Darwin ortiz lessons in card mastery pdf download

Beyond lessons in Card mastery you will find lessons in "connection" mastery and "audience" mastery, and several other "masteries. Of course the title is two-fold. It's also about the plot of much of the work in the book. This book is nearly all about demonstrating to your audience how much mastery you have over a deck of cards.

You know. I will never play cards with you EVER" kind of way. These books both look and feel very similar to each other. Let me tell you one of the best things about everything including this book that I've read from Ortiz. Even the stuff that I can't do or wouldn't do is interesting to read. Often when I read a book, I'll skip certain effects that don't "fit" me or that are beyond my skill set. I'll read a few paragraphs and just stop.

With Ortiz, that rarely happens. Of the thirty effects found in this book there were only one or two that I didn't bother reading all the way through.

And even those had interesting parts that I did read. At the end of each effect you'll find performance tips, clean up ideas if needed analysis and theory behind much of what you just read in the method section.

Ortiz has a brilliant mind and is very good at expressing his thoughts, theories, methods, effects, personality and performance style on paper.

Imagine this: I have not yet mastered a perfect faro; I cannot do any type of false deal and I suck at pinky counting. Positive techniques are those that expand upon the m atters to be em phasized. Whatever you treat as im portant the audience will perceive as im portant. If you tell them that som ething is im portant, they will believe it's im portant. If you pay particular attention to som ething, they will believe it's im portant.

If you spend m ore tim e on som ething, they will believe it's im portant. In a pick-a-card trick, you m ay spend a great deal of tim e in having the card lost in the deck and little tim e in locating it, or you m ay spend little tim e in having the card lost in the deck and a great deal of tim e in locating it. In either case, you're telling the spectator what is the im portant part of the trick.

Either approach m ight be justified in a particular trick. In one effect, the im pact m ight depend alm ost entirely on the spectator appreciating the utter im possibility of your keeping track of his card; thus, you should em phasize the procedures for losing the card in the deck. You can also achieve em phasis by negative techniques. By this I m ean that you can underscore one point by deleting other points.

Every word, every gesture, every action m ust be evaluated on the basis of whether it contributes to the overall effect you're attem pting to achieve. If it doesn't contribute, you should elim inate it. All of us who have a serious interest in m agic have had the experience m any tim es of seeing excruciatingly bad perform ances. Som e were due to technical inadequacies on the part of the perform er and som e were due to presentational inadequacies.

If you think back to those which were due to poor presentation, I think you'll recall m any instances of the following flaws. The perform er m ay have continually taken three sentences to say what could have been said in one, at the end of which you still didn't know what he was trying to say. He m ay have com plicated each effect with the introduction of conditions such as having cards signed, wrapping rubber bands around the deck, and other m atters that seem ed to have no point except in his m ind.

The end result was a cluttered effect, the m ost com m on presentational problem. In m agic, as in housekeeping, the solution to clutter is to throw out what you don't need. Your effect sum m aries have provided you with a clear picture of the essential features of each effect. Using these effect sum m aries, I recom m end that you review the presentation of each effect, elim inating every patter line, every action, every procedure, and every condition that does not dem onstrably contribute to conveying the essential effect you wish to create.

The result will be clear, stream lined presentations that will m axim ize the im pact of each trick. With tim e this kind of thinking will becom e autom atic whenever you work on a new effect.

Initially, however, this exercise in conducting housecleaning on your presentations will pay im m ediate dividends as well as starting you thinking in the correct term s. Anything in your presentation that overburdens the spectator will hurt the clarity of the effect by overwhelm ing him with m ore than he can com fortably handle. For this reason, the audience m ust never be m ade to w ork. And the toughest kind of work is m ental work.

Therefore, you can't afford to put the audience in a position where they have to concentrate unduly. For the effect to be successful, the shifting of the cards or shells m ust be kept to such a m inim um that the audience can keep track with virtually no effort. If you were to shift the props around so rapidly or so extensively that it required real concentration to keep track, the effect would certainly fail.

