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I agree. So called 'misdirection' is a misnomer, it should just be 'direction', your body posture, wherever you are looking and/or pointing is where the participants will also look. We worry far too much and focus on the finger flinging stuff instead of relaxing, making smooth and natural movements to draw attention away from where the action is.

I think a lot people forget that when we talk to our audience its natural for them to look at our face.
If you want to do something with your hands and the cards then dont worry about fancy moves.... just try talking to them. At some point they will look up from your hands and make eye contact. That is the moment you can do almost anything you like with your hands. Quite blatant cutting, stealing, even a deck swap can take place if they are looking at your face and engaging in conversation.
So dont worry about the clever moves, concentrate instead on timing and when to ask them a question so they look at you.

Of course you have to look at them while talking to them. If you are looking at your hands, so will they.

Another good misdirective ploy to use in a pinch is to ask everybody to take a step back "so that everybody can see". This causes a lot of looking at the floor, each other, wondering who it was that couldn't see in the first place etc . Obviously it can't be used every time you do a move (or everyone ends up about 3 miles away!) but is good if you need a surefire way of briefly disrupting a tricky audience member's gaze (assuming you are performing to a standing audience).

I totally agree, as long as you just treat everything as unimportant or as if it doesn't matter then 99% of the time your audience is going to do exactly that. People do worry about being caught out buut one thing to remember is that most of the time, your audience doens't know what's going to happen anyway so have no idea what they're looking for.

Lady of Mystery wrote:I totally agree, as long as you just treat everything as unimportant or as if it doesn't matter then 99% of the time your audience is going to do exactly that. People do worry about being caught out buut one thing to remember is that most of the time, your audience doens't know what's going to happen anyway so have no idea what they're looking for.

I totally agree with this, but I think it is important to add, (although it should be obvious) that the only thing that should really matter, where all your attention should be, is on the spectator. Don't talk to the cards, coins or props. Don't watch your own trick. Pay all that attention to the spectator.

And as said above, they don't know what is going to happen. It took me a long time to learn this lesson. But because they don't know what is going to happen, chances are they won't know your mistake is even a mistake. So don't point it out. Just keep on going.

I once read an article in the New York Times by Ricky Jay, quite possibly the best magician of our time, (and a lot of other times), he was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and produced the wrong card. And while he admits it took him a few seconds to recover he realized that nobody knew that he had made a mistake. He just used the mistaken card to find the real card and nobody was the wiser.