What if the spectator or a member of the audience asks to shuffle the deck? I will only be like, "Uhh..no" but then from then on they'll be suspicious. Any advice? Thanks!

In my opinion, if you refuse to let them shuffle when they ask, no matter how strong the trick you are going to show, they will probably think it's stacked deck/gimmick deck/fake deck.
If you let them shuffle, and proceed with a trick from there, the "wow" factor will be higher.

But then again, thats just my opinion ^_^

Haha yeah I know. But what if the deck was supposed to be stacked?

If the deck is stacked what you can do is to tell them y not i shuffle the deck and you tell me is it fair. this way when they see you shuffle the deck(false shuffle) and they agreed that is a geniune shuffle in their mind this deck is clean!

I'm not very advanced with card tricks as well , so when i use card control i try to make it very convincing using a couple of riffle shuffles plus 2 -3 ***** cuts. usually it convinces 95% of the audience that the deck is fair shuffled well.

for the hardcore 5% who do ask the question , my rebuttal would be : Are u the magician or am i the magician , then give an acknowledging wink ?

this usually keeps them quiet and i can get back to the magic ^_^

If I happned to have a stacked deck and they request to shuffle, I will let them shuffle and do other tricks that is impromptu, for example ACR. They never expect what are you goin to do next.

I met magician before that they can only do a stacked deck trick. lol
But another way is do finish the stack deck trick asap then ask them to shuffle and do another trick

When curious spectators want to shuffle your cards, it can only mean this thing:

- Low level of rapport with the audience

When you have a low rapport with the audience, it makes them suspect every single thing you do. Even if they shuffled the deck, they will still somehow "suspect" SOMETHING must have taken place. So in any case, unless you perform something REALLY strong, they wont be amazed.

Of course I have to rule out sometimes audiences just want to touch your props.

Try using presentational ploys to get the spectators out of the "shuffle your cards" thing. You can refer to Wonder Words by Kenton Knepper for more reference. It teaches you very powerful techniques to use carefully chosen words to enhance your effects, and of course, keep their hands off your stacked deck...

But singaporean crowds just isnt that sporty. LOL i believe lots of you should experience that you havent even start the trick or doing any sleight yet , people start to say you did some thing ..lol

Haha I guess. Thanks for the help.

In general, for a magic routine to start, it is always not advisable to start with a stacked deck. But there are other situations that can uphold that rule.

So, when you start using a normal deck and allowing them to shuffle, its first of all, clean from any weird thing you did, and also, give them a feel that the deck is a real normal deck. Now after the shuffle, do a quick trick, and with simple gesture, just switch the decks over to the stacked one. Then you proceed with the stacked effect.

In situations like this, you are building the impact, slowly in the end, you did something impossible, that cannot be explain with "I shuffled it, its impossible" Even for a gimmicked deck, it works around the same, once you switch it, and deck color suddenly change to red from blue, they be like holy shit.

So what are the situations that you can do a stacked deck first up? Its when you are in control, when on a scene where people know you performing for them sitting down and listening to you. In this case, just take a deck out of the box, and casually showing that its randomed and do your stacked effect, people won't be bothered about shuffling it. Because you are the magician already, in their mind, its already done, they not expecting you to turn stone into gold, they know its entertainment. In this kind of situations, its good for you to play around in which kind of effects are good for control, and for higher difficulty effects, this work better.

So back to shuffling the deck, if you got a stacked deck and people want to shuffle, just casually let them do it, or not, when they mentioned, I want to shuffle, you immediately say, oh wait, before I start doing card magics like its so common, we do something else. So you put back your deck, and do your coins or sponge. Then take out your normal deck, then say, you mentioned you want to shuffle, here, go ahead, make it quick, so I can show you guys more. :)

In short, try to have much more control than the audience, try to be ahead of them as much as possible, if a heckler is breeding, dun focus on him to give him the chance to mark you, note him, do more effects to people beside him, wow the people, then if he try anything funny, people will feel ignored that, "hey, I still watching"

I mean, its up to indivdual.. thats my individual.

Thats great advice right there.

Anyway, if someone asks to shuffle the deck, immediately think of an alternate trick which you can perform then. In otherwords, switch to a different trick which you can do on the spot such as an Ambitious card or ungimmicked sandwich effect.

I don't use stacked decks but once when I was performing the ambitious card, one of the members of the audience took the selected card, placed it in the middle, and shuffled it halfway through the routine. I had to improvise from there. I did Repainted to locate the card ( basically the audience sees a blank fan but you see every card ) , did a control, and I was back in business.

