On the way to a gig the other day, I stopped at the new location for the All American Magic Theater in the Pioneer Place Mall. Gaddy is working behind the counter, and he does a great job demoing and is very knowledgeable.
The magic shop has a big variety of magic tricks, from the latest releases, to vintage magic. Portland it lucky to have a well stocked magic shop!
-Louie
I think magicians try to overcomplicate things with the card magic they do. You can get amazing reactions with a couple of very simple things. Here’s a quick three beat trick that gets great reactions:
There’s not much to it: two forces, a top change, and then a double lift. I don’t do a double turnover. The reason for that is that most people who have had a passing interest in magic tricks learn a double turnover in the context of either an ambitious card or simply changing the card. When I do this sequence, it looks nothing like what they’d learned in a YouTube tutorial. While I’m using techniques that they may know, they don’t look like what they’d learned.
This is a good lesson: if you keep getting busted doing something like a double turnover, either find a way to eliminate it or make it look different.
-Louie
PS: If you want to learn about my thoughts on the classic force, it’s in my 2025 PCAM lecture notes.
The third edition of my book How to Perform for Seniors has been sent to the printer!
This was originally written in 2005, then updated with a second edition in 2011. When the first two editions came out, hardly any of the activity directors had work emails, and the fax machine was still commonly used!
This third edition of the How To Perform for Seniors has updated information. There’s more about contacting these facilities by email, as well as things like using video projection in your show!
The estimated ship date is October 13th, 2026. If you want to preorder the book, it’s on sale for $30 now until October 12th, or whenever the books arrive from the printer, whichever is first!
Get it at: https://www.magicshow.tips/product/16716/
-Louie
My all time favorite deck of cards are Stud Playing cards. Recently made a post about finding a couple of decks of them at a junk shop. I finally opened up the deck and and starting using them as my “fun” deck.
These cards handle exactly how I remember them! I could immediately do a table and in the hands faro with the deck!
When I was a teenager, these were the cheapest usable decks that were around. There were cheaper, but those were junk by any standard. Stud cards were made on great stock, had a great finish, and were available for a great price.
I wish these were still available…
-Louie
When I’m on the road, I frequently stop to stretch my legs and walk through junk shops. I was super surprised to find two unopened decks of old stock Stud Playing Cards!
These were my favorite playing cards when they were available. They haven’t made them in years. I think someone (US Playing Card Co.?) made another batch of them about 10 years ago; however, they were on a different stock than the original, and basically Bicycle Cards with the stud back printed on them.
I’m planning on adding these cards to the stack of nice cards that I practice with. They’ll last longer that way than a working deck that lasts 45mins to a hour.
-Louie
A couple of days ago Doug Conn posted about the book Card Finesse by Jon Racherbaumer:
His post about the book, made me remember an cool card move that’s in that book. Well, I’m 99% sure it’s in that book, it might be in Card Finesse II.
I had to slightly adjust the camera move. When done as written, there’s a slight flash that the normal human eye watching won’t see, but it won’t withstand repeated viewing on the internet.
-Louie
When I was a teenager, I remember reading in (I think) Scarne on Card Tricks about slick cards. These are cards that have a smoother finish than the rest of the cards. In that book, John Scarne mentioned that they were made by using car wax to make the face or back of a card smoother.
At some point when I was a teenager in the 1990s, I noticed that Bicycle Pinochle Cards had a different finish than the poker cards, even though the box said they had the same “air cushion finish” and those cards could be used as a slick card.
Recently I came across an old deck of pinochle cards and made this video:
Most magicians back in the 1990s had never actually seen slick cards; they’d only read about them in old books. I’m pretty sure that now even fewer magicians have heard of them.
What can you do with them?
First of all, you don’t need to drop them as I did in the video. You can bump the deck and it’ll break at the slick card. That will give you a spot to then cut or shuffle to.
Another thing you can do is toss the deck on the table so that they spread a little bit. The deck will naturally spread wider at the slick card, and that can be used for the psychological force of them taking the card at that point.
It’s a weird thing I wouldn’t want to rely on, but it’s fun to play with having one in the deck!
-Louie
Yesterday I made a post about David Regal’s Off With His Head. I wanted to add a third beat to it, and one of the ideas I mentioned was making the three cards that weren’t selected blank. This is really following the B’wave format.
Here’s it with the three blank cards as the ending:
I think it’s (for me) a better trick than the original and away to turn B’wave from a mindreading trick to a magic trick.
-Louie
In a box of old magic tricks that I came across, there was David Regal’s Off With His Head. This is a packet trick that is essentially B’wave, but with different beats and effects. B’wave is a prediction, with multiple things that prove you committed to the prediction. Off With His Head is a magic trick, where several different effects happen.
In Off With His Head, the effects are:
1: The back of the selected card changes color
2: The faces on the selected king disappear (cut out of the card)
I used this trick as my “trick of the day” at the fair I was performing at.
I wish this trick had a third beat to it, like B’wave does. I guess I could have the card appear face up, or have all the other cards blank. It would give a third beat; however, I’m not sure either would add to the trick.
I’m liking this packet trick and I’ll probably keep doing it until I wear out the cards.
-Louie
The Triumph card trick, where cards are shuffled face up and face down, ending with all the cards going the same way, except a selected card, has fascinated me for a while. In the past, I’ve published a version or two in Vanish Magazine. Here’s my newest idea for it:
I really like using the old drop the deck and the top card flips over thing as a way to flip over the top card. I’ll probably write this up at some point and publish it somewhere.
-Louie
