Confessions of a sleight of hand artist

“Acquiring the art is in itself a most fascinating pastime, and the student will need no further incentive the moment the least progress is made”

S.W. Erdnase, The Expert At The Card Table, 1902

Alright, this is officially the most pretentious series of essays in the history of card magic or probably any other discipline for that matter. Spoiler alert, it will be full of contradictions, aggressive remarks about card magic and the many horrors one witnesses when scanning the actual card magic landscape. No apologies are considered necessary by yours truly since this is a personal platform and it is meant to express my personal thoughts and opinions.

Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Want to Know?” is the tune that now accompanies me as I start with a little bit of an anecdote about my very first magic convention and how it presented a fundamental epiphany about card technique.

I was 15 years old and about six months into magic when I attended my very first magic convention in Buenos Aires. The all mighty “Buenos Aires Tiene Magia” magic convention happens every 2 years and it’s one of the biggest and therefor most important events for the Latin-American magic community.

The year was 2012, or what I like to remember as “The Daortiz year” due to the fact that it was back then when I went on a family vacation packing only a few decks of cards and Dani Daortiz’s brand new Utopia DVD Set. After a month, I was practically a pre puberty version of the Spanish master and cards were falling from my hand forming a waterfall that converged in a not so ideal mixture of messy card handling, little sleight of hand skills and amazing psychological management skills. I was in heaven.

The day came when I attended my first convention thinking I was the greatest magician in history and that my twisting the aces rendition will amaze every single attendee…

It was only about 60 minutes into the convention that reality hit me in the face causing an impact higher than that caused by the collision of an unstoppable force and an immovable object (I am not which one of the two represents myself in that particular scenario)

I remember walking out that day feeling immensely depressed and equally motivated to become the smoothest card technician I could become. That has been my quest ever since and it will continue to be as long as I stand on this earth.

“I do not have dreams, I have goals”

Harvey Specter