Eng­lish Articles

On my recent lec­ture tour, I spent a won­der­ful even­ing after the lec­ture din­ing with my friends. Sud­denly a small dis­cus­sion about Denis Behr’s new full even­ing pro­gram came up. Some guys had seen it already, and the talk was about Denis’ opening …

If you’re aim­ing to infuse a sense of genu­ine antiquity into your present­a­tion mater­i­als – whether it be an old-style let­ter con­tain­ing cards, akin to those used in the Gipsy Curse, or per­haps a cal­en­dar resem­bling an ancient leather-bound tome – here’s …

As a magi­cian, I’m usu­ally reluct­ant to reveal the secrets of my craft to fel­low con­jur­ers, pre­fer­ring to keep these mys­ter­ies close to my chest. How­ever, given my prom­ise to you, I’ll make an excep­tion this time. While I have a gen­eral fondness …

Sub­tleties are fine in magic routines, but they will not always work as inten­ded. Much depends on the audi­ence’s level of atten­tion and intel­li­gence, and their interest and focus on the per­form­ance. So you can’t always be sure that the subtleties …

R.I.P. With him, magic has lost one of the major cre­at­ive forces and an out­stand­ing per­former, cre­ator, his­tor­ian and ambas­sador of the art of magic. A truly out­stand­ing, ori­ginal per­former and per­son­al­ity. Thank you for all you have given to us. You will live on …

An intro­duct­ory present­a­tion for the Fred Kaps $11 Bill Trick: First tell the old story about the res­taur­ant and the 3 guests. The bill for the 3 cus­tom­ers is $30. Each pays $10. Later, in the kit­chen, the owner explains that the …

One thing that sad­dens me when I see con­tests at (many) magic con­ven­tions : the tables of the close-up, card magic and par­lour cat­egor­ies. How often have we seen a simple, plain table dec­or­ated with an ugly piece of mater­ial? “Attached to the …

In the past years, the SO (stand­ing ova­tion) seems to have become a “reg­u­lar” at magic con­ven­tions. The most recent example is the FISM in Busan. Wit­tus Witt remarked on his blog that maybe this FISM-con­­ven­­tion will enter his­tory as …

It is not uncom­mon to see the phrase “easy to per­form” used in advert­ise­ments for magic items. As some of my research in the magic com­munity has shown, the major­ity of magi­cians (ama­teurs and pro­fes­sion­als alike) are attrac­ted to advertisements …

In recent years, there seems to have been a trend in the magic of advert­ising: the way in which advert­ising copy is worded. More and more often we read words and sen­tences like these: “This will fry your brain!” “This is a killer effect!” “Des­troy them with this!” “This …

One of the inter­est­ing things for me is to ana­lyze my buy­ing habits. As most of us, I went through the tedi­ous pro­cess of being remote con­trolled by the deal­ers’ cata­logues, the ads in the magazines and, of course, the internet …

Recently I acquired a very inter­est­ing read: John Naish’s book ‘Enough’. It’s main top­ics are about get­ting the idea of ‘hav­ing enough’. Whilst being a ‘non-magic’ book, it is a very inspir­ing and thought pro­vok­ing read for us magi­cians, who are facing the same …

People like giz­mos and gad­gets. So do I. The cra­zier, the bet­ter. I want to share with you my one of my ’idea techniques’.The photo shows my typ­ical idea work­space. I use the light­bulb, which actu­ally is a con­tainer with a screw­able lid. This …

Script­ing is very import­ant for magic. It is an art for itself and depends largely on good ideas and novel slants story wise. When writ­ing a script for a magic trick, it is some­times not so easy to find an effect­ive intro line. Sometimes …

One of the most import­ant things for a proper the­at­rical per­form­ance piece in magic (or Men­tal­ism) is the plot. Many routines lack of a plot. They seem like a use­less demon­stra­tion of clever prin­ciples, designed and put together to show­case the performer’s cleverness, …

It is the little things that really make the dif­fer­ence. This post is to make you aware (or remind you, if you have for­got­ten) of some bril­liant ana­lysis and think­ing by Ascanio regard­ing the Ham­man Count. Usu­ally this count is done in …

Since my youth I was addicted to the ‘cut­ting the aces’ by Dai Ver­non (see Stars of Magic). Espe­cially when I learned of the the­at­rical present­a­tion of PUNX, which is described in his book ‘Setzt euch zu meinen Füßen’. What a gem! But then …

From time to time ques­tions like these arise: “What makes a good cre­ator and how can you become aware of them?” I faced this ques­tion quite a few times. The answer is quite dif­fi­cult (or was). Mean­while, I answer with cita­tions from the Bible: “By their fruits …