A couple of years ago an effect was m arketed that revolved around a con gam e prem ise. The perform er and a spectator played a gam e in which the perform er always won. The gam e involved a group of spot cards laid out on the table. The perform er and spectator took turns pointing to cards and totaling their values.

The first person who surpassed a certain total lost. After reading the m anuscript in m y hotel room I went down to the casino to play som e blackjack.

I was struck by how long it took m any of the other players to add up their hands. A player m ight be holding a fourteen and draw a card. When he received a nine he would stare at his cards for an interm inable period before turning them face up.

It took him that long to realize he'd gone over twenty-one! This observation m ade m e appreciate how trying an experience it would be for such a person to watch the effect I had just bought. I am not speaking here only of uneducated people.

Many well- educated, intelligent people are inept at sim ple arithm etic. Educators even have a nam e for the problem ; they call it innum eracy, the m athem atical equivalent of illiteracy. The invention of pocket calculators has only m ade the problem worse. There's a nam e for this too: it's called m ath anxiety. A trick that requires the audience to continually add up num bers sim ply requires too m uch concentration to be entertaining to m ost people. This sam e effect involved a presentation in which the spectator was encouraged i.

Norm ally, in a m agic perform ance, the spectator can devote just as m uch energy as he wishes to trying to figure out the tricks and no m ore.

When he is challenged by the perform er to com e up with an explanation, he m ay feel pressed to do m ore m ental work than he really cares to. J ust as arithm etic carries unpleasant connotations of dreary school days for m any people, so does m em orization. Any effect that taxes the audience's m em ory will be perceived by m ost people as work, the antithesis of entertainm ent. You should never ask one person to rem em ber two selected cards.

Sim ilarly, you should never ask the sam e person to rem em ber one selected card after another. Spread the burden by having different people pick cards in different tricks. Of course, alm ost every effect requires that the audience rem em ber som ething, even if it's only under which cup you just placed the ball. The point is that the effect should be structured in such a way that such rem em bering occurs without conscious effort. We can put this in the form of a general rule, one of Darwin's Laws: Make it easier for the audience to rem em ber w hat y ou w ant them to rem em ber than it w ould be to forget it.

While on the subject of avoiding schoolroom drudgery, let m e add that the audience should never be m ade to take a test. This is a classic exam ple of m eaningless clutter, in this case used as a ruse to cover a switch of the aces.

There are m any other exam ples of presentations where the perform er cross- exam ines the spectator at som e point. Most people didn't like school. Don't cast yourself in the role of a schoolm aster with your audience as your students. This kind of aggravation is what people have to deal with at work every day. It's precisely what they look to entertainm ent to allow them to escape from.

They quite rightly expect you to do the work while they sit back and relax. Taxing a person's concentration or m em ory not only interferes with their enjoym ent of the perform ance, it tends to confuse the effect for them as they m iss key points of the trick while they struggle with whatever m ental task you have foisted on them.

Elim inate all such features from every effect and you'll have taken a step toward clarifying your m agic. Clarifying Techniques Let's exam ine som e of the m ajor techniques you can use to clarify an effect. Each is a tool to help the spectator properly conceptualize the effect. Keep in m ind, however, that these techniques are not necessarily called for in every effect and an effect that incorporates one or m ore of them is not necessarily better than one that doesn't.

Whether a particular effect would benefit from any of these techniques is a question you m ust answer based on your artistic judgm ent and the audience reaction you're getting which m ay or m ay not indicate the need for greater clarity. However, if you sense that one of your effects is com ing across m uddled, the following should function as a handy checklist of possible m ethods to help correct the problem.

This is the m ost extrem e of clarifying techniques, som etim es a very effective one. Cardini introduced, and Dai Vernon popularized, the use of six rings. J ack Miller used only four rings. Today, m any perform ers find they can attain the best audience reaction with a three-ring routine. Certainly the use of only three rings allows for the clearest possible picture for the audience of what is happening. The classic ace assem bly em ploys sixteen cards: the four aces plus twelve indifferent cards.

