Many people during the birth of the blog bitched and complained about me making examples of people doing horrible magic. They say that it is unfair for me to “laugh” at them behind their backs. It is true that I laugh at them for performing magic without proper practice or just plain common sense. It’s like watching this and blaming us, the viewers, for being “insensitive”. the person is just fucking stupid. While I wouldn’t say the person performing bad magic tricks is “stupid” per say, I think they really feel that anything they do because its sleight of hand will never get noticed by the laymen.  How wrong they are.

Case in example. The masked magician. You would think he is some kind of bad-ass magician that has gone “rogue” to destroy the very foundation of magic. Watch how amazing he is and he even teaches it on his DVD! Roll Film.

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So here is my question after watching this horrific clip. To all the critics, is it wrong to show this clip? Is it wrong to make a example out of this and show magicians never to do this? Granted he has amazing outs for pulling out the wrong gimmicked deck and fucking up the trick. Although I have NEVER seen anyone fuck up on the indicator card out AFTER they look through the deck to know where the selection is.

Maybe you say that the difference is that someone is just posting it on Youtube and that it didn’t get as much exposure as on TV. I would argue that TV gives you less exposure as it is only locally on a global scale. Youtube is anywhere you have an internet connection.

All I’m saying is that bad magic is BAD MAGIC. I am not personally hateful of the performer. Just like you would call the person trying to jump through a fucking basketball hoop an idiot, if you knew him, I’m sure at that moment you would be thinking about his health more than anything.

Constructive criticism is always hard to take if you are insecure of your ability, but we can not further our Art if we sit around and just say nice things to each other.  I try to be as constructive as I can but there are people out there that want to be entertained too.

I guess the only constructive thing I can say about this video is that he has some fucking balls to stick through that trick.  Oh, and he is an amazing actor when it comes to dramas.  My inner child cries every time I see him act.

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Bring on the trumpets!

This blog used to be about this book, the mecca of hard moves. My inner child cries when I think of the book. It’s coming back ladies and gentlemen. I will again start my documentation of learning every damn thing in this book and helping anyone who has the book along the way. I posted many of them on my old Youtube page but I will re-shoot them and make them a little more official. Coming soon is probably the two moves that people don’t think is even possible, the Broadside steal and the Longitudinal Swivel Steal. Enjoy the old videos and look forward to the new ones.

Proteus

House Guest

Bureau d’Echange

Lets imagine that you practiced sleights to the point of perfection. Angle-proof and nothing to see. You have the mentality that no one will ever suspect anything that you did.  Can the spectator still sense that you did something “fishy”? Think about it. Magicians always stress the perfection of sleights to the point that they don’t see any finger flashes, adjustments of the hand during the move. I agree with this 100%. There is something else that is just as important.

Speed of your actions.

What do I mean? When people do something that is bad, they tend to hide it.  Either by doing it when no one is looking or trying to get the action over as fast as possible. The sleight of hand is suppose to withstand careful eyes, but we as human beings still do the same tendencies as if doing something dirty even though its hidden through the construction of the sleight. So you always see magicians change speed during moments of the move.

A very obvious example of this when false dealing cards.  When you deal a 5 handed game and during the bottom deals you had to slow down to do the move,  even though they don’t see the move, they sense the rhythm is off.  Another example is during a pass.  Your handling of the cards is so smooth and nice and then during the pass you have a fast jerk of the cards.  Then all of a sudden, you are back your old nice ways.  They can sense it.  Trust me.

Now I am faulty for doing this, it is one of those things that you don’t notice until someone tells you.  So I’m telling you.  Figure out a speed that you are confortable performing at and try to stick to it throughout the trick.  A big negative thing that people say about Aaron Fisher’s Gravity Pass is that it takes too long.  It’s the same when going too slow.  All of the sudden the spectator sees you “frozen” in time then resume.

Don’t take this for granted.  You must take your performance speed with as much detail as you do about sleights and patter.  When you watch videos of performances see if you can spot these speed changes.

What is a magician fooler anyways?  We all know its done with sleight of hand.  So what is defined as a magician fooler?  Is it just an unknown principle that your friend performs for you that he read in a 1938 card trick book found in the basement?  How about performing some variation or original sleight of hand that you never seen?

Darwin Ortiz said it best, if you fool a magician for 10% of the trick, you got them.  From that logic, is it true then that magicians aren’t really fooled?  Just puzzled?  Obviously I have no idea how you separated the colors of the cards so fast, but there must be a method or principle that I don’t know about.

We all know that magicians will never say to some magician after a card trick, “What you did there is out of the realm of human physics.  You sir, are performing true magic.”  Unless he was really sarcastic.

So then really, a magician fooler is showcasing something that is beyond their knowledge of the art.  They know that it is something they haven’t read or seen yet.

Here is the question.  Is a magician fooler the same with a laymen fooler?  Where does that line between magician knowledge and laymen knowledge start?  What I mean is that do we really fool laymen?  They get bigger reactions than magicians because they know less about the art, but the mere fact that they know phrases like “The hand is quicker than the eye” makes them acknowledge that it is something they haven’t read up on in a sense.