If we believe research­ers and sci­ent­ists, we all have the mind of a mon­key. This ana­logy, slightly humor­ous though it may be, is actu­ally an inter­est­ing one. Con­sider that we have around forty thou­sand sep­ar­ate thoughts each day, many of them on the same …

Whilst watch­ing the explan­a­tion of Rubiales’ genius ‘Blind­side Deck’, this idea occurred to me. You might find it inter­est­ing to play around with. The BSD is set-up as fol­lows: 26 cards from Eddie Joseph’s Pre­mon­i­tion deck (bank 1), 26 cards (bank 2). A …

Cuando Len­nart Green pub­licó su rutina comer­cial lla­mada ‘Stolen Cards’, res­ultó ser un éxito inme­di­ato en el mundo de la car­to­ma­gia. Como muchos, com­pré inme­di­ata­mente el juego. Sin su inven­ción y su rutina, esta humilde ofrenda no exi­stiría. El truco es muy …

This is my ver­sion of the clas­sic ‘Diary Effect’ as inven­ted by Ted Dan­son. It was inspired by and is loosely based on ideas by Patrick Page, Eddie Joseph, Mark Els­don, Mike Born­stein, Richard Web­ster and Bob Cas­sidy. I wrote up …

Many magi­cians are very fond of Juan Tam­ar­iz’s bril­liant routine “Neither Blind Nor Silly”, pub­lished in his won­der­ful book SONATA. I did it for a very long time and still use it as described for lay people. What an effect this trick has! I …

Do you remem­ber the old trick, where two glasses are placed with the open­ings down onto a clear glass plate (or a book), which is then turned over with the glasses being appar­ently sus­pen­ded in mid air? I always liked the trick, because of …

Robert Har­bin’s ‘Card in Bottle’ is a ter­rific trick. I abso­lutely love Mar­tin Lewis’ bril­liant adaption/​method for doing it. The only wee little draw­back is that it demands the use of a black­out table to get rid of the empty bottle. For a long …

Recently, Bob Ostin’s ven­er­able switch­ing device received an update and was revamped by a prom­in­ent magic fact­ory. I am a big fan of Bob’s gim­mick and have been using it for a few dec­ades now, switch­ing in and out vari­ous items, from bil­lets to …

In the magic com­munity arrises from time to time the topic of ‘being a cre­ator’ or ‘cre­ations’. So – time to take a short look at what cre­ation, cre­at­ors or ‘being cre­at­ive’ could mean. If we look it up in the dic­tion­ary, the results …

Recently visu­al­ist Will Tsai per­formed his ver­sion of the Mat­rix effect on AGT. As it could be fore­seen, it got a tre­mend­ous reac­tion on the vari­ous social media and magic for­ums. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7wrfzpjf9U The main point of dis­cus­sion is without a doubt the ques­tion whether …

This is a little extra for an ACR, that can be used before reveal­ing that the card rose up to the top. To begin with, the ambi­tious card is on top (without the spec­tat­ors know­ing this, of course). The per­former shows …

When Len­nart Green put out his com­mer­cial routine called ‘Stolen Cards’, it proved to be an imme­di­ate hit in the card magic world. Like many, I imme­di­ately bought a set. Without his inven­tion and routine, this humble offer­ing would­n’t exist. The trick is a very …

Spring flowers have been a topic in magic for more than 100 years. Ever since Buatier de Kolta inven­ted them, they have been a fixed com­pon­ent in magician’s rep­er­toires. It is sad that the flowers avail­able from deal­ers look just out­right crappy and cheap. One …

Magi­cians tend to over-eval­­u­ate the import­ance of per­fec­tion. They try to achieve per­fec­tion in their tricks and moves, and most of the times some­thing other very import­ant (present­a­tion) falls behind. Ever since Dai Ver­non brought that ›per­fec­tion‹ to the attention …

Finally, I found a ring that is per­fectly suited for these count­less ring/​rope routines. Finally a ring the spec­tat­ors will recog­nize and know what it is! Onstage, I could ima­gine even using the lion’s head as a deco, remov­ing the ring, do the routine and …

Com­par­ing the past and the present times, it seems the magician’s scene is more and more dom­in­ated by trends. I see people get­ting heav­ily involved into pro­du­cing and pro­mot­ing busker’s pouches and com­plete ‘busk­ers’ out­fits (from table to pouch to cups to …