Part of the reason for the trick's strength is certainly the exceptional clarity of effect achieved by reducing the num ber of cards. In the Cups and Balls, m any perform ers who have trouble selling a routine using three cups and three balls find they can get excellent reaction from a routine using only one cup and one hall. Card m agic provides several exam ples of a potential drawback of reducing the num ber of props—nam ely, the danger of reducing the scope and, hence, the im pact of the effect.

One of the m ajor card m agic trends of recent years has been the proliferation of packet tricks. Som etim es the result is a stronger effect due to greater clarity. Som etim es the result is a weaker effect due to dim inished scope. Changing the backs of four cards is not as great an achievem ent as changing the backs of fifty-two cards.

Reducing the num ber of props is a case of achieving clarity through a sim plification of effect. The other clarifying techniques we will look at work without altering the effect itself. Som etim es all you need is to provide the audience with som e sim ple visual or verbal m nem onic aid to help them conceptualize a particular effect clearly.

In this trick a half-dollar in one of the perform er's hands transposes with a Chinese coin and a Mexican coin in the other. Mendoza says he prefers the original version because it's less confusing. This is because of the sim ilarity between the English coin and the Mexican coin; both are copper. With the use of three totally dissim ilar coins, the audience has too m any different concepts to juggle. J ust com pare the following two lines of patter and consider which is easier to grasp.

This will weaken the effect, however, by dim inishing its scope. The Mendoza m em ory hook of classifying the coins into two categories, foreign and dom estic, offers the best of both worlds. The spectators can appreciate the added im possibility of one coin changing places with two, while still easily grasping the effect. One coin changes places with two rather than one with one or two with two. If the effect were perform ed with four selected cards, it would be the sam e effect in theory but it would be at least slightly harder for an audience to conceptualize.

The use of the aces provides an easier picture to grasp. The three aces with sm all pips change places with the one ace that has a large pip. The three sm all— pip aces form a convenient group to contrast against the one large-pip ace. One at a tim e, each of the four aces turns over in the packet. Brother Ham m an introduced the idea of doing the trick with the ace, two, three, and four of one suit.

The cards turn over in num erical order, m aking it alm ost autom atic for the audience to realize at each point which cards are yet to go. Rem em ber one of our goals: m ake it easier for them to rem em ber what you want them to rem em ber than it would be to forget it. I once read a card effect in which a group of four blue— backed kings transposed one at a tim e with four red-backed queens. The added condition of using cards with two different back colors m ade the trick seem m ore im possible but also m ore difficult for the spectators to follow.

They now had to rem em ber which cards had which color backs. The problem could easily be solved by using four red spot cards with red backs and four black spot cards with blue backs. Now each card is practically the sam e color on both sides and rem em bering which is which becom es virtually autom atic.

The different backs now actually m akes it easier for the audience to follow the effect since they can easily see which cards are where whether they're face down or face up. Here the different color backs are used to em phasize the im portant cards the im portant aces have a bright-colored back while the unim portant cards have a m ore subdued-color back.

Thus, the two different backs help clarify the effect rather than potentially m uddle it as in the previous case. In m y gam bling lecture I dem onstrate bottom dealing techniques. When dem onstrating a face-down bottom deal, the picture can be kept, very clear. Four aces are openly placed on the bottom. When dem onstrating a stud bottom deal, however, all the cards are dealt face up which can m ake for a cluttered picture. That's why, in the latter case.

I first openly place a group of black spot cards on top of the deck and a royal flush in hearts on the bottom. The red picture cards m ake a strong visual contrast to the black spot cards. The audience can now easily distinguish between those cards that m ust have com e from the bottom and those that m ust have com e from the top—between the im portant cards and the unim portant cards.

This sam e idea can be applied to an ace assem bly by using four kings instead of four aces and twelve black spot, cards as the indifferent cards.

In a very sim ple, straightforward ace assem bly, this m ight be superfluous. In a m ore com plex assem bly plot, this step m ight be useful in clarifying m atters. As with all the clarification techniques, visual clarification of props is only an option; it's your job to decide when it's called for.

