From time to time, posts on the Café ask questions such as "What sleights should I learn?"

Dan Watkins posted this in the Show Me the Money section:

- Arthur Buckley, Principles and Deceptions 1948.

From my own experience, I can tell you this is absolutely true, for several reasons. One of them is that if you do not use the sleights you learn, you will lose them. Another is that if you start working on too many sleights at once, you will not master any of them for a very long time.

Sleights are part of the basic structure of magic. They are to magic as scales and chords are to music. If you only know one scale and three chords, you can play a lot of tunes, but there is a huge body of music that you cannot play.

If you master a series of sleights, you can start doing some fairly amazing things right away. Since this is an open forum, I don't want to post the names of these things here, so I have posted them in the
Secret Sessions area.

For coins, first learn to do an FP. From there you can progress into the SP.

Then learn a routine that uses these sleights. If you learn a good routine that uses these sleights, then you will not lose them.

Once you have learned the FP, it isn't a big stretch to learn the BS.

And that opens up a whole realm of coin tricks for you. You should, at some point learn the RV, and use it. Then work on the CP. Reed McClintock's video will help you a lot with this most necessary sleight.

With cards, if you learn any F, including the Classic F, you have a whole lot of things you can do. Combine this with a C and a DL or a TC, and you can work miracles. This is especially true if you can do a P and get the card into some other location -- or have a duplicate somewhere.

I know all these abbreviations may look like a lot of BS to you, but hey, that's the way it is.

Now, I'm going to give you an assignment that I used to give my students 25 years ago, when I was teaching for Leisure Learning Unlimited. Come up with 10 completely original ways to reveal a chosen card. I don't need things that are possible. I don't want things that you have seen in a magic catalog. I want off the wall ideas -- things like the card in the block of ice.

You come up with the idea, I'll come up with a method.

To give you a hint -- Karrell Fox landed his first gig as a trade show magician by having a plane skywrite "Henry Ford chose the two of clubs." He got the job, and in so doing became the first trade show magician in the world.

Any ideas why he used the two of clubs?


BTW, let me add that these are not the ONLY sleights you should learn. Far from it. This is just a starter set.

I don't recall where I heard the story originally. It may have been in one of Karrell's books. But to give you the whole story, this is it.

When Karrell was a young man, he had chutzpeh. He lived near Detroit, so he went to the offices of Ford Motor Co. and wangled an appointment with Henry Ford. Now you must understand that getting an appointment with Henry Ford, in those days, was something like getting an audience with the President of the United States. This was one of the wealthiest men in the world. His time was worth more per minute than the average annual income of one of his workers.

So he was somewhat taken aback when K.F. said, "Mr. Ford, I have an ideas that will help you sell more cars. Here, take a card." The first part of the sentence got Ford's attention. The last part was almost an insult. But he took the card.

Karrell showed him a King of Hearts. It was the wrong card. He showed him an Ace of Spades, wrong card. Finally, in desperation, he said, "I planned this so carefully. When this kind of thing happens to me, I just want to stare out of the window."

He drew the curtains, and there was the place where the skywriter had just written "Henry Ford took the two of clubs."

When Karrell told me the story he added: "Do you know why I forced the two of clubs?"

"No."

"Because it has the fewest letters of any card in the deck. Skywriters charged by the letter." Somehow, I think he chose Henry Ford for the same reason.

Of course, it would have worked with the ace, the six or the ten as well.