Try to have a few 'outs' sometimes, if things screw up. Whenever possible, if the audience asks to shuffle, let them.

Ifthe spectator ask to shuffle the deck and there is no way out, acknowledge their question and say "ok watch closely this time" and carry on doing your next trick. They will usually forget their question and their minds will be fixed on the next effect.

Another way I answer them (no problems so far) if I have performed the effect once and they ask to shuffle the deck, is to tell them that magicians never perform the same effect twice. Note that this has nothing to do with their question of shuffling the deck, but it sort of satisfy most people and you can move on to your next effect. (Silly. but it works) Better if you can keep the stacked cards and do some non-stacked or non-card effects before coming performing the stacked effect later on.
===================================

Last but not least, (what I would recommend), learn some simple impromptu methods of marking a card that allow spectators to shuffle the deck. E.g. underground, prime cut, etc. These are very easy and little/no sleight of hand at all.

(This is what I do most of the time when asked by spectators to shuffle the deck.) If you perform a stack deck effect, and they are heckling you, follow up with a quick impromptu effect. For example, if you know how to secretly mark an impromptu chosen card so that it stands out from the other cards in the deck, you can allow the spectator to shuffle the cards and end the effect cleanly. From a spectator's psychological perspective, since you are using the same deck of cards and since he shuffled the cards after the second effect, (and can examine the order of cards even) he is unlikely to conclude that the first trick, is stacked.

Spectator: Can I shuffle?
Magician: No.
Spectator: Why not?
Magician: Will you let me anyhow touch your gf/bf?
Spectator:.....

or alternatively

Magician: Has your friends ever go to your house?
Spectator: Of course..
Magician: Do you like him going around, opening doors, looking through your drawers and touching your stuff?
Spectator:...

Magician: I am the magician here and this is my stage, so I think you understand why I don't like people touching my stuff.

(Above suggestions are by Enrico, I've used it a couple of times for specs who want to shuffle my cards..)

No offence, but i think those lines sounded a little rude?
We are suppose to be entertaining, not challenging.
I think even if the tone of the magician were set to a joking tone, saying those lines still sound rude to me somehow. :P

A caveat here... you need the personality to pull it off, of course. Like Slydini. Same words, said in different way will sound differently to people. So far, I haven't been punched before, so... maybe still not that rude.

Haha hey, thanks a lot guys. The response has been overwhelming. =) do keep em comin' :P

Hi I'm Solomon. I used to work in a magic shop and I have constantly fooled some of the best magicians here in Singapore and overseas. And some of the effects that I fool them with required the use of a stacked deck.I put in a lot of thought into choreographing these routines and decided to use the simplest device. A d*** s*****.But these magicians know about deck switches(heck some of these magicians seem to know lots but get fooled by my simplest tactics..sigh) so what I did was to set it up so I did stuff that just used a normal deck to disarm the ever so suspecting Mr. Know It All. I would keep the deck to proceed with a coin trick or whatever that would seem to require me to keep the deck(neatness,Etc). Then I would re-introduce the deck that was kept.

In other words I would use the trick that just uses a normal deck as bait for my coup de grace.

Just to sidetrack a bit on this recently I was jamming with Lamalamerz and after toying around with his deck he kept it in the box and remarked that he watched Extreme Beginners and it was advised in that video that you would not want the deck to be out of the card box longer than 15 mins to keep the deck in good condition.And it hit me that the 'excuse' above could be used as an excuse to d*** s***** later.Food for thought don't you think? Of course this (It was advised in that video that you would not want the deck to be out of the card box longer than 15 mins to keep the deck in good condition.) would apply more for the magicians who perform for magicians. But you can try out the above with laypeople and see what happens.

On another note I don't really recommend starting out wit a trick that uses a deck of cards.Laypeople here (on occasion) have been known to show disgust whenever a magician pulls out a deck of cards.(they don't say anything at first but later on comment to people"eh he seems to only do card tricks le". I used to be that magician by the way.) I would suggest doing some warm up tricks like rubber bands,coins,ropes,etc..and only pull out a deck of cards near the middle of the interaction after winning the approval of the audience members. But then again everything is subjective don't you think? Try out what I hav suggested and if u have any doubts let me know and I will be more than willing to help.Cheers.

Post edited. I'm tired of editing your posts. Please leave a space after every punctuations to make reading easier.

