Alexander de Cova

Again, an old but rarely used top palm tech­nique. Why? It is decept­ive, fast and sure­fire. Get to it and resur­rect it … 🙂

One of my favor­ite coin van­ishes. It util­izes what Al Schneider calls his ’ snap back tech­nique’. I should men­tion that I strongly believed I ‘inven­ted’ this tech­nique com­pletely inde­pend­ent from him in 1988, when I was work­ing on my stage manip­u­la­tion act. At that time, I did it only with jumbo coins. Later I dis­covered it could also be done with nor­mal sized coins—very clev­er bloke!

Here is my exe­cu­tion of the clas­sic bot­tom palm Erd­nase style (well, more or less). The bot­tom palm comes in handy when in dif­fi­cult per­form­ing cir­cum­stances when all the Ramsey/​Malini ‘wait’ tech­niques failed …

In the explan­a­tion part I use a plexi-deck for bet­ter vis­ib­il­ity. Don’t use that in real performance! 🙂

Unfor­tu­nately I nev­er met this gen­tle­man in per­son. Maybe I com­pletely missed him 30 years back when at a con­ven­tion in UK. Evid­ence of a big­headed young­ster, who thought he knows all and every­body. Wish I could turn time back …

So here, 30 years too late, my humble rendi­tion of this mas­ter­’s van­ish. Hope you you will prac­tice and per­form it! 🙂

Over the years my eyes got worse. And my ‘tem­por­ary per­form­ance memory’ (per­form­ance cache). Which means that when I present a trick using a key card, and I have to remem­ber this in the per­form­ance, I tend to simply for­get it! Just stand there with a stu­pid expres­sion on my face think­ing of a way to get out of this situation.

On stage (or stand-up) I don’t wear glasses. Spot­ting the index of a card in a fan quickly and safely became more or less impossible.

But I abso­lutely love Dai Ver­non’s ‘Emo­tion­al Reac­tion’ from Inner Secrets of Card Magic—what to do?

Well, using a double backed card as a key­card is the solu­tion for me. Works like a breeze and sets me up for anoth­er great Ver­non trick …

In the past weeks I worked hard get­ting through Al Schneider­’s monu­ment­al ‘The The­ory and Prac­tice of Magic Decep­tion’. Amaz­ing work, quite a lot to swal­low. Heavy stuff.

Then, some guys poin­ted out to me that Schneider is a ‘low-key’ per­former, lack­ing esprit and pizza­zz. Well, maybe true to some point, but then he nev­er stated being the enter­tain­ment beast nor that ‘con­sum­mate professional’.

But take a look at how clean he per­forms all of his moves and how incred­ibly con­vin­cing the routines look. No wasted and unne­ces­sary moves or com­plic­ated hand­ling. To prove, here is a clip of his cups and balls routine:

Everything he does is con­gru­ent with his the­ory on how vir­tu­al magic should look like and why.

It is not a mat­ter of point­ing out the seem­ingly lack­ing ‘enter­tain­ment’ in his work. Too many ‘seasoned per­formers’ doing flip­pant and unes­sen­tial pat­ter, gags and present­a­tions, deceiv­ing them­selves into think­ing this is com­mer­cial magic.

Bet­ter to absorb Schneider­’s the­or­ies and think about it ser­i­ously. Then to con­vert them to one’s own routines and rep­er­toire. More than enough work to keep us busy for a long time …