Alexander de Cova

The clas­sic three shell game is a strong favour­ite of mine. All those years I was strug­gling to find a nice and prac­tic­al way to trans­port the props. No finally, I found it. The solu­tion is a simple leath­er pouch, which is used to carry pen­cils and oth­er writ­ing utensils. You can get it here.

The oth­er prob­lem was trans­port­ing the small glass for the cli­max of the routine. I found that the shot glass I prefer fits per­fectly into the end parts of the pouch. So now I have the glass plus the shells and the peas – all in one place. Not too bad for a little leath­er pouch!

I wrap the glass into a microfibre cloth which is used for clean­ing a pair of glasses. This not only pro­tects it, but also serves well to keep it clean. Most of the times the small details make all the difference …

Pass it on!

The idi­ot is me, by the way. Because I repeatedly for­get in Ver­non’s great trick ‘Emo­tion­al Reac­tion’ with the key card (see Inner Secrets of Card Magic), wheth­er the card on the left or the card on the right is the spec­tat­or’s chosen card. I sim­pli­fied the thing already by using a double-backed card as the key card (because I tend to for­get the key cards as well). See the art­icle here. Maybe you like the addition.

I marked the double-back­er on both sides. In this case, I used the bone cards and shaped the bones so they point to the right (on both sides of the card). But, of course, you can think of a prop­er mark­ing for any back. That way, when I fan the cards, I see the double-back­er (= key card) and I see which card is the spec­tat­or’s, because the mark­ing is point­ing out to me which one of the two it is.

I know, this seems stu­pid, but then I am stu­pid some­times, espe­cially when doing that key card stuff. If you are not as stu­pid as me and can remem­ber and spot things in per­form­ance, then you can per­form without that double-back­er and do it with a bor­rowed deck of cards …

Pass it on!

Some­times I like to chal­lenge myself (or, in fact, I am chal­lenged by someone) with a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem. How can I make the per­former appear in a close-up theat­er? This sounds easy, but it is not. I have found some inter­est­ing solu­tions, which I will explain even­tu­ally over the time. Here is the first one.

The main tech­nic­al prob­lem is we are not talk­ing about a big stage here. The oth­er thing is we can­’t use too many assist­ants. So how could we make a per­son appear with­in close quar­ters in a more or less nat­ur­al and unsus­pi­cious man­ner? We are forced to use what I call ‘soft illu­sions’ (smal­ler illu­sions that work without big tech­nic­al needs). I always ask myself how the geni­us Jim Stein­mey­er would solve stuff like this. Ima­gine a a typ­ic­al set­ting like this:

The per­former is to appear in the space behind his table (in or near the area with the blue circle). But he can­’t be under­neath the table, this would be too obvi­ous. And we don’t want all the flash pots and smoke that will kill the audi­ence in an intim­ate theat­er setting …

The set­ting would be that the spec­tat­ors enter the little theat­er and take their seats. Then, the per­former would appear and start his close-up show.

One of the bet­ter illu­sions that could make this pos­sible is described in Andrew Mayne’s great book, “Illu­sion Book” (2004). He called it ‘Blinker’ and it is per­fect for this pur­pose. I added a few thoughts and a present­a­tion­al idea to the concept. Take a look at the (badly scanned from me) pic­ture to get the rough details of the concept:

There are two traffic bar­ri­cades stand­ing way back behind the close-up table. The back wall of the theatre should be black. One of the stands is pre­pared by hav­ing a black art pan­el at the back, behind which the per­former hides.

The bar­ri­cades are stand­ing in front of the back wall, with their lights flash­ing. This means the black art prin­ciple can be util­ized instead of the mir­ror. There are some clear plastic sheets (as used by paint­ers), which cov­er the bar­ri­cades. Of course, the bar­ri­cades should be designed and dec­or­ated to fit into a theatre under con­struc­tion. They look like some­thing left behind by the stage hands, who don’t seem to have had enough time to clear the work­space for the show. A per­fect set­ting for a mod­ern close-up theatre.

