Self Working Magic Tricks can be a great tool for beginner magicians when they don’t have enough sleight of hand knowledge, and even for more advanced magicians they provide an alternative and impressive form of magic! In this post I will be weighing up the pros and cons of self working tricks, as well as referencing some of the best tutorials on them.
The Pros:
Self working magic tricks are ideal for the amateur magician, mainly because they don’t require any advanced moves or expensive gimmicks.
They can usually be performed with any kind of deck, which means you can also borrow a deck for your tricks- always a bonus.
The methods are often very methodical and become second nature once you have the patterns down.
The effects are often based on mathematical principles, so are very hard to explain or understand (some seem like real magic even to you too!)
There are LOADS of resources for learning them, especially on YouTube.
The Cons:
Self working tricks often require a full deck; it can be a bit of a hassle to count out 52 cards every time you perform a trick.
Self working tricks can be (really) long sometimes, because of their mathematical nature, which can sometimes lose the attention of your audience.
The methods can often require a lot of memory work before you are ready to perform.
A few tricks:
I personally view self working card tricks as a little bit similar to long walks; they’re nice to engage in every now and then, but if you did them every day than you’d get pretty tired pretty quick. By all means, go ahead and learn three or four good quality self working tricks. But make sure that you don’t neglect the other types of tricks.
Self working trick No.1:
This is my favorite self working magic trick- mainly because I have no idea how on earth it works. I’m not joking when I say that this trick blows my mind even more than the spectators every time I use it (which is actually quite a lot). In terms of method, it is really quite simple to do- you can even try the trick out on yourself beforehand to make sure you’re doing it right.
Self working trick No.2
Cut is a classic mathematical trick that was one of the very first card tricks I ever learnt. It might not be quite as mystifying as the previous trick, but it is definitely faster and easier to learn. It will require that you have around a full deck of cards though, so make sure to always keep at least one deck around that you know is complete.
Self working card trick No.3
Simply Amazing Self Working Card Trick.
This trick actually fooled me the very first time I saw it performed. It’s another solid choice and easy to do. Check it out!
So there you have a few good examples of self working tricks- go and learn them and then tell me what you think in the comments below!
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