You can't ignore your audience when they are watching you perform. So the best way is still going through the F**se Shuffle and cuts. Normally, that would already made them think that its fair. Anyways, for me, I will do the F**se shuffles and cuts in front of their eyes when I took out the deck from the box. Mentally, they would already know that its actually clean. So there will only be a 15% chance they would ask to shuffle the pile. If you are unlucky and hit the 15%, then forget about the trick you are trying to show in the first place and just do a normal routine with other tricks. There are always hecklers around. Just relax and handle the situation properly.

Regards,
TheSilentillusionist; Ryman

ya haha!

i once did to an ang moh old lady

even tho i kinda suck at the 1st 2 tricks

after that she kept going "oh that was good!"

it felt really nice n i got motivated

then i did a really good acr routine then she was amazed , that was really the best performance i had :D

There's this saying in show biz "It's never as bad as it seems." No place for complacency though, but take heart and not despair.

Hmm... I'm sure you can write better English than this. Please read the rules. :D

Well what I can say is just to echo the advice of some of the members here, basically, don't start with a stacked deck, and even if you do, just do some f***e cuts and f***e shuffles.

It is advisable to start without cards, although some of the people I perform to actually request for cards haha. I was quite amazed and delighted, naturally haha, as the usual reaction seems to be, "Oh my God, not cards again!"

I personally feel it's not wise to brush off the spectator, as you want to keep a close rapport with them. Maybe something like, "Can you please wait and let me show you something quick first?" will work. But of course, that also depends on your performing personality. I have a cheeky performing personality, so I might make a comeback or two. You might be a very quiet, mysterious person, so you might say something different. A good example is David Stone, he is kind of Marmite, either you love him or you hate him. Personally, I love him.

If it is a partial stack, you could use the method Lennard Green used in this version out of the world. It gives the impression of a sloppy shuffle and it would really help in allowing the audience to believe the deck is shuffled.

ADrian

But will it stop the spectators from requesting to shuffle the deck themselves though? Because some spectators do insist on shuffling the deck even though you've already shuffled.

Nothing is guaranteed, but if you do it well, time what you say and do well, you will find that you will hardly be requested for the deck for shuffling. Ultimately, people only want to shuffle it if they think that it isn't well shuffled - so convince them!

And even if the deck is shuffled, surely we all have other tricks to do that can be done with a shuffled deck?

Personally, I tend not to do tricks that require setups, as I'm too lazy to setup. I was just asking seeing this was the topic.

hi guys,

i learnt a hard lesson when i first performed for my good friend's sister. We know each other very well and come out for coffee and stuff. Basically i find that she's a nice, approachable and fun person to be with. I thought there was good rapport with her.

Boy was i wrong. Huge mistake.

There's a big difference between joking around among friends and 'magician-audience' relationship. To cut to the chase, basically i started a card trick on her where there was a setup involved. To summarize and in order to not reveal anything, she made life hell for me.

That episode was a good lesson to me. No matter how well i know a person, you would not know how well he or she is receptive to magic or to the performer (in this case me, maybe i have a xia lan face, i don't know ). :lol: So nowadays i ALMOST always start off with impromptu tricks or let the spec shuffle first. Happy to say, no major 'tough-customer' scenario since that lesson. I learnt to build rapport with specs slowly and not jump to conclusions.

My 2 cents.

Well, its true that you will never know how the audience will react accordingly when you perform a trick. He/She might heck you at any point of time. What i recommend is always be prepared and do a change of doing another trick that even can let the audience shuffle the deck. Alternatively, you can even do a f***e so that you have already know the card before hand.

Normally, I prefer doing mind blowing and impromptu tricks. From my point of view. I don't really like set up deck because it a kind of tedious procedure. :rolleyes:

IMO, the more tedious the better - especially if the effect is better. Impromptu effects with cards are good, but it can be quite limited.

Just a note: I hardly get heckled. There must be something with my presentation/personality, but the lesson is that it is possible to reduce the cases of heckling by changing the way you perform.

But on a social context, I tend to (if circumstances allow) do something with setup first, before moving on to impromptu tricks (or tricks with very light setups), and end off with tricks involving setups.

Hey, I used to loathe tricks that require set-ups. Thought it was just too "un-impromptu" and I only love "impromptu" tricks.

But after some time, I learned how to set-up right in front of their eyes (eg: Out of this World) and I am not longer limited to just "non-setup" effects. In fact, most of the best effects in the world need set-ups.

Sorry, a bit out of point.