4 ms·

I got bored a couple of years ago and decided to start learning some magic. If anyone wants to learn card magic, there are an unbelievable amount of tutorials

I got bored a couple of years ago and decided to start learning some magic. If anyone wants to learn card magic, there are an unbelievable amount of tutorials on YouTube. All you need to do some very impressive tricks is a single move — the double lift.

hentrep 8y ago
Can you link to some of your favorites?
dkersten 8y ago
I started learning myself in late November 2017. You can get a LOT of mileage off a $10ish book too (eg “expert card technique” or “royal road to card magic”[1]) But yes, I follow a few YouTube channels that have taught me a lot: Xavier Spade, Alex Pandrea, PigCake and a few others. There are some excellent ones, but I noticed that you do have to be careful, there's a lot of "reveals" or "tutorials" that are done by hobbyists and their quality is varied, some would teach bad handling or bad habits. They can be fine to get the concept, but maybe not as an absolute beginner. The ones done by magicians who perform professionally tend to be great quality though. But you probably know this better than I, since it sounds like you've been doing it longer :) Its really easy to find tutorials and guides nowadays, you just gotta put the time in! I personally don’t actually like the double lift because I find that 90% of them, even though they are perfectly executed, just don’t look natural — most laypeople simply would never turn cards over in the way most magicians do and it just looks fishy. Having said that, most laypeople don’t actually notice (it’s ibcredible what you can get away with sometimes!) but I notice it and it puts me off :) [1] A side story on this book... I may have cost the publisher a bit of money... They have a "video edition" of the book, where many of the techniques and routines have a QR code linking to a video, but when I got it, all of the links were broken. So I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (UK) and about two months later, all of the QR codes started working. I noticed that they all directly linked to Rackspace CDN URLs (ie not to their own domain). I can't imagine it was fun or cheap to get the exact same identical URLs working again...
gregorygoc 8y ago
I’ve been doing magic half professionally on and off for almost a decade now. Basically, I don’t do card tricks anymore and the reason is simple - if you were to do real magic, would you do it with playing cards? On a side note, revealed card tricks on YouTube were my pain in the butt for a long time, but I don’t care anymore.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Playing cards can be a nexus of strong emotions and violence, and they exemplify the uncertainty of life and the greed/addictive tendencies of living things. From that perspective then seem as much a magical talisman as chicken guts and such. From the other direction, a card shark might say that doing magic with cards makes it a practical skill and takes away the magic :)
  - krapp 8y ago
    I believe tarot cards started out as simple playing cards. I suppose if one could do "real magic" with cards, divination would probably make more sense then sleight of hand. If you could actually control probability and make small objects appear and disappear through physical manipulation then there would be much better uses for that then street magic.
- dkersten 8y ago
  I agree that cards are somewhat unnatural for the average random person and I remember seeing a youtube video where a magician did a (not so scientific) test so see what people preferred and I believe he tested cards, sponge balls and elastic bands and most people preferred the sponge balls. I do think that the "tricks with everyday objects", especially if spontaneously obtained (from the spectator if possible!), are the most memorable, but at least pretty much everyone knows what cards are. I've got some pretty great reactions with cards. There's also the school of thought that its dishonest to pretend you have real magical abilities and therefore you don't have to simulate real magic, instead treating it as the performance art that it is. Most people know its a trick and don't mind that its not totally believable. That said, you're probably right in that your way leaves a more lasting impression. Re: youtube, magic is a really bad art for video, IF you're the kind of person who only enjoys magic if it baffles you and once you see how its done (even just partially) then it gets boring and with a video, where you can watch it 100 times, in slow motion, of course people will always see something they shouldn't. Sadly these people often see it as a challenge (I find the "pretend to have powers" magicians are largely at fault for this, IMHO) rather than as a performance art. Oh well. But those are just my thoughts, I'm not a professional and have never performed for money or in front of more than a handful of people, so you know a lot more about it than I do!
tobr 8y ago
> All you need to do some very impressive tricks is a single move — the double lift. As someone who has had a casual interest in card magic and sleight of hand, here’s an observation about how so many different tricks can come out of such a seemingly simple sleight. There’s a fairly simple formula that makes it possible to be very creative and come up with endless new tricks and variations. At the heart of any trick is some sleight, such as the double lift, where the illusionist creates a seemingly trivial rift between reality as the audience perceives it, and reality as it actually is. The illusionist can then get creative with what to do with this difference. Usually you maintain the facade and do things that would be possible in both realities. From the audience’s point of view, it’s like the trick hasn’t started, when in a sense it is already over. Then, at a safe distance from the original sleight of hand, in terms of time and attention, the illusionist can now seem to break the rules of the reality the audience believes in, simply by revealing the difference between the two realities. This allows you to amplify an underwhelming “Ok, so I couldn’t see that you picked up two cards” to a very impressive “Wow, my card magically reappeared at the top of the deck after you put it into the middle of the deck and let me shuffle it”.
- dkersten 8y ago
  Ah, good old time-misdirection! I love it. You explained it very well and gave me something to think about for my own routines.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Really nice explanation, I kind of knew the idea in practice, but can't remember having seen it so well explained before! Here's a thing I still wonder about: I used to practice forcing, so I get the general idea. What I used to do was mind-reading etc, but there's one particular event that stands out for me, here is what I think I saw: A pro magician shows up in a birthday party showing a deck of cards, asks the host to think of a card, shuffles the deck and shows the card, confirming with the host that it is correct, then goes on to do all kinds of amazing tricks where this card shows up again and again. In my mind, there are only a few options here: - they agreed on it (too risky. This bloke does big jobs, won't do that in an ordinary birthday.) - somehow influenced the host ahead of the selection process (how? when? Is this actually possible with NLP or something? Something about the setup of the deck?) - maybe he tricked us into thinking he had a full deck and all there ever was was 4 of clubs? (Sounds crazy, bit not impossible for a guy who'll pickpocket the craziest things, walk around with a flying piece of furniture while exposed to 180 degrees of audience, non staff on the stage and a TV crew filming.) - somehow guessed it based on eye movements (what I used to tell when I did stupid "mind reading" tricks that was only stupid forces) - somehow tricked the host into thinking this was the chosen card even if it was another (again how?) Anyone wants to share pointers? A few words, links to books, web sites, anything?

