Learn How to Do Magic Tricks – Coin Magic Training

December 24, 2015 By Aaron Fisher

Learn How To Do Magic Tricks

Coin Magic – Core Training

Learn How to Do Magic Tricks: The Vanishing Coin Trick # 1

Do you want to learn how to do magic tricks? Learning how to do magic is easiest when you have a great place to start. So, we’ll begin with the most basic of all tricks. It’s also one of the most magical: making an object disappear!

In this article, we’ll show you how to make a coin vanish completely.

(If you are interested in easy card tricks, check out this other article here.)

And we’ve included several video tutorials to make the magic easy to understand and master!

Why start with a Coin Trick?

Great question! There are a few reasons. First, coins are one of the easiest objects to start with. They’re also normal. In fact, almost everyone you meet will have one in their pocket, and that alone makes the magic much more amazing.

But the best reason is this: Not only does the vanish of an ordinary coin have the power to amaze anyone, it also has the most important secrets of magic embedded inside. We’re not going to just ‘reveal’ the secret behind the trick. Far from it. In the videos and instructions you’re about to enjoy, we’ll show you how to use the secret art of misdirection to create more than a trick…an illusion that seems just like real magic.

Before we start, here’s a final note. You can start astonishing with this miracle very quickly, but it’s important not to get frustrated if it feels as though you’re not ‘getting it’ the first time through.

We’ve broken the entire thing up into ‘baby-steps’ to make it nice and easy. Just follow along, and you’ll master a very cool coin trick…and at the same time, foundation you’ll need to pull off magic’s greatest illusions!

Materials:

Start with a silver dollar. You’ll be able to do this trick with any coins, but you’ll actually have an easier time if you start off with a bigger coin!

We recommend an Eisenhower Dollars, because it’s nice and big and unlike older silver dollars, Eisenhower Dollars are very inexpensive.

Try and get a newer coin, that hasn’t been worn down around the edges. As you’ll see shortly, coins with freshly milled edges are easier to ‘palm’.

Pro-Tip: Whenever we start learning coin tricks, we can expect to drop our coins many times for the first few weeks. We suggest that you wait for this phase to pass before you start spending money on coins with a high silver content. Real silver coins look GREAT, but they’re very expensive.

And remember, you can practice and perform this trick with any coins you have lying around. Bigger coins are just easier to learn with…plus, bigger objects make for more impressive magic!

Have a wand/talisman/stone of your choice.

How to Find Your Personal Finger Palm Position

Phase 1

1. Watch this Video to see how your personal palm position will look and feel. Then follow the steps below to create a palm position just for your hands….so natural, no one will ever suspect you of trickery!

2. Start with your coin at the base of your RIGHT fingers. The coin should rest pretty evenly on your middle and ring fingers. Make sure you’re comfortable with how the coin feels.

3. Form your three middle fingers into ‘Xylophone Position’. Your palming finger – your third finger – sits in the middle of a three-finger combination that looks like a xylophone. Extend your pointer finger fully and curl back your last three fingers to grip the coin.Your fingers should be staggered so the finger on top sticks out slightly more than the one below it. When you are starting to learn how to do magic tricks, this is an important hand position to remember.

Illustrations 3 and 4 below show exactly what this looks like to the audience.

4. Curl back your pinky finger. Imagine a string pulling your pinky toward your wrist. Don’t curl it too far, though, or the coin will show. If you have smaller hands, start your palm position with the third finger palming a bit of the coin (move the coin closer to your pinky).

Note: For detailed video training on finding your own personal palm position, check out our free training here.

5. Loosen up! Try to relax each muscle in your hand so the palm position doesn’t feel forced or tense. After you find a position a position at looks natural and feels comfortable, begin softening your grip, releasing tension, until you hand seems empty…even to you!

Phase 2

When you practice you palm position, you’ll get the strongest results from practicing without any coin at all! That may sound strange, but practicing without a coin will make the palm position feel natural to your hand. The more natural it feels, the more normal it will look to your audience when you are in fact palming a coin.

To make sure the position is natural, grasp the coin between your thumb and pointer finger. Your middle finger will look like it’s holding the coin when it really isn’t, and that will help you conceal any objects in your hand (see illustration 4 above).

How to Find Action Position

First watch the clear video training above. Then use the following instructions to keep track of the details that make the magic!

1. Start your routine with your best right-hand finger palm position.

2. Cup your hand naturally in a horizontal “C.” You’ll probably find this position a little uncomfortable at first. In fact, many people have a hard time keeping the right hand horizontal.

But remember that this is a relaxed finger palm, not an “activated” one. Don’t contract your muscles in this position. Look in a mirror or camera to make sure your hand forms a “C” shape.

2. Use your right hand to rotate the coin forward so that its bottom edge rests along the top edge of your pointer finger.

