Practice, practice, practice. I have done a lot of it over the last week. I can now sit down at a table and deal out cards in a right handed manner well enough that people wouldn’t give it any thought but I certainly have a ways to go before being able to preform holding the deck this way. It has made me think about what it is we aim for when learning a new slight.

Any style of preforming art requires great amounts of practice if you want to be seen as great. It is often considered a compliment to say ‘they danced so beautifully that it seemed effortless’. Magic takes that an extra step, the point is not that the movement looks effortless but that it doesn’t ‘look’ at all. Being able to deal hands of cards should look smooth and effortless and I am getting close to achieving that right handed but doing any of the moves found in EATCT shouldn’t look effortless they should look exactly like not doing them at all.

The shuffles at the beginning of the book are not to far from being unseen. I haven’t filmed any of my practicing sessions yet because I don’t believe anyone would really want to watch ‘almost undetectable’ false shuffle. I tend to have a tick at the same spot each time and so am trying to spend time practicing while watching something else. It is a simple enough move that I don’t need to be worrying about dropping cards and if I am not watching I am building that muscle memory and not stalling due to the my brain thinking ‘okay here comes the move, pretend it isn’t happening’.

It is strange though, devoting all this time so that one day I can ‘Watch this’ and have the spectator see nothing at all.

Then there is the section on shifts that I am not sure how much time to devote. It is a strange category of moves. They are knacky, angle sensitive moves that have no place in the cheating end of things and many argue they don’t have a necessary place in the magic side of things either. It is a move that tends to be misunderstood by beginners – the advice that a larger action hides a smaller movement is often taken to extremes by beginners and I’ve seen videos on youtube where the performer comes dangerously close to punching themselves in the face. When done well it is an unnoticed move but rarely is it mastered to the point of really being invisible.

My introduction to downloadable magic instructions was actually a video that focused on a couple versions of the move and I believe there was a point in time where I could do a passable job but it always seemed like there were easier ways to control the cards. All that said I am still a ways off from the sections of Shifts so maybe by the time I get there I’ll be excited about working on them.

To become an adept at second dealing is as difficult a task as can be given in card handling, but once acquired, like many other arts, it is as easy as habit.

This is an example of how little previous experience I have with EATCT. In thinking about my goals for the year a passable second deal was top of the list. It is a move I have always been fascinated by and even remember being accused of using when playing cards at school. I have never attempted to do it but assumed that it would be something that a fair bit of time was devoted to in the book.

Turns out there are roughly two pages discussing the second deal and half of one page is taken up with illustrations. I was a bit surprised but it just shows that I don’t have much more experience with Erdnase than I do with dealing seconds.

It is not going to affect my goal at all. I want to transition myself to dealing like a right-handed person would, which means I need to spend a bunch of time just dealing cards, so I might as well spend that time dealing seconds.

Jason England has a great section in Fundamentals 1 going over the strike second, which interestingly is not one of the ways mentioned by Erdnase, so I am going to work on that as I deal countless right handed hands.

I’ve never quite made up my mind on Daniel Madison but I do like these cards and love the commercial.

The Dealers by Daniel Madison from Ellusionist on Vimeo.

week one

For years I have used the excuse that I deal left handed and it is tricky to transpose directions when learning card magic. This is a pretty lame excuse and really it just comes down to the fact that sometimes I am a bit lazy. So  to correct this I am going to spend the upcoming year with S. W. Erdnase and his Expert At The Card Table. If you are unfamiliar with the book it is considered to be one of the must have books in any card workers library and is aimed primarily at gambling slights.

I have spent some time trying to decide the best route for beginning this journey. EATCT is not a particularly long book but many of the moves that it teaches take an incredible amount of time to be able to preform undetected. Do I simply start at the beginning and once I am comfortable with a move continue on to the next one? That is what I would do if I thought that I would be able to execute the moves within a week or so but that is far from realistic. What I have decided to do is sit down and do an inital read through of the book. This will give me an understanding of where Erdnase is likely to lead me and help be focus on where I want to focus my attention first.

I also plan to learn to deal from a right handed perspective. It is just an exercise in muscle memory and certainly wont hurt to be able to do thing either left or right handed.

I am, and will always be, a book person so my main source for this project will be a paperback copy of EATCT. The current Dover edition to be exact. There is a mulit-disc dvd version that I have heard mixed reviews of that I may look at tracking down later on. I have however purchased a copy of Jason England’s Foundations Vol 1. to lend some extra visuals to a number of things taught by Erdnase. And I have grabbed a couple of decks of Bee’s as they are more suited to gambling slights.

So that is the game plan. The goals, having not yet read the book, are to be able to second deal and have a least two usable false shuffles at my disposal by the end of the year. There are also a number of books about Erdnase that I look forward to reading.