How To Improve A Magic Trick

When I think about making a trick better, broad-stroke changes make a big difference to the routine. These bigger ideas are often much easier to conceptualise and imagine their impact. For example, you could make a ‘person vanish’ better by performing it on a raised platform.

These methods of making tricks better often feel obvious in hindsight — no-brainers!

However, when it comes to improving a trick, you need to perform it. You could rehearse it, but nothing will beat performing it in front of an audience. One of magic's biggest flaws is that it is difficult to practice in front of an audience without an enhanced risk of failure.

You need to find ways around this fear or find an environment in which you’re comfortable with failure.

Aim to get a trick off its feet and in front of an audience as soon as possible because you can only make a trick so good before you perform it live. Once the trick is in front of an audience, you can improve it and keep improving it. These improvements are to be made incrementally, with feedback from each performance.

I. Best Practices

If you ever go to a stand-up comedy show, you’ll likely see a comedian place their phone down at the back of the room or on stage. There is a high chance they’ve switched on their voice memos app and are recording their own performance. Later, they’ll listen back to the gig and make notes and changes.

Over time, comedians can track the natural progression of their performance recordings. You don’t need to be a genius to slowly improve your comedy act — trial and error will get you there.

I witnessed this while I was working in UK comedy, as I happened to see comedian Phil Wang perform seven times in one year. He would do the same ten-minute set each and every time. It slowly but surely, improved and ended up in his Netflix comedy special.

If you have ever been to a magic show, you will likely see that the magician does not place their phone down to record their performance. Why is this? I have no idea.

Time after time, I have consulted with magicians and suggested possible improvements that I’m sure they would have noticed themselves if they’d watched their own performance. Of all the people at the show, I’d say the magician possibly has the worst angle of both the audience and the performance itself.

If there is one thing you take from this article today, it is that if you perform magic, you should record it as much as possible.

My other advice comes later: ask the audience for feedback. I think most magicians fear that if they were to speak to an audience after a performance, the magician might hear something negative or discover that the audience knew the secret method. Fear not; they usually don’t.

However, if this is a fear you have, then you are asking the wrong questions.

Ask the audience to describe what happened back to you; perhaps they misremember it, and perhaps that’s a good thing. The goal of direct audience feedback is clarity. Find out how they felt and if they understood what happened.

There’s a popular illusion act that I have seen perform many times in which an important word is emphasised in the script. I’ve seen the act several times in the last seven years. I am utterly convinced that few people in the audience knows what this important word means because it is an industry/stage term. It bugs me to no end.

II. Work Towards Comfort First

When I’m consulting magicians, the most important thing is to ensure that the magician feels comfortable and confident about the trick. Usually, this starts by ensuring the trick actually works. There’s nothing more comforting to a performer than knowing their magic trick will always work. There’s also no reason to perform a trick that doesn’t always work. If a magician I’m working for chooses to perform a trick that doesn’t always work, I make it pretty clear that this is not something I recommend doing.

However, the work is not done when the trick is working every time. There are still more ways to ensure that the magician feels comfortable. You need to talk to the magician and find out which moments in the routine bring them discomfort and work from there. When I’m working with magicians, they often pick out moments of the scripting they feel could need work (often jokes), and they’ll describe too much heat at specific moments.

Perhaps your trick always works in its current state, but there are ways to make it even more reliable. You might remove some sleight of hand for a self-working method. If a method relies on the magician saying a specific script they might forget, you could look into alternative solutions.

However, you do really need to speak to the performer. I’ll watch performance videos that magicians send to me before consultancy calls, but I can’t always predict which parts of the routine are bringing them discomfort. However, the performers know — they always know.

Start with what is called the big swings or low-hanging fruit; these are the obvious methods of improvement. The things that slap you in the face as you watch the performance. Then move into the intricate details that often take some discussion to get into.

III. Lottery Prediction

I shared a method for a solo lottery prediction with a printed ticket last year. The routine involved throwing a book titled How To Win The Lottery to the audience. Several volunteers opened the book to random pages and remembered their numbers.

By the end of the routine, a lottery ticket used as a bookmark at the front of the book is revealed to have all numbers chosen by the volunteers printed upon it. In the original method, I included a way for one of the six numbers to be freely named by a sixth spectator who was brought onto the stage.

What excited me about the routine was that it could be performed solo and with a genuine printed ticket. For me, this element overpowered the lack of true freedom in the number selection. With your encouragement, I printed a batch of special books for One Ahead members and eagerly awaited your feedback.