In the past years there has been a revival of the ‘magic’ with a Rubik’s Cube. More and more clever meth­ods to do vari­ous effects with it. The craze once again star­ted … For me, the cube has always been a toy. A soph­ist­ic­ated one, but …

This one really changed my life and atti­tude towards the work with a thumb tip and any fol­ded slips of paper or bills inside it. It is what I would call a clas­sical ‘hack’. The main prob­lem for me was that often I couldn’t retrieve …

Daniel Madis­on’s video­clip makes the rounds and it seems that more and more card men dis­agree or laugh at it. I like Daniel Madison. He is him­self and unique. And I like the clips he puts out. Very enter­tain­ing. He is the …

Here is an inter­est­ing and thought-pro­­vok­ing art­icle you should read before going into my ram­blings: http://blog.simplease.at/2014/02/dont-please-your-clients/ Good thought, right? For a designer, this is simply a truth. The qual­ity of the rela­tion­ship customer/​designer depends on how good the designer is find­ing out what the …

This is quite a good say­ing that someone reminded me of some time ago. I have been think­ing about it really hard. I’m talk­ing about what to do in magic in these times, and what to pub­lish and share with the magic com­munity and …

In the past years I star­ted to watch care­fully other magi­cians’ selec­tions of tricks that they per­form in their shows. No mat­ter where I looked, again and again I saw the same tricks (at least here in Ger­many, Aus­tria and Switzer­land): Chop Cup (Paul …

Recently, I was watch­ing the You­Tube clip of David Roth’s per­form­ance on the Penn & Teller show. I was inter­ested in see­ing his hand­ling of the open ser­vante. A glance at the pic­ture will tell you that the dir­ect­ors of the show made my …

I am reflect­ing on the mag­ni­fi­cent magi­cians and people who brought all that joy to my life. Without them, I would­n’t be what I am. Par­tic­u­larly, I would like to express my sin­cerest thanks to Mr. David Roth. When I was a young­ster, his coin work …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

In the past years I observed that quite a lot of magi­cians were search­ing for ref­er­ence mater­ial on mis­dir­ec­tion. Here I offer a col­lec­tion of book sources. The books lis­ted below have helped me most and shaped my think­ing about mis­dir­ec­tion. These books should …

I abso­lutely hate writ­ing about this, but then we live in a mod­ern world, where copy­ing stuff is the nor­mal thing to do. I was ripped-off so many times that I don’t want to count any­more. I am sick of it. But recently I learned of another …

Now at the begin­ning of a year, I always make my notes of all the dif­fer­ent lec­ture tours in Ger­many. 2017 will be a year like never before. The MZvD (Magic Circle Ger­many), and some private lec­ture tour organ­isers, put up a sched­ule which …

I don’t jump on a new one-trick pony too often, but this one really baffled (and fooled) me. Check out the video trailer, make up your mind and down­load it. It is really good and a fun trick to do. I am going to …

There are more book tests in magic than magi­cians are will­ing to buy. The num­ber of dif­fer­ent sys­tems and edi­tions is stag­ger­ing. I have had my fair share: M.O.A.B., Flash­back, Codex‑X, you name it. All of them are good, but some of them …

Not so long ago the concept of the bul­let Journal came to the aware­ness of many people which had used the clas­sic Filo­fax time man­age­ment sys­tems. It was­n’t long and the thing cre­ated a real hype on the inter­net, a lot of people …

I for­got how many times magi­cians have asked me that ques­tion in the past 25 years. It seems there is some­thing mys­ter­i­ous about that old book. The answer to that post’s title is: Yes, abso­lutely! What – a $2.00 book that is pub­lic domain …

Some guys wondered about the sub­title of this blog. The expres­sion ’90% of everything is crap’ is the well-known Sturgeon’s Law (or Sturgeon’s Rev­el­a­tion). The reason I use it is because I find Daniel Dennett’s work quite inter­est­ing and I think in mod­ern magic …

Jan Gallo’s Osaka Bills is one hell of a fun trick, and a prac­tical one, too. If you don’t have it yet, do your­self the favour and get it. It is worth hav­ing that one in your arsenal of magical weapons. But buy it …

I don’t do table-hop­ping any­more, except in an emer­gency. But when I was doing this, here is a little strategy that is easy to make, doesn’t cost a lot and is really fun to per­form. This gets all your props in a handy case, …

When I was work­ing for the ZZM (Zauberzen­t­rale München) with Har­old Voit, one of the main tricks to be learned and demon­strated for the cus­tom­ers was Ken Brooke’s “Chase the Ace”: the one with the three jumbo cards with the false …