3. Going into the flip-over action, angle your right hand slightly back towards you. The coin should rest like an easel with your thumb holding it down. Your audience should see only the edge of the coin.

4. Keep your thumb subtly in position once the coin flips back. If you do this correctly, the coin should fall right into palm position.

How to Find Display Position

Again, watch the video training above, and then follow along, coin in hand, to get the details that follow!

Remember, we started by finding your personal palm position, then we ‘backtracked’ one step to find an ‘Action Position’ that ends with the coin in your unactivated, or open, finger palm. Now you’ll complete the puzzle by finding your personal Display Position. From your audiences perspective, this is where the whole illusion begins!

We call this Display Position because it will ensure your audience can clearly see the coin, and at the same time, facilitate easy movement to Action Position and finger palm after that.

1. Before you attempt Display position with a coin in your hand, first try this exercise — Press down on the joint of your thumb with your pointer finger. Your thumb should be straight with your finger curling down.

2. Now do the same thing, this time actually holding a coin! Pinch the coin at the very edge with the tip of your pointer finger near the joint of your thumb. Most of the coin will show, helping your audience retain the visual.

3. Tilt your right arm forward and back so that the coin is reflected in the light.

Alternate Method: Place your thumb in a 10 o’clock position and keep your pointer finger straight. You’ll have the same control but a much more natural look. (As you learn how to do magic tricks with confidence, you’ll often discover alternate versions of many tools and positions.)

coin magic tricks — *Illustration 11*: Looks almost identical to the audience, but you may find this method works better for you!

After you get a bit of practice in the three areas we’ve just covered: finding your personal finger palm position, Action Position and Display Position, you’ll have the entire right hand sequence for one of the most astonishing vanishes ever devised.

Secret Training Strategy: Give the steps above a few weeks of practice to become comfortable and fluid. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to add the left hand action to the mix and create the finished illusion of making a coin disappear completely!

Creating the Magic: Your Left Hand Action

1. Start with your empty left hand.

2. Pin your elbow to your side and extend your forearm at a 90-degree angle.

3. Your entire arm and hand should be completely flat, palm up.

4. Use your right hand to move your left hand up 5 degrees on an angle. Your hand should still be flat.

5. Using your right hand, pretend to drop a coin in your left hand. Bend your fingers at the inner joints to hide your palm and create an illusion of weight.

6. Roll your thumb behind your fingers so the backs of your fingers are facing the audience in a grasping position.

7. Reveal the empty hand.

Note: Even if it takes you a few weeks or longer, practice your palm and action positions until you have them down pat. Our next few lessons build on top of what you’ve already discovered, so to learn how to do magic tricks, starting with this incredible coin trick, you’ll want to be comfortable with the basic moves before you start to focus on showmanship.

Remember As You Practice…

Practice the steps in the order we’ve taught them.

Coins reflect light…and that’s crucial to the effect.

Every time you practice palm position, double-check your fingers’ xylophone configuration.

Introduction to Misdirection

Once you have the basic finger positions described above, you’re ready to coordinate the left and right hand actions, and turn this effect into it miracle.

Here is a short list of the key things to keep in mind when you intend to perform this Coin Trick for an audience.

Remember to have an actual connection with the audience; don’t fake it!

Great close-up magic is more like a conversation than a performance.

Remember the importance of your gaze in visually connecting with, and directing, the attention of the audience. After you connect with an audience member, be sure to bring your gaze back to the object of the effect. Learn how to do magic tricks.

Your constant movement of focused attention is the first step to successful misdirection. If you don’t tell the audience which direction to go with their mind, they’ll pick their own, and that can work against you.

For more information, check out Juan Tamariz’s book on misdirection – The Five Points of Magic.

Misdirection Frame By Frame: Attention Jacking

Here’s an outline to help you keep track of the crucial information in the video above.

Open and in-transit sequences:

Focus on your spectator (A) then shift your gaze to your object (B), such as a coin.

Go back and forth from A to B.

Shift your gaze from A to your wand (B2), which is the object of the open action (i.e., where you want the audience to look).

As you look at the object of the open action, you reach for that object and do the secret move in transit.

The Coin Vanish Frame By Frame:

Frame 1: Magician says hello to a spectator (A).

Frame 2: Magician looks at the coin (B).

Frame 3: Audience looks at the magician’s face as she returns her gaze to A.

Frame 4: Magician shifts gaze to wand (B2), and audience sees the wand.

Frame 5: Audience sees the magician’s face bringing them back to B, which they don’t know has changed.

Frame 6: Coin disappears. This leaves the audience with pictures of the magician’s face, the coin, the wand, and then the coin vanishing. Their visual memories omitted anything in between.

Structure & Presentation

Technique and misdirection are just the beginning. If you truly want to learn how to do magic tricks that astonish, you’ll want to incorporate two more elements to the trick.

