Handling Magic Trick Outs Like a Pro

A while ago, I was watching a close-up magic competition. A magician walked on, took out his deck of cards, and shuffled it. Then he lifted it above his head, pinching it between thumb and index finger to show the jury he wasn’t switching the deck, and walked toward the audience to have a card chosen.

Then he tripped. The cards scattered across the floor.

Pause.

He walked off.

True nightmare. Think about all the time dedicated to getting ready for that specific competition — all of it swept away by a stumble.

If only he’d had a second deck set up in his pocket. Three minutes to prepare it, in exchange for the certainty of being able to carry on if something went wrong.

This brings us to: always have an out.

Why put yourself in an embarrassing situation when one tiny extra thought could prevent it?

Deliberately exposing yourself to errors during practice produces better performance under pressure. This is the core principle behind Error Management Training, a concept developed by psychologist Michael Frese. We need to be ready for mistakes. And to do that, we need to build outs.

Professional magicians often make a list of everything that could go wrong during a performance, writing each one out.

That’s what you should do too.

Take your routine and advance through it five seconds at a time, asking yourself: if this fails at this point, what can I do to recover? For each moment, give yourself at least four solutions. Keep one thing in mind: you’ll probably be rattled and won’t have time to think. Solutions need to be practical and realistic for you.

Think ahead to a worst-case scenario. The technique fails; you lose the spectator’s card, or the entire stacked deck falls to the floor. What do you do?

For example, you could set up a second deck identically and make a deck switch. It’s useful to have deck switches you can execute in most situations. 

You reveal the card, and it’s wrong. What now? Do you have the technical skills to spread the deck and find it? Would you rather have a second deck in your pocket with an index? Or do you simply have the spectator choose another card?

Most outs rely on having identical objects loaded on your person — and the closer you get to professional performing conditions, the more this matters.

Professional magicians never perform a coin routine without at least two more coins in your back pockets and two more at chest level. If you work with a stacked deck, keep another one ready in your pocket. If you do table hopping, carry doubles on you and triples in your case, easily accessible during the break between tables. In your case, you might also keep a small repair kit for things that break quickly, if the fix can be done in a few minutes.

For stage magicians doing manipulation, having backup loads is standard practice. Have them in different places — jacket, trousers, servantes in the shirt — accessible at any moment.

The point is to practise resuming your routines from whatever point things went wrong, or to have a separate routine prepared using the object you’ve just picked up. If, during a manipulation act, you drop what you’re working with and grab a backup load, it’s useful to have a sequence of adjustable length ready to fill any time gap you need.

If you drop an object and it rolls out of reach, or off a stage and into the audience, the rule above applies: use the backup. Grab the coin from your pocket, take the object you need from your jacket. There’s nothing worse than watching a magician weave between the legs of spectators searching for a dropped object.  

If you’re on stage and an essential object you can’t continue without falls out of reach (yes, this happens to the best of us), a strategy is to have a backup object in the wings. If you use a set, have a backup tucked inside or behind pieces of the scenery.