Magi­cians are proud of their his­tory, the whole looooong story .… We cher­ish the old stuff, but wrongly. We still per­form, like apes imit­at­ing each other, the same lame stuff. One copy­ing the other, in the hope to get the same strong …

I don’t know when it happened and how. But it happened. At one time, many of the lec­tur­ers on the cir­cuit star­ted to per­form card tricks (on the table top). I have noth­ing against it (I like card tricks), but I had …

Recently I found some­thing inter­est­ing. The Con­jur­ing Arts Cen­ter sells some tiny TEATCT edi­tions, which look like mini­ature bibles. Great. The main idea is two-fold. Many times I was asked by the spec­tat­ors, how I learned all those tricks. Now, by hav­ing this little …

After the elec­tions in the USA, we have a dif­fer­ent situ­ation com­ing. I don’t want to go into the polit­ical debate, that is not my busi­ness as a Ger­man. But it is nice that this Mr. Trump is in the spot­light and so …

Recently I sub­scribed to the chess web­site «Tiger Chess» by GM Nigel Dav­ies. My thoughts were two-fold: I want to improve in my chess and looked for a sort of «course» that was con­struc­ted on a longterm basis. A solid train­ing plan. Secondly, I wanted to …

This new gim­mick has arrived in our headquar­ters. Well, I write reviews only rarely, but will do on this one. At least, this is a 70 € invest­ment. First, take a look at the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kKinJV1YlE Basic­ally, this is an index sys­tem con­cealed in a card case. …

When doing the selec­tion pro­cess for the mater­ial in your archive, it is of enorm­ous help of hav­ing a check­list with the most import­ant ques­tions about the item to be added. This list is optim­ized for the cas­ual per­former and hobbyist, …

I remem­ber well when about 18 years ago, I wanted to open a small theatre of my own, where close-up magic was per­formed even­ing after even­ing. A few years later I was help­ing a fel­low magi­cian with his show and I sug­ges­ted per­form­ing close-up magic at a round table, …

Just saw this on Face­book, lovely pic­ture of a street per­former por­tray­ing obvi­ously a magi­cian. He is dressed like a magi­cian with top hat and tail­coat and holds some the tools of our trade in the hands … maybe he actu­ally IS a magi­cian? Now this …

When I watch videos of magi­cians (espe­cially close-uppers) on the net, there is one thing that is annoy­ing to me: the con­stant snap­ping of their fin­gers, when a magical moment is about to hap­pen. Sure, we are used to quite a lot of …

All ten years or so I decide to cre­ate a “new” act. This time it will be a manip­u­lat­ive act for the small stage/​parlor. In my past I had already some exper­i­ence with a manip­u­la­tion act. I always was fond of this branch of magic. …

Recently I atten­ded a con­ven­tion here in Ger­many (the preselec­tions for the Ger­man Mas­ter­ships) and I watched with anti­cip­a­tion the con­test – espe­cially the genre manip­u­la­tions. And there it was again: the old Bil­liard Ball Trick. Well, it is a clas­sic, and (maybe due …

Recently I read in some of those really old books in magic. In the volume “Tricks for Every­one” by David Devant (pub­lished in 1909!), he describes a lovely quick trick with a ruler. The moves and the van­ish look like the well-known “Flip Stick …

Les pré­par­at­ifs et voy­ages pour la tournée de con­férences en Espagne ont occupé tout mon temps libre, de sorte que le blog a été en quelque sorte nég­ligé. Mal­gré tout — en ce moment je suis en tournée en Espagne, je montre ici …

Our magic industry is gov­erned by the magic deal­ers. Ima­gine a (magic) world without our deal­ers. It would be drear­ily and bor­ing. Only half the fun. But also, with the deal­ers came the trade-spe­­cific copy. They developed it almost into an art form …

Being bom­barded by new things and the mar­ket­ing strategies of the internet(eers) more and more, a ques­tion arrises. Speak­ing about magic, of course. Per­fectly made video clips, all in a cer­tain level of pro­duc­tion is the stand­ard these days. We all got used …

Siendo cada vez más y más bom­bardeado por las nuevas cosas y las estrategias de mar­ket­ing de inter­net (y los inter­nautas) me surge una pre­gunta. Hab­lando acerca de magia, por supuesto. Los video clips per­fecta­mente real­iz­a­dos, todo a un cierto nivel de pro­duc­ción es …

This and the fol­low­ing art­icles should be of some help in mak­ing proper selec­tions. Of course, it must be under­stood that the tricks and books I will sug­gest are purely my per­sonal opin­ion and your taste may vary. Don’t for­get, this …

