Magic Tricks Site

This is an odd site: www.cardtrick.ca. Can’t decide if it’s a good source of ideas or just a ‘lets reveal some magic secrets and make money from advertising’ type site.

It’s good points are: There is a lot of info on it including card tricks, coin tricks and sleights (mainly card tricks though). Everything is simply explained. There is also not very much advertising on it.

Bad points: The way the left side navigation keeps changing order makes it difficult to find the same thing twice. Nothing is referenced and maybe the explanations are just too simplistic. It would be difficult to learn anything from scratch from the descriptions.

Hmmm, maybe the bad points outweigh the good points. But, if you know a bitabout magic already you may find some good ideas. Take this memorised deck idea for example. With a bit of work on the actual mechanics of the trick, I could see this looking like an amazing trick with a shuffled, borrowed deck.

The Gray Man

www.thegreyman.com is the site of Philip Escoffey, a ‘mind reader’ based in London in the UK.

I really like this site. It is well written, simple and creates a real feeling of mystery. I expect it’s intentional that you can’t see a picture of Philip on the site. This adds to the slightly weird and unnerving feel.

He also offers a money back guarantee if the client is in any way unhappy. Not something I’ve seen before on any magician or other performers website.

Expert Magic

Expert Magic is yet another online magic dealer.

They have a very nice looking site, slick and well laid out but not a huge variety of items on offer – mainly card tricks and DVDs. Most items do have a video demo though, which is almost required these days.

I’ve never ordered anything from them so I’ve no idea what their customer service is like, but they do clearly state their shipping and returns policy on the homepage which is always a good thing.

Marked Cards

This is an interesting site about marked cards – www.cardsorcerer.com

If you delve deeply, it tells you how the various types of markings work, including ways to detect them on a pack of cards.

There are also some card trick methods on the site (not that original, but a few god ideas) and some links to videos – unfortunately they weren’t working.

Some of the stuff is expensive though, there’s one card marking system on this site for $900!

The Perfect Shuffle

This is an interesting page: www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/cs4fn/mathemagic/brentmorris.php

This chap is a computer scientist and interested in magic – a dangerous combination.

On this page he talks about perfect shuffles and how you can send a card to any position in the pack using a sequence of in and out faros. Of course you have to quickly convert decimal into binary and be able to perform faro shuffles to use this technique. Not easy.

There are other ways of acheiving the card to any number effect, most easier than this. But it is an interesting idea to have tucked away, maybe it could be used in conjunction with something else…?