Everything revolves around my upcom­ing MZvD lec­ture tour, where I’ll be present­ing my new lec­ture “60/​60 – Best of ARCANE CRUMBS.” Right now, the phones are ringing non-stop, and there’s a lot of nego­ti­at­ing over dates. A list of tour stops will fol­low as soon as possible!

News from the Blog

Dive into my pub­lished articles.

• Mis­dir­ec­tion Ref­er­ences
  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 …
• The Pre­mon­i­tion Box Story
  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 …
• The Insane Lec­ture Busi­ness
  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 …
• Lloyd Barnes ACME Hole Trick
  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 …
• A Simple Book Test
  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 …
• A Bul­let Journal For Magic
  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 …
• Is Erd­nase Still Necessary?
  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 …
• Seven Tools For Crit­ical Think­ing
  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 …
• Osaka Bills Pre­par­a­tion
  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 …
• Table Hop­ping Chess
  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, …
• Chase The Ace Revisited
  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 …
• Magical Monks
  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 …
• Have you seen the lec­ture?
  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 …
• The Erd­nase Bible
  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 …
• The Trumpy Color Chan­ging Silk
  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 …
• Train­ing In Magic
  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 …
• The Ver­tigo Pre­dic­tion
  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. …
• Crack­ing Magic (8) — Check­list
  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, …
• Table Magic Theatre
  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, …
• Image
  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 …
• It’s A Snap!
  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 …
• Birth of an Act
  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. …
• The Bil­liard Ball Trick
  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 …
• A Sur­pris­ing Find
  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 …

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