Triumph Clean Up…

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of using the old card production where you drop the deck of cards on the table and the top card flips over as a “clean up” for card trick triumph. By clean up, I mean the last thing you have to do in my sequences where you need to reverse one card…or half of the deck.

In the past I’ve published a fairly complex version of Triumph that used a stripped deck and had a kicker ending, but used the flip over production to clean up the deck for the reveal. About a month ago, I think I finally hit on a sequence that makes sense, and it’s pretty simple, I’m surprised I didn’t think of it earlier. Here it is:

  1. Card is selected and returned to the deck, but secretly controlled to the top.
  2. The bottom half is flipped face up and you are going to do a modified zarrow shuffle. You will shuffle all but the top card (selected card) of the face down half into the bottom half of the face up cards. Then run about a quarter of the face up cards, drop the final face down card, and run the remaining face up cards.
  3. You will now strip out the face up cards, but add the face down selection to the face up cards, so they to on top.
  4. Find the natural break between the face up and face down halves. Side jog the face up half and drop it on the table. They should flip over, giving you deck that’s all face down except for the face up selection!

That’s it. While the shuffle procedure reads fairly complex, it’s not. If you can do a Zarrow Shuffle, you can do this.
-Louie



Make It About You…

When I was a kid starting out performing one of the people that gave me advice, and someone that I still respect now would always ask me, “why are you doing that?”. My answer was simply something like, “I’m doing a magic show, I have to do something.” It took me years to realize what … Continue reading “Make It About You…”

When I was a kid starting out performing one of the people that gave me advice, and someone that I still respect now would always ask me, “why are you doing that?”. My answer was simply something like, “I’m doing a magic show, I have to do something.”


It took me years to realize what he was actually trying to get me to answer. The questions wasn’t “why are you doing it“, it was “why should the audience care?” Sometimes the answer can simply be “because I’m doing a magic show”, however the majority of the time it needs to be more.




Once you figure out why the audience should care, you’re 90% ahead of most magicians who simply do tricks. You become a person that’s doing tricks!


TLDR: Make them care about you.

Custom Built Props…

We live in a very exciting time to be a magician. Right now it’s super easy to get custom made props cheaply.   This means your show doesn’t have to look exactly like someone else’s.  For example the Evaporation trick…don’t want it in orange Sunny D?  Easy, I can make it in almost any other bottle … Continue reading “Custom Built Props…”

We live in a very exciting time to be a magician. Right now it’s super easy to get custom made props cheaply.   This means your show doesn’t have to look exactly like someone else’s.  For example the Evaporation trick…don’t want it in orange Sunny D?  Easy, I can make it in almost any other bottle for not much more than the stock version.

 

Click here for details on custom Evaporation bottles

 

This goes with pretty much any prop, you can print out decals on your home inkjet printer and add them to props.  Then you could customize off the shelf props that use generic product names to have “brand names”.

 

Here’s an example from my show. I do a soap bubble act and all of the props were made from “found materials”, thing that I repurposed to use as props.  The props don’t remotely match is color or general look.  I spend about 45 minutes one day designing them to print on my 3d printer.

 

bubble magic

 

I printed them out and got a set of props that not only looks better than what I was using before, but works better than what I was using before.  If you don’t have a 3d printer, there are plenty of services that will print out your projects for you, there are even libraries that have 3d printers you can use!

 

Basically in 2018, there’s no real reason to have props that are cobbled together (unless that’s the look you are going for).

 

Louie