I am a big fan of pure, sleight-of-hand coin magic. When I started, we didn’t have all those fancy gimmicks. We were dealing with (when lucky) a couple of silver half dollars and copper pennies. Maybe an ugly Jumbo coin with it, and that was the basic outfit. Nowadays, the young generation is outfitted with […]

Here is a novel presentation idea using a concept of thermodynamics: entropy. The definition from simple Wikipedia is this: A law of physics says that it takes work to make the entropy of an object or system smaller; without work, entropy can never become smaller – you could say that everything slowly goes to disorder […]

This might be of interest for some. I will formulate it in this way: The more emphasis you place on finding magic you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the magic you do. How many times have you heard magicians say: “I love magic, it’s my passion.” That […]

In Bascom Jones’ magazine MAGICK #441, there is a lovely trick by Phil Goldstein, called “Tobaccognition” (what a title). It depends on the OLRAM count for display, uses only six (unprepared) cards and is reset the moment you finished performance. And it has a timely topic — that of smoking vs. non-smoking. For some time, […]

This is the start of a series of articles on the topic of subtleties for magicians. There will be even a few thoughts on the topic of “Framing”, which is a well-documented, respected (and often commented on) topic in modern society. It is used in politics, economy and human interaction. In magic, framing can be […]

There aren’t too many card tricks for the parlour/stage magician. Maybe the hurdle is the lessened visibility of the card’s faces on stage. Tricks where the faces are not important, and the number of cards counts (as the Cards Across) are not affected by that. Interesting is how one could produce an effect with freely […]