After hav­ing pre­pared everything from the hard­ware side, it is time to tackle the mater­ial itself. The first thing in my opin­ion is to be able to prop­erly select mater­ial, or some­times to de-select mater­ial. There­fore, I changed the former article …

The hard­ware is being expan­ded by some very import­ant tools … Hav­ing men­tioned in the last art­icle already that the com­puter is not my most import­ant tool for the archive, here is one of the most import­ant tools (besides the brain, of course): …

Now that we have the little note­book or whatever ready for use, it is time to get some struc­ture onto it. Here is the sys­tem I have been using for years and it proved to func­tion per­fectly. The whole thing is to …

Gedanken von Robert Stacher Sem­in­are, Work­shops, Super Prac­tice Ses­sions – sie sind das Zauber­salz in unserer Suppe. Wo sonst würden wir alte Bekan­nte und Fre­unde tref­fen und über unser eigenes Rep­er­toire plaud­ern können? Wofür würden wir sonst unser Geld aus­geben, wenn nicht …

Now we are going to dis­cuss a couple of tools that are use­ful in build­ing our archive. These are not many and may dif­fer from what you have been using already. Again, very few and simple cat­egor­ies: com­puter note tak­ing stor­age Com­puter In …

Let’s take a look at that mon­ster called archive. We have to build one from scratch. Much bet­ter than wast­ing time in try­ing to get some over­view of the mess we have already. This will be our new archive, that also …

There are tons of books and courses out there, even blogs ded­ic­ated to the topic of self-organ­­iz­a­­tion. But for the magi­cians, there isn’t too much on this. In the past years, help­ing other magi­cians cre­ate their acts and shows, one …

This pro­ject was born out of anger and des­pair about the things going on on the magic mar­ket­place. Help to stop that! See what Tim Ellis is right­fully doing already. I think we are not the only ones think­ing that way. We feel that …

Este proyecto nació desde el enfado y la deses­per­a­ción sobre lo que está ocur­riendo en el mer­cado de la magia. ¡Ayuda a parar esto! Echa un vistazo a lo que Tim Ellis ya está haciendo de hecho. Creo que no somos los únicos …

If there ever was a magical “DIY hack”, then it is this one here. John Ram­say’s “Cyl­in­der and Coins” trick is a clas­sic and a very strong effect. I always wanted to do it, but then there were two obstacles: The expens­ive and hard …

A card pre­dic­tion using only two small blank file cards. Any­time, any­where, in the pocket/​wallet and almost impromptu. One of the res­ults of my never-end­ing search for “nat­ural index sys­tems”. It was born in an emer­gency, when I did­n’t have the …

The Him­ber Wal­let is a very use­ful tool. But some­times, it is easy to get con­fused as to which side to open. I know that a seasoned pro has no prob­lem with that, but this hint is dir­ec­ted at the ama­teur and casual …

Recently my friend Jon Allen informed me that he had a new ver­sion of his best selling trick “Par­agon” in the pipeline. He sent me a little private video clip and I was fas­cin­ated! You do the same Par­agon effect, but then you …

Simon Aron­son is a card magic genius. I love his work. There is one trick that has fas­cin­ated me thor­oughly, and that is his “Ad-Jacent”. What a great trick! Des­pite hav­ing it, I would­n’t per­form it, because I am a lefty, and all the reg­u­lar peek work …

Simon Aron­son es un genio de la car­to­ma­gia. Me encanta su tra­bajo. Hay un juego que siempre me ha fas­cinado, es su “Ad-jacent”. ¡Qué gran juego! A pesar de ten­erlo, no lo podría hacer, porque soy zurdo, y todos las manio­bras están fuera …

The magic scene has become some­how insane. A con­ven­tion here, some event there, a couple of videos, DVDs, new tricks, books to be read, club meet­ing, gigs, new down­loads, new new new … bang! The head explodes. With all that input, how can …

Last year, same time. Ring ring! (phone) Q: Hi Alex! XXX here (name garbled). A. Hi! What’s on? Q: Alex, you have to help me! I have a show in two weeks, and I need a 25 minute stand-up pro­gram, some new tricks and things. You know, it is an important …

I love this little “hack”! I do this often, not because I can’t palm cards, but because it is so much fun to do it right under their noses. Have one of the well known gag cards with 52 prin­ted on the (with a matching …

I pub­lished this notion already on the Ger­man part of my blog, but then would want to repeat it here for the Eng­lish read­ers. After see­ing again and again on the Face­book, at con­ven­tions and in clubs the desire and attempts …