In the theater, a standard technique em ployed by directors in staging a play is what is som etim es called picturization. It is the visual interpretation of the m eaning inherent in the lines of the play. Although these elem ents are constantly shifting, at any given m om ent, this positioning provides the viewer with a particular picture. With the cards laid out in this pattern, it's instantly clear to every viewer which of the four packets is the focal point of the effect.

The spectator doesn't have to m ake an effort to rem em ber which is the im portant packet; he could hardly forget if he wanted to.

Eddie Fechter used to perform an effect in which six quarters traveled from one hand to the other one at a tim e. After each coin traveled he would spread out the coins from his left hand in a row on the left side of the table, then spread the right-hand coins in a sim ilar row on the right side of the table. As the one row continually got shorter and the other continually got longer, even the m ost dense or inebriated spectator could hardly fail to follow the flow of the effect.

Suppose you're going to perform an effect with two groups of cards, one m ore im portant than the other. When first displaying the cards you could subtly underscore this point by laying out the unim portant cards in a tight spread while the im portant ones are laid out in a wide fan.

If a prop plays a central role in the effect, place it at the center of the close— up m at; if it plays only a peripheral role, place it som ewhat to the side at the periphery of your m at. Of course, none of this should look contrived or calculated, any m ore than the placem ent of the actors in a well- directed play looks contrived.

Rem em ber, adequate rehearsal is what m akes things look unrehearsed. There are countless m ore exam ples I could cite, but the concept is sim ple once you start to think about it.

That, of course, is the key. As obvious as the idea m ay seem , you won't find yourself applying it— at least, at first—unless you think about it. Once you start thinking in visual term s, it'll soon becom e second nature. Naturally, there is another consideration in the arrangem ent of props besides clarity, nam ely the dem ands of m ethod.

For exam ple, if you intend to lap som ething it m ay be necessary to place it near the table edge. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as the arrangem ent doesn't send a visual m essage that contradicts the effect you're trying to convey.

The switch of the spectators' cards which was the key to the m ethod required that the selections be dealt in a row in front of the perform er while his predictions were dealt in a row in front of the spectators. The perform er's cards were in front of the spectators; the spectators' cards were in front of the perform er.

The effect was an outstanding one. Nevertheless, it struck a false note at this point. There is som ething subtly wrong with placing the perform er's cards on the spectators' side of the table while the spectators' cards are placed on the perform er's side of the table.

Of course, since there is no such thing as real m agic, all m agic tricks involve com prom ising the ideal. Each perform er reading that effect will have to decide whether this com prom ise is worth m aking. It's easier to rem em ber where som ething is if it's in plain sight.

In general, a version of an effect where the props are visible throughout m ost of the effect will be clearer than one in which the props spend m uch of their tim e hidden face down, in the perform er's closed hand, or covered by other props. By contrast, each of the elevator cards m ust rem ain face down on the table until after it travels. The longer the spectators have to wait for som ething to happen, either because of the perform er's use of tim e- consum ing procedures or because of excessive patter, the m ore likely they are to becom e unclear about what is supposed to be happening.

Later we'll be talking about the problem of fading em otional m em ory. Tim e lags can also cause intellectual m em ory to fade, concentration to flag, attention to wander, and one's ability to grasp the overall picture to weaken.

Rem em ber, the spectators are not as fam iliar with the trick you're doing as you are. Im agine you're perform ing an effect and, right at the m ost critical m om ent of the trick, another entertainer interrupts you to do a bit from his act.

Perhaps a com edian com es over and tells one of his best jokes. Or perhaps a juggler elbows you aside and does a little juggling bit. It m ight even be another m agician who stands in front of you and does a quicky effect in the m iddle of your trick. Obviously, that interruption m ay m ake it difficult or even im possible for the audience to follow the thread of your effect.

It doesn't m atter that the joke m ight be quite funny, the juggling bit quite im pressive, or the quicky effect quite startling. In fact, it m ight be all the m ore likely to sabotage your trick because of how effective it is. The bit's effectiveness m akes the interruption that m uch m ore of a distraction from the effect you're trying to present. Fortunately, what I've just described isn't likely to ever happen to you.