With a strong structure and clear presentation, you’ll have everything you need to perform miracles that can astound anyone!

Structure can be in a single effect that grows into a more complex routine or in how separate routines are put together in a show.

Your Presentation will give you the confidence to perform in front of an audience with a flawless routine.

The layers of a routine are: Technique, Attention Management, Structure, and Presentation. A great presentation will naturally fill in the gaps if the first three elements are well-aligned. The more you work on these four layers, the better your magic will become.

Internal Monologue and Authentic Discovery

Your Internal Monologue is the silent conversation you have with yourself to make sure you’re holding the attention of the audience.

Note: It’s easy to confuse your internal monologue with the actual presentation. To learn how to do magic tricks like a real pro, avoid saying things you can simply show the audience instead!

Authentic Discovery is the ability to see each audience member and object in your show for the very first time…any time.

Remember to be patient with yourself! If you want to learn how to do magic tricks, it will take time. These skills could take four or five months to perfect, so don’t get frustrated. Enjoy the journey and the rest will come in short order.

Do you want to learn how to do magic tricks? Please leave a comment and tell us what you want to learn. I read each and every comment – and I look forward to reading yours!

Magic Tricks Revealed

September 19, 2015 By Aaron Fisher

Magic Tricks Revealed: The Important Ones

Magic Tricks Revealed is an ironic title – it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. After all, it’s the sort of term people type into the Google Machine when they’re making their very first inquiries into the world of card magic. That’s not the sort of inquiry that ever brings up my name. I’ve been publishing magic books and videos, and creating original magic for about 20 years, but if you search of secrets revealed, or magic exposed, it’s a guarantee I’ll never come up in that conversation. I’m just not the sort of magician that comes up when folks start asking to see Magic Tricks Revealed.

Why is that? Because most often, the phrase “Magic Tricks Revealed” seems to imply a desire to see the methods, or secrets, behind many famous tricks. And of course, as you may have already noticed, that’s not what this site is about. This site is about Magic Tricks Revealed, to be sure – but not that kind of trick.

At this site, Magic Tricks Revealed refers not just to the tricks and effects themselves (oh but they’re be plenty of that i promise you!), but to the countless tricks and secrets we magicians use to ensure the basic methods are never suspected, let alone detected, by our audiences.

Magic Tricks Revealed refers to the tricks of misdirection, difficult tricks, that must be mastered to direct the audience’s attention during a performance – and draw focus toward the effect and away from the method.

Magic Tricks Revealed refers to the technical secrets behind some of magic’s most sought after, hidden techniques. I’ve devoted much of my professional life to developing not only the strongest approaches possible for these techniques. But also, Magic Tricks Revealed refers to my special tricks of teaching and explaining those techniques to my students – so these important tools can be learned and mastered more quickly, and more effectively, than ever before.

Magic Tricks Revealed refers to the secrets of effect structure and presentation which cloak our sleights, gimmicks and misdirection within well planned, deceptive effect design. Without this structure present in your work – you’ll find your Magic Tricks Revealed before your audience! And at the worst possible times.

Magic Tricks Revealed refers to performance techniques – and the skills we magicians must master if we want to connect to our audiences and make them experience the feeling of real magic.

Magic Tricks Revealed refers to the name of this blog. With my tongue firmly in my cheek i begin, knowing that magic tricks revealed through anything other than the sincere desire of a student to master our craft – are not revealed at all, but merely exposed.

Thanks so much for joining me – i’ll do my very best to make it work your time and effort to join me!

With Thanks

Aaron Fisher

7 Card Magic Myths You Should Leave Behind

September 18, 2015 By Aaron Fisher

Try dropping any one of these beliefs for just a few months. You’ll find yourself practicing and performing more effectively, having more fun, and getting stronger reactions from every audience.

Myth #1: The longer I practice a sleight today, the better I will be tomorrow.

It takes many months or longer to get comfortable with a sleight-of-hand technique. For years, I practiced twelve hours a day – often, I’d devote much of that time to just one move.

Eventually I began to realize I was wasting a lot of energy. I’d make an improvement or a series of discoveries in the first hour or two of the session, but after that, not so much. By learning how to sense the end of the productive work and either put the cards down or move on to another subject, I got better results and had more fun.

I tell my online students that 30-60 minutes of focused attention, three to four days a week, will offer better results than four hours in a single day, or even four hours every day of the week. Sleight of hand is like slow setting cement. Take the time to set moves into your muscle memory slowly – you’ll get better results than you will from mindlessly repeating a sleight for hours!

Instead of more practice, focus on better practice.

Myth #2: If I do the move fast enough, no one will see it.