A little sub­tlety would be to con­struct the bar­ri­cade in the way of Dar­win’s ‘Black Art Table’ with the rollers. That way, after the appear­ance the black art cov­er would van­ish and the stage­hand could walk behind the stands, his legs being seen. Proof that noth­ing was behind those barricades.

Here is a nice touch on the present­a­tion: a theat­er stage hand or con­struc­tion build­er (dressed in dun­gar­ees) enters and greets the audi­ence, apo­lo­giz­ing for the theatre not being ready. He sug­gests start­ing the show any­way and begins clear­ing the unfin­ished stage. He takes a big sheet that is lying around. This is quickly spread and behind it stands the mas­ter magi­cian, walk­ing towards the table and ready to start his close-up miracles.

The stage help­er silently takes the cloth and pushes the stands quietly to the side and exits.

There you have it: a strong yet easy-to-do appear­ance, which isn’t too expens­ive and has a nat­ur­al and logic­al present­a­tion for a close-up theat­er. Before it dawns on the audi­ence that all is set-up and part of the play, the magi­cian has mys­ter­i­ously appeared!

Get Andrews book and read the detailed work­ings of this beau­ti­ful illu­sion: https://​www​.magic​shop​.co​.uk/​i​l​l​u​s​i​o​n​-​b​o​o​k​-​b​y​-​a​n​d​r​e​w​-​m​a​y​n​e​-​b​ook

P.S.: I have a slightly dif­fer­ent ver­sion, using a lad­der stand­ing around. Same set­ting, same present­a­tion, but a slightly dif­fer­ent tech­nique. I may describe this in a later art­icle in the blog.

Just received Dia­mond Jim Tyler­’s new Omni Deck from Wolfgang Wollet (thank you for the light­ing fast deliv­ery). Great thing! Scares me to death only look­ing at it, not to talk about hav­ing it in my hands!

It looks so scary that I would­n’t want to per­form it to real people. But then I thought as being one of those guys born under the star sign of Scor­pio, it would be a nice idea to link this some­how into the present­a­tion: “Hey … by the way … what is your star sign? Fish … OK. Mine is Scor­pio … take a look …”

Then the unsus­pect­ing spec­tat­or dis­cov­ers the beast in her hand … lets it drop, screams and slaps me in the face (hope­fully her and not her body build­er boyfriend).

This will end up on my desk as a paper­weight because I am really too scared and actu­ally afraid to do this for real people. Magic is not mak­ing people scream. But then, if I were to do it, I would add a little thing in the presentation.

Here is my bas­tard present­a­tion idea: Do the Scor­pio Omni Deck and have the spec­tat­ors take a look at it and swal­low the shock. Then take the block, and after a wave of the hand, dis­cov­er the block sud­denly is empty and clear (switch in the reg­u­lar clear Omni Deck, using any tech­nique you like and that is con­vin­cing and surprising).

Could you ima­gine what hap­pens when you glance under the table and say some­how wor­ried: “Sh** … this isn’t the first time this happened … where the hell did he go … be careful…”

At this point, all spec­tat­ors should have left their seats, includ­ing the girl’s body build­er boyfriend.

I would prob­ably per­form this little thing in that way. If I wer­en’t so scared of the beast myself … so I won’t …

Pass it on!

It was­n’t long after Dav­id Cop­per­field and Kev­in James pop­ular­ized the ‘Snow’ effect that soon just about every­one was doing it. If your goal is to look like every oth­er magi­cian, fol­low the herd. If your goal is to define your own magic­al exper­i­ence, run away from the herd. The easi­est way of doing that is to avoid doing whatever every­one else is doing.

Andrew Mayne

Noth­ing to add here.

Pass it on!

The diary effect is a clas­sic for many reas­ons. I like it, but many of the exist­ing meth­ods are a bit com­plic­ated. This changed when Patrick Page showed me his Good Old Moore’s Diary trick. Here was the per­fect solu­tion for walk-around work. Noth­ing to remem­ber, no sleight of hand and best of all, the trick resets after the performance.

