Earning my chops

That´s the phrase i would use to describe the current stage of my artistic development.

The month at the casino went by and it was a good experience. Not only money-wise; i FINALLY tried new stuff out. All the stupid whinning reached it´s end. All i had to do was WORK. Williamson once said that the best advice for a magician was ´work, work, work´. And he´s damn rite! When you work, you naturally tend to try stuff out and to take ´little risks´ that end up paying a lot. You get sharper and fit.

Among the items that i´ve been getting a lot of pleasure and education from, were:

Spoon trick by Dr. Sawa / David Williamson.

Man was i shy and fearful to try this item out! The first times i did it only for kids. They are the BEST judges for a couple of reasons. One is that i fear not kids and two is that they are usually more shrewd than adults and can spot the trick more easily.

Eight kings treathened to save...

I did some Erdnase reading and picked up this item to experiment. Lovely. It´s old but what the heck? It´s great. The old ´guess your card´ trick is lovely! I just love doint it!

Card under the seat

This was a killer. Whenever i was invited to seat i´d start ´jazzing´ with a selected card and it would usually end up below my pompas after sundry revelations.
It´s so easy to do and it´s so powerful. I learned a lot from this.

There is one trick that i started doing some time ago with good results and was getting rather confident doing but now i´m not ´cause it backfired a couple of times:

card under spectator´s watch

I did it a couple of times but it did not go well. Once they even saw me carrying the folded card under the guy´s wristwatch. It was pathetic :)

Many times i pulled a miracle doing some version of Vernon´s:

The trick that cannot be explained.

Don´t you just LOVE when you somehow (ie: spell the name of the spectator and there resides the card he thought of) manage to pull a miracle out of NOTHING? :)

Lot of second dealing too. Tried out Paul LePaul´s spread pass too, and even some real fortune telling!

Good times!