slowly moving to more advanced stuff. Along with sleights you can learn the tricks that make use of it (but not the other way around). It's a little boring in the begining, but it'll pay off later, since when you become more verse in sleights, you'll be able to learn new tricks faster, and you'll have a solid foundation.

My impression was that most people started to learn with card magic. Later on, you can decide whether you want to branch out into other genres or stick with cards, but just doing some simple card tricks to people is valuable magic experience.

Kati

Starting with cards is probably the easiest route (unless you have a burning desire to do coins).

With cards you have more great resources and teaching products than virtually any other branch of magic.

Plus it's cheap to get into - you need a book AND/OR a DVD and some errr, cards!

I began learning basic card tricks. Learnt some simple sleights and progressed from there. When i got more experience i began to look at other magic.

I started with a mix.

My first was a passed down Svengali deck what I learned with, but grew tired of. I then saw dynamic coins and was instantly hooked. This stayed with me for a while. I then went onto an TT that someone revealed to me, mainly bacause I pestered them so much for the secret (person was a layman).

It then took off from there with a few selected tricks, mainly self workers that I practiced the presentation for and it grew from there.

Then CUPS set in!

I started when I was 'just a kid' with those kids magic boxes and of course they contain lots of types of tricks.

After a couple of years I got in an accident and needed to stay in the hospital for more than 6 weeks and needed something to do, since I was not able to walk or go anywhere.

Before ending up there I could do a couple of card-tricks, but when my parents came to visit me they asked me if they should bring anything. I just said: A deck of cards and my magic book please

So I started practising and doing card magic for nurses and from that point on kept focussing on card magic.

Every day at school people would come up and ask me if I got any new tricks they hadn't seen yet.

From that point on I thought: 'cards are just cards' and started doing other stuff like a bit of coins and other close-up stuff.
But I son realised: A deck of cards is 'instant' and they have some kind of attraction on people.

So now I still do mostly card-tricks and just some other close-up stuff for some variation.

Anyway, to make a long story short: I started off with a lot off types of tricks but got back to mainly card-magic.

So this was my story, hope you enjoyed it

Reading your posts, I think that I forgot something important to ask: major occupation (the one that’s remunerated, if it’s not MAGICIAN) and, on the other hand, what free time lefts for magic (hours per day).
I usually practice about 1 hour/day on business days and a couple of hours on weekends.
See you.

There are some rope tricks that take little skill and complement cards well

Medeiros66 wrote:Reading your posts, I think that I forgot something important to ask: major occupation (the one that’s remunerated, if it’s not MAGICIAN) and, on the other hand, what free time lefts for magic (hours per day).

Well in that case my 'occupation' is IT-student and yes I do have some other jobs and stuff but I have free evenings most of the time. But I'll have to divide my free time between playing the guitar and practising magic.

I guess on the average I spend about 20 hours on magic. It varies a bit from day to day.

I do not set a time for magic, I think that that would then become pretty boring after a while. I play with my cards while on the computer and sometimes when watching TV.

I started with half a dozen Marvins Magic tricks for my grandchildren then started looking at the various products on sale on the web.

At first in a very CUPS manner I bought tricks that looked good by sellers description. When I had bought my first torn and restored routine and found that all I got was a book, no secret magical device to do the trick for me I realised that this was going to take some work.

So I bought Royal Road and some cards and started to try to do some proper tricks.

So far as practice is concerned I do an awful lot of card handling prctice whilst watching TV, it is a good time for me as I don't have a lot of spare time and it makes me practice without looking at the cards.

I suppose that whilst I have majored on card tricks I have also tried other things. Now mentalism is my big goal.

As for buying tricks now I NEVER purchase until I have read the reviews on this site. If you search hard enough you will find a good review for almost anything out there because some of the moderators are reviewing tricks before they even get on to general sale. I have not been let down by any review and have just this week been sold on the purchase of Simon Lovells Million Dollar Card Tricks by the review. Just waiting for it to arrive