If it did, I'm sure you'd be furious with the jerk who interrupted you. But, am azingly, m any perform ers will interrupt them selves at a critical m om ent in an effect to tell a joke, do a flourish, or throw in another quicky effect. But I like the fact that it's a curious phrase because it m akes it easier to rem em ber.

And the concept it represents is very m uch worth rem em bering. But the positioning of such digressions is critical. Throwing in a gag as you're having a card selected won't do any harm and m ay do som e good, both for the laugh it gets and by filling in a m om ent of dead tim e. Throwing in a gag as you're revealing the selected card m ay kill the whole im pact of the trick if, for exam ple, it distracts the audience from appreciating that the card was, not just in your wallet, but in the zippered com partm ent of the wallet.

Recently, I saw a m agician perform a beautiful version of the Cards to Pocket. J ust as the last card was about to travel to his pocket he threw in a very funny visual gag. Unfortunately, the gag was so funny that it com pletely distracted the audience from the vanish of the last card and its production from the pocket—what should have been the high point of the effect.

If the gag had been used earlier, on one of the previous cards, it would have been just as funny and it wouldn't have killed the clim ax of the trick. They laugh at the joke or sm ile in adm iration of the flourish. However, as J esse J ackson would say, you've got to keep your eyes on the prize.

In this case, the prize you're after is the gasp of astonishm ent at the clim ax of the effect. Anything that threatens that goal just isn't worth the m om entary gratification. Som etim es the anti-contrasting parenthesis is actually built right into the structure of the effect. After a m agical gesture, the cards are spread on the table and every card is now face-down except for one face-up card in the m iddle. However, unlike the original, the face-up card is not the selected card.

Instead, it is a ten-spot. The perform er then counts over ten cards from the ten-spot; the card at that point is turned over and proves to be the selected card. In this case, the ten-spot creates an anti-contrasting parenthesis. What's the story with that ten of spades? J ust as the spectator's m ind is about to explode, you let all the air out. It's like having the phone ring just as you're having an orgasm. Even if it's good news, it's just not good tim ing, This is a good place to introduce another of Darwin's Laws: Audiences are not easily fooled, but they are easily confused.

If you add Vernon's dictum that confusion is not m agic you should see why it's im portant to avoid m agicus interruptus. Nothing kills clarity in m agic m ore surely than using indirect procedures and excessive handling. If you spread the cards and have som ebody rem ove one, everyone can understand that a card has been chosen.

Many m ethods in card m agic require that the perform er continually cut, shuffle, deal, deal down and under, count cards, recount the sam e cards, and reshow cards that were just shown a m om ent ago. Many m ethods in close-up m agic require that the perform er pick up props just to place them down again in order to pick them up a m om ent later to no apparent purpose.

Many m ethods in all kinds of m agic require that you go about doing som ething in just about the m ost roundabout way hum anly possible. Because such procedures clutter the landscape that the spectators are viewing, they get in the way of their seeing the big picture. That big picture is otherwise known as the effect. There is no better exam ple of the relevance of the m ethod to the effect that is perceived by the audience, and consequently to presentation, than the way in which indirect procedures and overhandling can clutter an effect to the point where the audience doesn't know what is supposed to have happened.

This pointless procedure is used to switch the regular aces for the double-faced aces. There are far m ore direct m ethods of doing the switch, but they dem and m ore skill so they will be ignored by those lazy m agicians who tell them selves that the audience doesn't care about the m ethod.

They m ay not care about the m ethod, but they do care about whether or not they can follow what is supposed to be happening, and that is often affected by what m ethod you use. To m ake clear what I m ean by directness, I'll delineate the difference between directness and sim plicity.

A trick m ay be sim ple without being direct or direct without being sim ple. The plot of having som eone think of a card and then divining it is as sim ple as one could hope for. However, the procedure of continually dealing the cards in rows and cross-exam ining the spectator about the whereabouts of his card is the height of indirection. Finally, the Am bitious Card is an exam ple of an effect which, in the best versions, is both sim ple and direct.

