Spades & Diamonds - Newsletter

Tips Tricks And Hints To Be A Successful Magic Magician

Practice! Practice! Practice
Why the repetition you ask? Simply, practice is the only surefire way that you can get your tricks up to a polished standard. It is not so much the difficulty or simplicity of the trick that counts, it is making sure that you are competent in performing it in front of an audience. It is embarrassing to forget a part of the magic trick half way through or to mess up the handling. Lots of practice should also enable you to chat away to your audience while performing and (importantly) not have to keep your eyes on the cards or trick, all through the performance.
Stucture
To assist the success of your magic act, you should try to structure your performance by planning your tricks so that one trick leads onto another, either by theme or by some story line that you may be telling. Also make sure and save your strongest and most impressive tricks until the end of your act. This will prevent an anticlimax, as, if the audience were to view them before then, their expectations for the rest of the act would be of the same standard or higher.
Misdirection, Your best friend in magic
The importance of misdirection incorporated into your act can not be stressed enough. Misdirection is the skill that can really elevate your act and give it the polish that it needs to have a really professional feel.For the best entertainment value for your magic tricks it is important to learn to control everything going on during your performance. Factors include where your audience are positioned, where and when they look and what they are thinking about. Basically. misdirection is making sure that your audience say sufficiently entertained by your act to stay focused on the magic and don't get distracted enough to start trying to figure out how the trick is done. This is not usually a problem as more often than not, the audience are completely oblivious to the actual workings of the trick.
When things don't go according to plan

Ladies and Gentlemen, when I arrived here tonight, I received a special request... but, I'm going to perform today.

"Man, its so quiet in here, you could hear a career drop"

"Gee, thats weird, it worked perfectly at home"

"That's the first time that ever happened again"

"It doesn't look as bad from this side"

"Erm...could you step a little to the left? Your standing on the trapdoor."
Heckler stoppers
A heckler is someone who is trying to truly ruin your show. It’s someone who wants to see you fail and does everything in his power to make that happen, including verbal abuse, physical abuse, breaking your props, throwing things at you, etc. Dealing with hecklers are as follows, I laugh if someone makes a joke or funny comment. If I unintentionally set someone up and they make a joke, I’ll wait for the laughter to subside and then say, “That was really funny—I wish I’d said it!” Or I might say, tongue firmly planted in cheek, “Good one! But it’s MY show, OK?". Its imporant you control the situation so that no problems arise to ruin your act.