Category: Tricks

Coinistry!!!

The other day after the magic garage sale and we went out to jam at a local bar, we were talking about coin tricks. I brought up the Perpetual Motion Coin Myth from Paul Harris’s books. This is a coin flourish where you hold a coin sideways between two other coins and get the center coin to spin.

I’ve never seen or met anyone who could do it, but we started playing with it and now I’ve done it and seen it done!

That got me thinking, the next branch of magic is going to be COINISTRY! That would be fancy flourishes with coins! Start practicing now!

Tarbell System…

My day got exciting, through a unexpected exchange the other day, I ended up with and original Tarbell System (Tarbell Course in Magic)!

This is a first edition (5th printing) of the Tarbell System. The key about how I ended up with this is simply talking to people and being open to the wacky things that they ask!

I’m a HUGE fan of the Tarbell Course, I even had some shirts made a long time ago:

Chit Chat…

When you’re out performing, I think it’s important to talk to people you meet. I’ve met some really cool people over the years, just by chit chatting with them. At a fair a recently I started chatting with the guy selling mystery bags. His name is Gene Haaheim, he’s an old pitch man. He pitched Svengali Decks a long time ago, and also the magic mouse.

We had a great time chatting about some of the older people in magic who used to work the pitch circuit! Gene also did a couple of good card tricks.

Go out and talk to people at your next gig, you’ll be amazed at who you run into!

Magic Garage Sale…

I’m putting together a magic garage sale on July 11th! It’s a literal garage sale, so you have to show up in person for the deals. What’s left I may try to sell on facebook used magic groups, and a lot of it will probably just go to the dump.

There’s a lot of cool stuff, and I was just going through last night and putting prices on things. The garage sale prices are pretty cheap, there are a lot of deals to be had! If I end up listing stuff on the internet for sale, it will be more than the garage sale prices.

Here’s what I priced yesterday:

There’s a lot more! If you’re going to be in the Seattle area on 7/11/21, send me an email and I’ll give you the details!

Cheap Vanishing Birdcages…

People still shoot me notes asking questions about my Take Up Reel. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, “will it work with the vanishing birdcages from India?”

The answer is yes, here’s a video of me doing it with one of them:

Pretty much if you can vanish it with a traditional wrist to wrist birdcage pull, then you can vanish it with my take up reel!

The A.C.T. Card Trick…

Here’s the second video of me revising a packet trick that I got with a collection of magic that I acquired. Today’s trick is the A.C.T. (another card trick) by Bill Pryor.

Here’s a demo of the trick as written, then how I revised the trick:

The big problem with this packet trick is that the whole effect is a “kicker” without the initial ending. What I mean by that is that you start by asking someone to think of a card, but you never reveal it. You need the initial effect for a kicker to really work. I think at the end spectators will still be thinking, “what about the card I was thinking of?”

Also I don’t think the gags are strong enough to carry the trick past you never revealing the card they are thinking of.

Lecture Review…

During the Pandemic, I did many virtual lectures for magic clubs. I stumbled across a review of one in the Linking Ring magazine:

I really enjoyed doing these lectures. I would like to continue doing them, however moving forward with in person shows opening back up, I honestly don’t think that it would be possible to do them for a donation to the IBM or SAM endowment funds due to my performing schedule. I will keep doing in person lectures at conventions or as I travel and am in an area for the local club. It was nice to be able to give back a little bit!

Four Card Monte…

Recently I ended up with a collection of magic tricks and in that collection there were a bunch of packet tricks. Most weren’t very good, but that got me thinking about trying to improve them. The first one that I tried was called 4 Card Monte, and there are a lot of packet tricks with this title, so don’t judge them all by this one.

Here’s the effect as written in the instructions, then the effect reworked by me:

The trick as written is pretty bad, and doesn’t make much sense with the addition of a fifth card at the end. I think my version where there’s only four cards shown the whole time makes more sense. The addition of the kicker ending really adds a punctuation to the end.

One thing I think that’s important when you get a magic trick is to not discard because you don’t like the trick as written. Play with it and see if you can make it work!

Capping the Kicker…

I’m really trying to clean up the sloppiness that has crept into my show over the last 18 months of not really performing it much. That’s my main goal this week at the fair. However I am adding some newer stuff to the show and also trying to figure that out.

One thing I’m working on in my version of Luca Volpe’s Key of Fate. It’s playing alright, but it was missing some punch at the end. I was trying to figure out what to do, as the trick has a kicker ending, so I can’t really add another kicker on top of the first one.

What I ended up trying was adding some “stinger” music. Music that’s upbeat that I play right after the kicker is revealed, and it worked great! It got a much more applause at the end. Now I’m not sure this is how I want to do it, but it is a definite improvement!

Small things…

I’ve been working on my show this week at the fair. One thing that I’m doing is trying to correct little things. Little things are easy to fix, and can add up to a much tighter show!

In my show I do object in ball of yarn. I have a bowl that’s on a stand and it’s been on stage right with me and someone from the audience standing center stage. In it I give the person from the audience a fishing pole to reel in the yarn. Because the fishing pole is right handed, the person is using their upstage arm to turn the reel. I think the picture would look better if you saw the person’s hand cracking the reel.

The super simple fix was to having the bowl placed at stage right. Now you can see the person’s upstage hand cranking the reel. It really didn’t take much effort to figure this out, other than paying attention to the show.

On it’s own, it’s not a huge leap for the show, but bundle this with a dozen other small changes and it starts to be noticable!