How to Become A Magician - It's Never Too Late
These posts are specific to the three main types of magic, which are typically described as 1. Close-Up Magic, 2. Parlor Magic, and 3. Stage Magic.
Vanishing Inc. is one of the best sites on the internet for learning magic. They carry all the best magic books and downloads for all the latest releases by all the best and newest creators or magic in the world.
Today they are announcing FREE magic! The amazing Paul Wilson is releasing ten free card tricks today.
The side steal may be the most popular sleight of hand trick out because it is right under the nose of the person that is having the card stolen from them. You can find a lot of people that are impressed by card tricks, but they may have never heard of the bottom palm.
You can find a lot of people who understand these different tricks working in casinos for example. Money can be made by casinos because of these tricks.
Key Takeaways:
“For a move like the Classic Pass to be effective, it must be silent, effortless and economical – each secret action must take less than a single moment to complete…without rushing.”
There are tons of books that people often recommend as starter books for learning magic.
For example, if you will be doing card magic, check out the Card College series. I wrote about that here: Magic Tricks With Cards: Where Do I Start Learning?
For coins, you’ll almost always be told to get yourself a copy of Bobo’s Modern Coin Magic.
I heartily agree that those are excellent starting points. And they will give you the basic foundations you’ll need if you want to really be good.
But what if – while you are on the long learning curve to becoming a top-notch sleight-of-hand artist, you want to perform some magic right away?
I have the answer to that. It’s Paul Zenon’s Street Magic: Great Tricks and Close-up Secrets Revealed. Why that one in particular? Because it helped me out a LOT.
Because of the situation below, I’ve decided that the best way to learn magic is in a sort of “2-track” way. To become a really good magician, you’ll need skills in the basics, which takes awhile. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start performing SOME magic along the way. So here is the system I developed:
I had been dutifully studying Bobo and Card College, along with some other great sources (Eric Jones, David Roth, The Tarbell series, etc.) – this was my “Track 1 Learning” – when I won a door prize at a local magic club meeting (Society of American Magicians). That book was the Paul Zenon book.
Well I was going to a party just a few days later and REALLY wanted to have a couple of tricks I could do well, since I would be telling folks I’d taken up magic. Of course they were going to ask for a trick or two, right? But while the stuff I was studying was really long-term, foundation-building stuff, it didn’t really give me much in the way of stuff I could do RIGHT NOW that would be impressive enough that folks would really have fun.
But as soon as I started reading “Street Magic,” I found 2 or 3 tricks right away that were terrific and required no difficult sleights or anything. One of the card tricks I still do to this day (which is only 3 years later, but still :-)).
Paul Zenon’s book was my first foray into “Track 2 Learning.”
I am still working my way through Card College and The Tarbell course. But I think it’s important for you to get the experience of performing quite soon after you start. this will help keep the motivation up while you learn the truly wonderful life-long skills that take a little more time.
CLICK HERE if you want to grab a copy of Paul Zenon’s “Street Magic” for your own, and get started actually performing some really good magic quickly.
Coin magic is the kind of magic that I like best. And a coin trick is the first bit of magic that I showed to non-family members and looked like “real” magic.
That coin trick is called Tenkai Pennies. It’s been around since around the middle of the 20th century.
It’s a super clean trick that uses two coins. Ironically, hardly anyone does it with actual pennies, since those are such small coins. Usually people use half-dollars or even dollar-sized coins.
You can learn it in Bobo’s “New Modern Coin Magic” – which is the large hardback Bobo coin magic book, not the smaller paperback “Modern Coin Magic.”
I mentioned that the trick is super clean. What I meant was that Tenkai Pennies uses no gaffs or gimmicks. Nor does it rely on extra coins. What you see is what you get – one coin moves mysteriously from one hand to the other as if by magic.
It’s pure sleight of hand. And that is what makes it so special. You can do this trick with any coins. So that means you can borrow coins from someone and do magic with their own money!
The other special thing about this trick is that it relies on a sleight (“the use of dexterity or cunning, especially so as to deceive”) that is relatively difficult. That means that a lot of magicians will not bother learning it.
I would rather not – in this open post – specifically say what that sleight is*. Magic should retain some mystery, right? But what I will say that it has been SO worth it to learn this little move. And since many magicians don’t bother with it, you’ll be that much more ahead of the other magicians if you put in the time and effort.
Here is a video of me doing this quick but awesome coin trick:
* Click Here to send me a message if you’d like to know what the sleight is :).
If you’d like to learn how to do this trick step-by-step, click here to find out more and download the videos (instant download) for $5
I recently – finally – got my hands on Jay Sankey’s video, “Revolutionary Coin Magic.” Woot!
I learned a routine called Mr. Clean Coins Across from this video last year. Now I have access to all the routines! Buwahahahahaa!
Someone over at The Magicians forum requested that I do a quick video of me doing something I learned form this DVD, so I did a quick and dirty iPhone video of myself doing The Messiah Vanish. Here is the result of that.
As I mentioned, this trick can be found on Jay Sankey’s Revolutionary Coin Magic DVD, which is one of the best learning resources for coin magic ever, as far as I’m concerned. Granted, I’ve only been doing magic for a little over two and a half years at this point, but coin magic has been my main focus and I do have many of the recommended coin magic books and DVDs.
This DVD is harder to find than some of the newer ones, coming out as it did in the early 2000s – ca 2004 I think. But you can get it from Jay Sankey’s site here. Or try eBay, which is where I got my copy. Here is a link to it on eBay for one on sale right now.
So where do you learn magic tricks with cards? Just about every magician will tell you to start with the Card College series, by Roberto Giobbi – “Card College: A Complete Course in Sleight-of-Hand Card Magic.”
These books will take you from the very beginning – how to hold the cards, what to call the edges of the cards, etc. Giobbi then progresses through five volumes, continually building on everything that came before.
As a matter of fact, there are more than 5 volumes. Giobbi put out “Introduction to Card Magic” as a great place to start. It’s perfect because it’s a pdf – convenient and great for the immediate gratification addicts like me:). It even has video clips in it, which I found super helpful. That’s where I began. You can download it right how here for only about 8 bucks.
You can get book 1 – Card College, Vol. 1: A Complete Course in Sleight-of-Hand Card Magic on Amazon. So many magicians swear by learning magic from books. I understand that things enter the brain a certain way when you try to understand the written description. But I am REALLY visual and like to ALSO get a video demonstration when at all possible.
That’s why I liked volumes 1 and 2 so much. You can get PDF versions of those, each containing videos of the moves. Awesome. Unfortunately, that stopped with volumes 3-5.
You can get the first two volumes in pdf form with the videos below for $45 each:
As the name of the main series implies, it is a course on sleight-of-hand card magic. That means it teaches you handle cards in a magical way, to create the illusions and spectacles that are so cool in card magic.
Because of the numerical and mathematical nature of playing cards, there is a lot of magic possible that doesn’t require “sleights.” So Giobbi also published versions of the Card College that do not require sleight of hand. They are:
Card College Light: Professional Card Magic Without Sleight-of-Hand
Card College Lighter: More Professional Card Magic Without Sleight-of-Hand
Card College Lightest: Still More Professional Card Magic Without Sleight-of-Hand
So no matter what kind of card magician you want to be, you can make a great start with the Card College Series.