Magic Tricks

Devin Knight returned to Penguin Live for an encore performance. Unfortunately, his sequel fell short of the original. This lecture will befuddle your magic club with its upgrades on familiar tricks but will not add sizzle to your show.

The good news – this download comes with NINE FREE PDFs – including a new version of Blindsight.

The bad news – Mr Knight’s favorite phrase was “see the PDF”. Most of the tricks start with a clip from his Penguin stage show, followed by an incomplete explanation that ends with “see the PDF” and then finishes an aside: “and this is not in the PDF”. The result is a choppy presentation requiring you to jump back and forth and in and out of the video to fully understand everything.

A lot of these tricks are close up effects and I would have liked to see a complete close up performance followed by a complete explanation instead of a stage presentation and reference to a PDF.

The tricks themselves – or rather – better handlings of existing effects – lack the wow factor from Mr Knight’s first lecture. This is no ring inside a paint can, salt from a live lightbulb or card inside a sealed box. Instead there are a lot of familiar card and coin effects like tossed out deck, a spelling trick, a four-ace assembly and spectator selects the odd card from a force deck, ala Doc Eason’s “Impossible Opener”.

Mr Knight has improved and simplified these effects. However only magicians will notice the differences. Hence Mr Knight’s second favorite phrase of the night: “And this fooled magicians on my lecture tour”. Your magic club will think you’ve suddenly morphed into Shin Lim when you pop four aces out of a deck while simultaneously shuffling the cards, but does this have more impact on a regular audience than cutting a deck into four and producing four aces, ala “A Poker Player’s Picnic” from “The Royal Road to Card Magic”? I think not.

The bottom line: if you perform these tricks or want to learn them, you will benefit from Mr Knight’s thinking, however, there is not much new here – only better.

Two final notes:
(1) Some to the tricks may be stronger than they looked in the lecture. This lecture had the smallest audience I’ve seen at a Penguin event, about 10 people. Most apparently were magicians. They displayed almost no reaction or emotion to anything so some of these things may work better in the “real world”.
(2) Mr Knight and Dan Harlan offer some very useful information about going on the road in the Q&A session.