Ye Olde Magick Blogge

Chapter 20, Platform Tricks In this final chapter, we get to one of the reasons why I think Royal Road, if studied thoroughly, is much more than just a beginner’s text. Frankly, if you could master some of the stuff in here, you’d be in the upper echelon of modern card magicians. Some of these [...]

Chapter 10, False Shuffles and Cuts This is a weird chapter for me. For one, if you remember all the way back in the annotations on the first chapter, you’ll remember that I talked about how the G.W. Hunter shuffle is, from my vantage point, one of the real gems of the book. Obviously, the [...]

Any discussion on exposure that’s worth its salt has to come around to the subject of Penn and Teller at some point. It’s the weirdest dichotomy. On the one hand, you’ll see magicians cry out against exposure, saying it’s terrible for magic. On the other, you’ll see them say that Penn and Teller are fantastic, [...]

Here’s Gazzo. Got 40 minutes? I know instinctively that this video will not be to everybody’s tastes. Regardless, the only thing I can say is this: this video is important. It’s similar to Penn and Teller — you can like it or hate, but you can’t ignore it, because in all likelihood more people have [...]

So much study has been done on this routine that only an arrogant twit would attempt to add to it. Thus, without further ado… There are so many specific lessons that can be taken away from this routine. Granted, some of these lessons could be taken away from any thorough study of the cups and [...]

This is an absolute treat. Master Payne (known as “Payne” on the Magic Cafe) is here performing a really robust cups and balls routine. Payne’s a master at presentation — aside from the gift of gab that you can see in the video here, and the wide array of motifs he’s able to adapt his [...]

Well, try as I could, I was unable to pester the ever-elusive Lance Pierce into getting his performance video up of his take on the Benson Bowl plot, so here’s Earl South (a member of Lance’s forum) doing it for a competition in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a commercially available routine which you can purchase [...]

This sort of thing humbles me, if only because it reminds me of my ignorance when it comes to magic outside of the Western world. There’s an amazingly rich culture of street magic performance in India, for instance, and a recent Magic Cafe thread highlighted some great cups and balls videos and the background of [...]

I don’t know how many of you care which sort of routine I’d actually do myself, but if there was one from everything else this month, even given all the great stuff from Daniels, Regal, Carney, etc., this routine from Mark Jenest would be it. I’d probably modify it a little, and I might drop [...]

It had to be done at some point. Here’s Penn and Teller exposing the cups and balls. I’ve gone back and forth on the way I feel about this video. On the one hand, I was outraged that they’d expose this classic. On the other, so many magicians who like this routine claim that regular [...]