hentrep 8y ago

Can you link to some of your favorites?

dkersten 8y ago

I started learning myself in late November 2017. You can get a LOT of mileage off a $10ish book too (eg “expert card technique” or “royal road to card magic”[1]) But yes, I follow a few YouTube channels that have taught me a lot: Xavier Spade, Alex Pandrea, PigCake and a few others. There are some excellent ones, but I noticed that you do have to be careful, there's a lot of "reveals" or "tutorials" that are done by hobbyists and their quality is varied, some would teach bad handling or bad habits. They can be fine to get the concept, but maybe not as an absolute beginner. The ones done by magicians who perform professionally tend to be great quality though. But you probably know this better than I, since it sounds like you've been doing it longer :) Its really easy to find tutorials and guides nowadays, you just gotta put the time in! I personally don’t actually like the double lift because I find that 90% of them, even though they are perfectly executed, just don’t look natural — most laypeople simply would never turn cards over in the way most magicians do and it just looks fishy. Having said that, most laypeople don’t actually notice (it’s ibcredible what you can get away with sometimes!) but I notice it and it puts me off :) [1] A side story on this book... I may have cost the publisher a bit of money... They have a "video edition" of the book, where many of the techniques and routines have a QR code linking to a video, but when I got it, all of the links were broken. So I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (UK) and about two months later, all of the QR codes started working. I noticed that they all directly linked to Rackspace CDN URLs (ie not to their own domain). I can't imagine it was fun or cheap to get the exact same identical URLs working again...