Sim plicity is an aspect of plot. Directness is an aspect of procedure which in turn is a function of m ethod. Directness, however, is an absolute essential. Earlier I said that you don't have to try to incorporate all the various clarifying techniques into every effect. It's som ething you have to determ ine on a trick— by— trick basis. However, directness in procedure and handling is a goal you m ust strive for in every effect. It's not only essential to clarity, its necessary if your m agic is to really look like m agic.

In sleight-of-hand effects, indirect procedures are often referred to as overhandling. But it's im portant to realize that this problem doesn't just arise in sleight-of-han d m agic. Consider two versions of the sam e general effect that I recently read. Both are essentially self- working. In this version, the perform er shows a joker on top of the deck. He writes a prediction on the back of the joker and hides the writing from view by turning the deck face up.

He then asks the spectator to nam e any card he wishes. The spectator m ay, for exam ple, nam e the four of hearts. The perform er then spreads through the deck, finds the four of hearts, and drops it on the table in front of the spectator. The perform er brings out two decks of cards, one red- backed, the other blue-backed.

The spectator is asked to select one. The perform er then picks up the other deck and rem oves a card from it.

This card is not shown but is slipped inside an envelope which is placed aside. The rem ainder of this deck is handed to the spectator with the instruction that he place it in his pocket. The perform er then spreads the other deck, faces toward the spectator, and asks him to nam e any card he sees. Let's again assum e that the four of hearts is nam ed. The perform er then rem oves this card from the deck and places it inside the envelope with the other card.

The spectator is then asked to rem ove the other deck from his pocket. This is the deck from which the perform er previously rem oved a card, not the deck from which the spectator thought of a card. With m e so far? He is instructed to count through the face-up deck and stop when he sees the card that he thought of. He is then instructed to rem ove the two cards from within the envelope and turn them over.

They both prove to be fours of hearts. In a strictly intellectual sense, the effect is identical in both cases. The perform er proves that he predicted what card the spectator would think of. However, any good perform er should be able to present the first version clearly; only a very accom plished showm an could succeed in clearly conveying the effect of the second version to an audience. Even then, the im pact would not be the sam e. The trick is sim ply not clear enough because the procedure is so absurdly indirect.

The first version is nearly self-working; the second version is com pletely self-working. So you see, the problem of indirect procedures is not lim ited to sleight of hand. There are four reasons why m agicians so often fall into the trap of littering their m agic with overhandling or other indirect procedures. First, they fall so in love with the ingenuity of a particular m ethod that they use that m ethod even when it doesn't fit and m ay actually harm the effect.

A sm all exam ple of this can be found in the second version of the prediction effect I described a m om ent ago, the one that uses two decks. In that trick, the perform er begins by giving the spectator a choice of the two decks.

The perform er could sim ply have handed the spectator the deck he wanted him to use. In so doing he would have rem oved one sm all distraction from the effect. I can only assum e that he likes doing the m agician's choice so m uch that it prevented him from realizing that it doesn't add anything to this particular effect.

By now you realize that I don't subscribe to the m ethod- doesn't- m atter school of thought. I do, however, believe that m ethod m atters only in regard to how it affects the effect. The fact that you do a particular m ove very well is no reason to do it at every opportunity. The fact that a particular stratagem intrigues you is no reason to use it in an effect where it contributes nothing. This leads them to load up their effects with com plicated procedures in the hope that other m agicians will get lost in the m aze and be unable to reconstruct the effect.

A variation of this is the m agician who has spent so m uch tim e around other m agicians that he has lost all touch with how laypeople think. Even when he is routining his m agic for laym en, he attributes to them the thinking habits of m agicians. He continually throws in ploys designed to convince the laym en that he isn't doing things that never would have occurred to them in the first place.

In this connection, we will later be discussing subtleties and conditions—which ones m atter to laypeople and which ones don't. Always keep in m ind that devious procedures to m ake it im possible for other m agicians to follow the m ethod m ay also m ake it im possible for lay m en to follow the effect. Besides, I'll let you in on a secret, although you probably won't believe m e. Routine your m agic to fool and entertain laypeople and you'll be surprised at how m any m agicians you'll also fool along the way.

