How to Get Started If Youre a Beginner

Whether youve been practicing magic for two days, two years, or twenty, the only effective magic trick is one that actually "fools" your audience. This ability to create a good illusion depends in huge part on one thing: rehearsing!

Lets face it-no matter how great a trick is or how useful a magic prop is, you wont surprise or delight anyone unless its performed smoothly and confidently. What if you drop your deck of cards or accidentally mishandle a coin? The illusion will be destroyed, and youll have lost your audiences trust.

When youre just starting out its understandable that youll have to practice in front of an audience several times before you get it just right. No one expects you to be perfect right away. But you also cant expect to fool anyone unless you put in the time to practice your skills and work with your props (if you are using any).

The tricks in this chapter were chosen because they are simple, effective, fun to perform, and appealing to just about any audience. You can delight a crowd of schoolchildren with them, or you can test them out on adults. But before you do, practice, practice, practice to get it right!

For now, lets cut straight to the chase and talk more specifically about these simple yet stunning tricks. Then, at the end of this chapter Ill give you some highly effective strategies and techniques I used when I was just starting out!

Sleight of Hand

What exactly is sleight (pronounced "slite") of hand? This term refers to a broad category of magic tricks that relies on your skills and techniques as well as the facility of your fingers and hands. In other words, these are tricks that depend on your skill and dexterity to fool the audience, much more so than on props or gimmicks. Its your fingers that do the work, not a manufacturers product.

Another way of saying all this is that a sleight of hand is a trick that is performed so well and so deftly that the audience cant tell precisely how it was done!

Theres a great word for this that every magician should know: "legerdemain." This word comes to us from the old French phrase "leger de main," in which "leger" translates as light, and "de main" means "of hand." So if you perform with a light touch, thats the ideal form of legerdemain.

This deftness applies to most magic tricks, though, not just sleight of hand! In fact, most of tricks were going to discuss involve sleight of hand, from shuffling cards to palming coins. Even levitation, which well discuss in Chapter 4, involves sleight of hand-although thats more like "sleight of foot!"

Just keep in mind that accomplishing many of the following tricks successfully involves not just a working knowledge of the techniques but also the ability to carry them out easily and without a lot of obvious effort. Another good reason to get in as much practice as you can!

This article was extracted from the book Discover The Magic Trick Secrets Youre Not Supposed To Know. To find out more please visit www.DiscoverMagicTricks.com