It doesn’t matter if your pass is so fast it’s ‘invisible’. As soon as the audience suspects you’re attempting sleight of hand, the illusion of magic is spoiled beyond repair. Rather than invisible, your sleights must be imperceptible; no one should ever imagine you would, or even could, do anything sneaky. Performing a move with precision is important, but the speed of the move isn’t nearly as important as knowing exactly when to do it, and where your audience will be focusing when you do.

Speed is less important than audience management and timing. As soon as they suspect you of foul play, you’ve lost any chance of creating a magical experience.

Myth #3: I must perfect a trick before I perform it.

Sorry friends, but that’s impossible. The process of performing a trick, then listening to your audience and accepting feedback, is what makes a trick better and better over time. Just make sure you can perform a trick well enough to fool the people – and then get it up on it’s feet in front of a real audience. If you listen well, their reactions and responses will show you what’s working, and what needs your attention next.

Deception is just the beginning of your job. Once you can fool the audience you can move on to the real work of a magician – creating amazement and wonder. This is the real game, and it takes a great many performances and refinements to play. And that whole process can’t even START until you begin performing the trick.

Take the pressure off! Accept that no trick is perfect at it’s debut, and the first performance is part of a much larger process.

Myth #4: Presentation is the most important element of successful magic.

I hear this one all the time from new students in my online training program. They tell me that in order to make a new effect interesting, it must have a unique and fascinating presentation. As Jim Steinmeyer, one the greatest minds in magic of this or any other century, once told me: “Never forget: people go to a magic show to get the pants fooled off of them”. And he was right – that’s the prime directive. If someone goes to your magic show and leaves saying, “Boy, didn’t he have an amazing presentation?” something has gone terribly wrong.

As you develop your magic, focus on how to clearly create and communicate the desired effect to your audience using ALL the tools you have at your disposal: technique, misdirection, construction and presentation. Like too many flourishes, too many extra words in a presentation can muddy the effect and leave your audience feeling confused.

While an interesting presentation can enhance an already powerful and deceptive routine, by treating presentation as the engine that drives your magic, you’ll likely end up with a boring piece of magic that includes too much talk and not enough action. #TheWorst

Effective presentation highlights the effect, but is only one part of the whole machine.

Myth #5: Self-working card tricks require no skill.

This myth comes from the tendency magicians have to assume that the word “skill” refers only to sleights. Unfortunately, self-working tricks often require you to deal, cut, or arrange the cards while holding the audience’s attention and clearly explaining and justifying the whole process. Doing that requires card handling skills, attention management chops and performance ability. These ‘non-sleight’ skills are essential to make a ‘self-working’ card trick entertaining. In fact, they are needed in every trick we do!

‘Self working’ tricks aren’t self-working at all. Use them to master the many important performance skills great magicians need.

Myth #6: Some people have talent & I’m not one of them.

There is no such thing as talent, and, if there is, you needn’t let it concern you. Famous acting teacher and writer David Mamet once wrote that the word talent has no purpose other than to give students a reason to throw in the towel. This advice applies equally to actors as to sleight-of-hand artists and close-up magicians. When we see great sleight of hand artists like Nathan Kranzo or Lee Asher, it’s easy to automatically think “Well, I could do that, but I don’t have the talent”.

As Mamet so clearly pointed out, the notion of ‘talent’ doesn’t matter one bit. All that matters is figuring out where you want to go, and what the next step is to get there. Becoming a real close up magician is like eating an elephant – you have to do it one bite at a time. Don’t think about whether or not you’re special, unique or talented; the people in whom you believe these qualities exist would not be where they are today if they had not taken the single next step towards their success. So, drop that particular ‘talentless’ excuse and start figuring out which part of Babar you want to chew first – his ears or his toenails.

No matter who you are or what particular circumstances affect your life, if you have the desire to improve, you have what it takes to be successful.

Myth #7: We should seek out new, complex effects to stand out from other magicians.

Surprisingly often, my new online students say things like, “The ambitious card is boring, every magician does that…” As soon as we become engaged in magical pursuits, we lose the ability to think like regular people.

The majority of your audiences will have seen zero, one or maybe two magicians in person in their entire lives. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely that they will be bored by the same effects that bore you. For most real life situations, especially professional gigs, your tricks should be as simple, clear and direct as possible. Simple (or boring, to us magi), effects like the Ambitious Card and Card to Wallet are clear enough to penetrate the audience’s defences and get you a fighting chance at creating a magical experience. The more complex or esoteric the effect – the harder it becomes to clearly present it and make people care.

The clearest, simplest effects are called classics not because they’re boring, but because they’ve been able to connect with audiences consistently for hundreds of years.

Your Turn

Have any of these myths been holding you back? If so, which ones? Can you think of some myths I missed? Tell me what beliefs about magic your own experience has forced you to re-examine. What Happened? How did your change in attitude affect your magic? I can’t wait to read your thoughts.