I’m probably not making any sense, but I guess the point I am making is “Does card magic, in general, have the inherent property of being seen as a puzzle or trick?”  Can we ever get out of the that mold of being just sleight of hand.

Maybe the more important question is “Is card magic being labeled as sleight of hand a bad thing?”  I don’t think so.

Happy New Year guys.

Here is another retarded movie.  Don’t drink too much.  I know I will.  It’s my muse. Make sure you click link below to watch in HD.

Chad Rees does… from Tony Chang on Vimeo.

I find that one of the most crucial things that magicians take for granted is the process of losing the card back into the deck.  Take the standard selection of the card and putting the card back into the middle and doing a simple pass to control it.  Now between the card coming back into the deck and the control is a very short time.  Does the audience really believe the card is really back in the middle?  Does the fact that the card is in the middle enough to convince them that it is out of the magician’s control?

Maybe the bigger question would be does it increase the impact of the magic?  Depends I guess.  If we use the context of a simple selection/revelation type of card trick then I would say it certainly does.  Examine the way you take the selection back into the deck.  How much do you convince them that it is lost?  Does a simple double undercut really do the trick?

I would say that handing the deck out for shuffling would be one of the strongest.  But maybe your palming isn’t up to par.  I find that a simple confirmation of the losing of the card a huge convincer.  Let’s say while you are doing the cascade control you say, “Your card is somewhere in the middle that even you nor I would know, yes?”.  Now I know many would say that the spectator would always say “yes” in a sense, but the mere fact of him/her saying it themselves is a big thing later on when they reconstruct the effect.

Remember that the magic trick is the “show”, but the most important part is how you color the effect afterwards.  Take the David Blaine levatitation for example.  He really only floats up 2-3 inches, but when he asks the person how high he went, his hands extended 2-3 feet.  The spectator will remember it that way, and tell his friends that down the road.

It’s these little things that make an effect stronger.  So next time try to convince the spectator more then you usually would about losing the card and see if the result is better.

Happy Holidays everyone. Hope you guys like the blog. I try my best to speak my mind about things I personally find important to improve the art of magic. But you may wonder, if Tony Chang wasn’t a magician what would he be?

I would deliver pizza.

On the side I would make extremely retarded videos. Check them out and happy holidays. Make sure to click on the links below to view in HD.

Chad Rees does the Rubik Cube from Tony Chang on Vimeo.

Chad Rees does the weather. from Tony Chang on Vimeo.

Dolphin hands = good color changes.  Take that to the bank, senator.  The blood bank.

Trust me, when it comes to magic, Mr. Seagal’s opinion is the final answer.  So what do I mean by dolphin hands?  I think the term (which I made up because i have a fetish for dolphins) describes how to successfully execute a classic color change.

The classic color change.  While holding out the card in a classic palm, our hands assume the dolphin hand.  It would flash if it wasn’t.  That’s the easy part.  The hard part is the ditch and what happens after the color change.  The reason I feel that the last two parts are the most crucial is because if you do it wrong, the spectator can back track and figured out how you do it.  The simple answer is to say that you had a card and added it on right?  So how do we make sure they don’t go down that path.

The Ditch.  So here is my thoughts on the ditch.  The hand must stay in the “dolphin hand” position even after the addition of the card.  As magicians, we have a tendacy of over proving the cleaness of our hands after doing something dirty.  You know what I’m talking about.  When magicians do a color change, all of us open our fingers up like we are doing jazz hands.  It’s a very subtle thing but it tips off to the spectator that it was at that point where the card was added.  Sure its a subconcious thing, but it is something we can avoid.

This is probably the main point of the post.  Get used to having dolphin hands at all times.  Why?  If the magician’s natural tendency is to have closed fingers, then having a card palmed will not be out of context.  Just like having your hands in finger palm gestures all the time while doing coin magic. Instead of having your hands wide open all the time and then close it when you palm something, it keeps your actions natural and doesn’t raise a subconscious flag in their heads.

What Happens After. Similar to the ditch, what do you do afterward?  The need to disguize when the card was ditched is very important.  Many people doing a color change will stop the waving, magic gesture when the ditch is made.  Mission accomplished.  The card has been changed.  The spectator can feel the ditch because of this simple flaw.  Many color changes (in the classic sense) have the magician fly the hand toward the deck to drop the card and then back up to expose the change.  The simple change in direction is a major tip off when the color change was made.  It doesn’t matter how much waving you do before hand, if the last motion the associated with the color change seems different, then its game over.

The main point is to keep waving even after the change.  It’s all by feel of the color change so to speak.  If you can’ tell when the ditch happens in the color change in its whole, then you are on the right track.

Ricky Smith has probably one of the sexiest classic color changes I have seen.  He has taken all of the above to heart.  He didn’t even need my help or know of my existence.  check it out here.  This is what you should strive for.

Ricky Smith’s Standard Color Change.

Here it is guys, one of the most visual multiple color change out there. Sounds like a lie, but no gimmicks. This will be on the all new 9 DVD set by Paul Harris. We actually shot some of Cheng’s material for the DVD 3 years ago. long time to get something out. click on link below video for HD.

Poker Change from Tony Chang on Vimeo.

Old video dug up from the grave.  He does real magic.  period.

The real magician.