Alexander de Cova

This seems to be a long for­got­ten, won­der­ful coin van­ish. What I really like with it is the concept behind. A nice idea to use the small coin as a reas­on­ing to bring the hands togeth­er in order to steal the big coin. A per­fect example of how to hide the actu­al trick action under a nat­ur­al smal­ler action.

I hope that the new gen­er­a­tion of magi­cians will not for­get about this beau­ti­ful off-beat van­ish. It is easy to per­form and fun. And it fools the spectators …

When two magi­cians in Vienna try to set a stage for video takes, it looks like this. At that time, we were try­ing to con­ceive a small video ses­sions series (which nev­er happened). I abso­lutely love my friend Michi Schuller for his patience, because if you look at the guy in front of the cam­era, I am sure you would give up work­ing with him (that guy, not Michi). Michi did like a pro. Thank you, Michi, for put­ting up with me for such a long time!

This shows my rumble with the ‘Rob­ing’ routine … 🙂

Well, a move that is a life­time com­mit­ment. The move that sep­ar­ates the ‘boys from the men’. Here is how far I am so far. Import­ant here as well to notice the ama­teur­ish video edit­ing, all done by myself.

I can­’t remem­ber how long I do this routine. And how I simply love it. Every time, when I wanted to ‘improve’ upon, and learn one of the fan­ci­er, more mod­ern stuff, I fell back to this clas­sic Gos­h­man rendi­tion. At that time, I was heav­ily influ­enced by the Chinese cul­ture, as you can eas­ily hear, but this gives the routine an addi­tion­al ‘kick’, most of the people don’t like. I love the routine!

May Albert Gos­h­man live forever! Still my favor­ite take and approach to the ‘Mat­rix’, Chink-A-Chink or whatever you might want to call it. 🙂

The mas­ter Johnny Thompson dec­ades ago at a lec­ture in Lon­don poin­ted out the import­ance of the middle fin­ger of the hand palm­ing. A small thing maybe, but non­ethe­less an import­ant thing, which can make all the dif­fer­ence in appearance …

I tried my best to incor­por­ate that sub­tlety and it DOES MAKE that dif­fer­ence! Watch out for my middle fin­gers of the palm­ing hand and the beau­ti­ful hand shape this makes.

On this video you will see my good buddy Alais­dair McCova per­form his hand­ling of a Scot­tish vari­ation of a trick of Slydini—the coins across. I am sure all you know­ing guys out there will have no prob­lem fig­ur­ing out the moves. They are all more or less stand­ard and easy.

I am proud I was allowed to teach this in per­son to my friend John Carey, when I was driv­ing him around Ger­many for his lec­ture tour. The fact that a hard­core card man likes (and actu­ally wants to learn) the routine shows that it has it’s merits …

Intern­ally I call this my ‘Franken­stein Routine’. It is made up of all dif­fer­ent parts from dif­fer­ent resources: Tommy Won­der, Shideo­Tak­agi, Daryl, Slydini, Dai Ver­non and Ross Ber­tram. Maybe it looks as ugly as the poor ‘mon­ster’, but it has (for me) some love­li­ness. I love my ‘mon­ster’ …

For many years I was refer­ring to this as a vari­ant of the ‘Zar­row-Shuffle’, until Karl-Heinz Ritter from Munich cor­rec­ted me, point­ing out to me it’s actu­ally more of a shank shuffle. For years I believed I was doing a prop­er Zar­row, which I was not (incom­pet­ence?). Whatever it is (Roberto Giobbi will prob­ably set things right some­time) it works. And is one of my all-time tabled false shuffle.

Why? Because I can do it flaw­lessly even when work­ing with a used bor­rowed deck and being pissed. More than one time this shuffle saved my life …

The red card in the video is a double card. Two cards glued togeth­er but over­lap­ping for about 2 mm, so that I have a thick card in com­bin­a­tion with a broad card. This card in the video shows as aJoker. This way, the whole shuffle is even easi­er and more con­vin­cing, because I don’t have to hold a break in between shuffles. Fig­ure this one out for yourselves …