gregorygoc 8y ago

I’ve been doing magic half professionally on and off for almost a decade now. Basically, I don’t do card tricks anymore and the reason is simple - if you were to do real magic, would you do it with playing cards? On a side note, revealed card tricks on YouTube were my pain in the butt for a long time, but I don’t care anymore.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Playing cards can be a nexus of strong emotions and violence, and they exemplify the uncertainty of life and the greed/addictive tendencies of living things. From that perspective then seem as much a magical talisman as chicken guts and such. From the other direction, a card shark might say that doing magic with cards makes it a practical skill and takes away the magic :)
- krapp 8y ago
  I believe tarot cards started out as simple playing cards. I suppose if one could do "real magic" with cards, divination would probably make more sense then sleight of hand. If you could actually control probability and make small objects appear and disappear through physical manipulation then there would be much better uses for that then street magic.
dkersten 8y ago
I agree that cards are somewhat unnatural for the average random person and I remember seeing a youtube video where a magician did a (not so scientific) test so see what people preferred and I believe he tested cards, sponge balls and elastic bands and most people preferred the sponge balls. I do think that the "tricks with everyday objects", especially if spontaneously obtained (from the spectator if possible!), are the most memorable, but at least pretty much everyone knows what cards are. I've got some pretty great reactions with cards. There's also the school of thought that its dishonest to pretend you have real magical abilities and therefore you don't have to simulate real magic, instead treating it as the performance art that it is. Most people know its a trick and don't mind that its not totally believable. That said, you're probably right in that your way leaves a more lasting impression. Re: youtube, magic is a really bad art for video, IF you're the kind of person who only enjoys magic if it baffles you and once you see how its done (even just partially) then it gets boring and with a video, where you can watch it 100 times, in slow motion, of course people will always see something they shouldn't. Sadly these people often see it as a challenge (I find the "pretend to have powers" magicians are largely at fault for this, IMHO) rather than as a performance art. Oh well. But those are just my thoughts, I'm not a professional and have never performed for money or in front of more than a handful of people, so you know a lot more about it than I do!

tobr 8y ago

> All you need to do some very impressive tricks is a single move — the double lift. As someone who has had a casual interest in card magic and sleight of hand, here’s an observation about how so many different tricks can come out of such a seemingly simple sleight. There’s a fairly simple formula that makes it possible to be very creative and come up with endless new tricks and variations. At the heart of any trick is some sleight, such as the double lift, where the illusionist creates a seemingly trivial rift between reality as the audience perceives it, and reality as it actually is. The illusionist can then get creative with what to do with this difference. Usually you maintain the facade and do things that would be possible in both realities. From the audience’s point of view, it’s like the trick hasn’t started, when in a sense it is already over. Then, at a safe distance from the original sleight of hand, in terms of time and attention, the illusionist can now seem to break the rules of the reality the audience believes in, simply by revealing the difference between the two realities. This allows you to amplify an underwhelming “Ok, so I couldn’t see that you picked up two cards” to a very impressive “Wow, my card magically reappeared at the top of the deck after you put it into the middle of the deck and let me shuffle it”.

dkersten 8y ago
Ah, good old time-misdirection! I love it. You explained it very well and gave me something to think about for my own routines.
reitanqild 8y ago
Really nice explanation, I kind of knew the idea in practice, but can't remember having seen it so well explained before! Here's a thing I still wonder about: I used to practice forcing, so I get the general idea. What I used to do was mind-reading etc, but there's one particular event that stands out for me, here is what I think I saw: A pro magician shows up in a birthday party showing a deck of cards, asks the host to think of a card, shuffles the deck and shows the card, confirming with the host that it is correct, then goes on to do all kinds of amazing tricks where this card shows up again and again. In my mind, there are only a few options here: - they agreed on it (too risky. This bloke does big jobs, won't do that in an ordinary birthday.) - somehow influenced the host ahead of the selection process (how? when? Is this actually possible with NLP or something? Something about the setup of the deck?) - maybe he tricked us into thinking he had a full deck and all there ever was was 4 of clubs? (Sounds crazy, bit not impossible for a guy who'll pickpocket the craziest things, walk around with a flying piece of furniture while exposed to 180 degrees of audience, non staff on the stage and a TV crew filming.) - somehow guessed it based on eye movements (what I used to tell when I did stupid "mind reading" tricks that was only stupid forces) - somehow tricked the host into thinking this was the chosen card even if it was another (again how?) Anyone wants to share pointers? A few words, links to books, web sites, anything?