The third reason for indirect procedures is that they often m ake an effect m uch easier to perform. Unfortunately, they m ay also m ake the effect no longer worth perform ing. This is an uncom fortable fact that m any m agicians refuse to face. I recently read an article on presentation in a m agic m agazine. Magicians who are afraid of palm ing devised versions in which the aces had to be continually gathered up only to be dealt out again for no good reason.

The m agician's job becam e easier, but the effect becam e less clear. The fourth and final reason m agicians use indirect procedure is that som etim es they are the only way a particular effect can be achieved. If the indirect approach is the only way an effect can be achieved, do a different effect.

Adm ittedly, the above discussion assum es an ideal that can't be com pletely attained in the real world. Because we can't do real m agic, we'll always have to engage in a certain am ount of indirection in our approach.

It's a question of degree. Here is a test to help you decide if a particular handling is too indirect. Real m agic would always involve the m ost direct procedures possible. If you could really read m inds, you would sim ply ask som eone to think of a word, then you would im m ediately tell him what that word is. Since you probably can't really read m inds, you're going to have to introduce one or two detours. This is perm issible if they're kept to a m inim um and if you can convincingly justify each one.

Since directness is a m atter of degree, it will always involve personal judgm ent. The Dynamics Of Conviction The Expository Phase Virtually all close-up m agic tricks can be divided into two parts which I'll term the expository phase and the m agical phase. Robert- Houdin said that before you change an apple into an orange you should m ake sure the audience knows it's an apple. Changing the apple into an orange is the m agical phase. Making sure first that they know it's an apple is the expository phase.

The expository phase always com es first, for exam ple: having a card selected and returned to the deck; placing four coins on the table under four playing cards; having the four aces signed and buried in different parts of the deck; or dealing the aces in a T-form ation and dealing three cards on top of each one. Then com es the m agical phase: m aking the selected card rise from the deck; m aking the coins travel from card to card; producing the aces from four different pockets; or m aking the aces gather together in one packet.

At first glance, som e tricks m ight seem like they don't fit this form at. For exam ple, does producing a coin at the fingertips have any expository phase? Adm ittedly, this is a case where the exposition is so brief, it alm ost seem s nonexistent. Still, the production of a coin at your fingertips won't have m uch im pact unless som ething has gone before to lead the audience to believe you don't have a coin in your hand.

Therefore, each phase of the trick has its own expository phase and m agical phase. In any case, there's no need to debate about the few seem ing exceptions since alm ost all effects divide very easily and naturally into these two phases.

One m ight alm ost term these two phases of a trick the boring part and the interesting part. This isn't really accurate since the expository phase can and should be interesting to your audience too. Indeed, if you can't m ake the expository phase interesting, your m agic is bound to fail since the audience won't be paying any attention by the tim e the m agical phase arrives. Nevertheless, it is true that the m agical phase is inherently interesting while the expository phase is not inherently interesting.

This leads m any m agicians to treat the expository phase as a nuisance to be gotten out of the way as soon as possible. They act as if the exposition is of no im portance. The audience doesn't care how you control the card. They're only interested in how you reveal it. It's the punchline that pets the laugh, but it's not the punchline that's funny; it's the entire joke that's funny. To put it another way, the setup determ ines how funny the punchline will be. Im agine a com ic who stood before an audience and only recited punchlines.

Do you really think he'd set lots of laughs? Do you think it doesn't m atter what he says during the setup because the audience is only interested in the punchline? Not only is the setup necessary, the setup m ust be done just a certain way for the joke to work.

Any professional com ic will tell you that if a gag isn't set up properly it will die. In fact, it's only a slight exaggeration to say that the expository phase is what determ ines how strongly the effect as a whole will play. Adm ittedly, it's im portant to m ake the expository phase as interesting as possible. Right now I want to talk about perhaps the single m ost im portant consideration in creating strong m agic: m aking the expository phase as convincing as possible. Degrees Of Conviction One of the m ost im portant factors that will determ ine how strongly your m agic registers with an audience is the degree of conviction you achieve in their m inds.

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