The oth­er trick that inspired me was the ‘FRED’ trick (a freely named card with the name Fred on the back). This trick was sold by Ken Brooke and is the tech­nic­al solu­tion for reveal­ing the lucky card in my ver­sion of the diary trick.

The Deck

I liked the idea of the cards being writ­ten in the cal­en­dar and made my own set. But I changed the lay­out a little. I use 26 cards that rotate through the cal­en­dar. In the begin­ning, I took the first 26 cards from the Tam­ar­iz deck, because I thought that would make for some inter­est­ing pos­sib­il­it­ies. It turned out to be useless.

So I changed the setup and now use the 26 cards from Eddie Joseph­’s Pre­mon­i­tion trick. These are visu­ally bal­anced, you can­’t tell a setup by look­ing at the cal­en­dar, and they allow you to do a very inter­est­ing vari­ation of the trick (see the end of this article).

Setup

These are the cards writ­ten in the cal­en­dar: A 4 5 8 9 Q K. That is, the two black aces, the two black 4s, 5s and so on. Then all the red cards: J 10 7 6 3 2 (two red Jacks, two red 10s…). These 26 cards are the ones used in the Eddie Joseph setup of Pre­mon­i­tion. I have built a spe­cial watch for this trick, which I wear and which allows me to quickly check wheth­er a named card is no. 1 or no. 2.

These 26 cards are spread through­out the cal­en­dar. I only omit­ted the Ace of Spades a few times because it is a sus­pi­cious card that stands out. I designed the cal­en­dar in InDes­ign and had it printed.

From a deck with a red back, I removed these cards and prin­ted ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ boldly on the back. From a deck with a high con­trast back design (in my case a black pir­ate design), the oth­er 26 cards are removed to make a com­plete deck. The 26 red cards are on the front of the deck, so I can remove them and show the deck as a ‘black’ deck by spread­ing out the first 26 cards.

Per­form­ance

Take out the cal­en­dar and give it to the spec­tat­or. Then I take the deck out of the case and show the black backs. At this point I do an Erd­nase Over­hand False Shuffle, which main­tains the order of the cards. I mod­i­fied it a bit by doing a cut at the last stage, which puts half of the black cards in front of the red cards. So the red cards are a block between the black cards. The deck is then spread face up on the table.

The spec­tat­or then looks at the card on his birth­day. It is, of course, one of the 26 cards spread across the cal­en­dar. Remove it from the deck and show the writ­ing on the back. Put the card back in the red part of the deck and cut it so that the black cards are in front of the red cards on the back. The cards are again divided into red and black and the trick is set up for the next table.

Of course, you could make some­thing more out of show­ing the deck to be black by using vari­ous tech­niques from the col­our chan­ging deck routines. How­ever, I did not find this neces­sary. The cas­u­al dis­play of the 26 black backs along with the shuffle is enough.

Why the Eddie Joseph setup?

Because there is an inter­est­ing vari­ation you can do with the Pre­mon­i­tion deck. Basic­ally, you can do the Pre­mon­i­tion effect as writ­ten by Eddie Joseph. The only dif­fer­ence is that the first deck is replaced by the calendar!

The idea is that the card looked up in the cal­en­dar is miss­ing from the second deck, which is on the table from the start. The spec­tat­or does­n’t even have to say the card out loud! He just looks it up, then shuffles the deck a lá Pre­mon­i­tion and there are only 51 cards and his lucky card is miss­ing. Of course, you can make it from your pock­et using the index sys­tem described by Joseph. But it is more prac­tic­al because your index only has to con­tain 26 cards. If they are of the extra thin kind (like Card­shark’s Double­deck­er Cards) they could even be in a wal­let index.

This trick pos­sib­il­ity was the reas­on I decided to put the pre­mon­i­tion cards in the diary.