People loved the trick, which is amazing.

I actually went to see Christian Grace give a brilliant lecture in Bath recently. I bumped into Paul Brookes, who owns and runs the magic bar in the city. He took me by surprise when he shook my hand and told me he performed the lottery prediction every single night at his bar.

“In the magic bar?!” I said.

“Yep!” he confirmed.

“But surely there’s not enough of an audience for the method to work well?” I asked.

“Nope! It works great every night, and I give out the lottery tickets.”

I was genuinely surprised that anyone was performing the trick in such a close-up environment. I began asking Paul many questions, and he had a lot of great answers. I told him about the feedback I’d received from other magicians. He already had brilliant subtleties and fixes for them that even I had not considered.

There are always ways to improve a trick, so let’s look at the key feedback.

1. Looking at the correct page. Magicians wanted an easier way to ensure the spectators were drawn to the correct page of the two presented when opening the book.

2. Opening in the correct range. Magicians describe times when spectators opened to pages further back in the book and chose numbers that were too high to be on a lottery ticket.

3. The look and size of the book. Magicians wanted a smaller but thicker book with a cover design that was more legible at a distance.

Looking at the correct page

For the trick to work, the spectators must all remember either the left or right page they open to. This was much more of a pain point for magicians than I expected, and performers felt odd asking audience members to look at a specific page side.

Paul’s great solution is asking spectators to remember “the first-page number they see.” He says this works, as people always remember the page on the left. It’s a great subtlety that doesn’t bring too much attention to the fact that you are narrowing down the page numbers they can choose from.

However, our work here is not done. We can always make performers feel more comfortable. I set out to find an analogue solution that didn’t rely on scripting.

The obvious solution is to let spectators choose the number on either side of the page. This will make the six predicted lottery numbers look a bit odd and similar, but it’s an interesting solution and perhaps something to blend in later.

The perfect solution came to me when I was sitting reading a book and turned to a new chapter. Oh! There’s only one-page number visible when you turn to a new chapter in most books. This means that if a spectator opens a book to the start of a new chapter, they’ll only have one page number to choose from. Perfect!

So, in the improved version of this trick: no matter where the spectator opens the book, they’ll find themselves at the start of a new chapter. Sometimes they’ll be odd, and sometimes they’ll be evenly numbered.

The nice thing about this method is that it ensures that there is a healthy mix of odd and even numbers on the lottery ticket. In the original version, five numbers were odd, and one was even. In this improved version, I could design it so that three are odd and three are even, or perhaps two are odd and four are even.

Opening in the correct range.

I put a bunch of regularly numbered pages into the back of the book. This was so the magician could show that some of the page numbers were genuine. I also felt it would be unusual to have a perfectly sized 60-page book for the routine.

Paul told me that spectators would open the book at the back, even when he told them not to, and remember a number like 84, even though he’d told them to stick to numbers below 60.

I asked Paul if it would be better to use a 500-page book, and he asked the audience to simply remember the last two numbers of the page they turned to. He felt this was even more complicated, and I can’t help but agree.

Then I remembered working once with the talented Luke Jermay when he recommended a book test method in which every 300-page book was printed the same. Every page? You must be mad. Even at the start and end of the book? Are all the pages the same? When we did it, it worked every night.

The improved version of the lottery prediction will be a thicker book, and the first and last five pages will not be numbered: this is the standard of print books. All of the numbers in the rest of the book will be for the method, no extras. Wherever you open the book, you´ll find one of the force numbers.

I’m placing the page numbers in the centre of the book, which means you can still flick through one side of the book to show the pages without revealing repeated numbers.

Paul agrees that spectators do not need to see that every page is numbered differently — they certainly never in similar tricks I’ve worked on in the past.

If you feel any discomfort over this, I recommend you perform the routine with the two-book method. This is what Paul does, using a regular lottery book found on Amazon and combined with a magic principle called equivoke to force the choice of which book to throw to the audience. The second regular book can be freely handled by a spectator on stage, who can see all the pages are different before you use the book for them to select the sixth number — either randomly with multiple outs or using something like a riffle force.

The look and size of the book.

This one was an easy enough fix. I’ve made the improved books bright red, with bold text. The books are thicker, which I feel makes them look more genuine.

This is quite the balancing act; you want the books to look like actual published books, but then on the other hand all of the genuinely published books on how to win the lottery look fake.

I’m quite happy about the balance I’ve struck with the new design. I’m going to send one to print and give it to Paul to see how he gets on with it at the magic bar.