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Good Morning everyone,

Im Ben, 38 and always sort of toyed with magic, never properly committed but always enjoyed the skill of sleight of hand, close up and card magic. Love the genius of some of the tricks and what people have mansged to think up to create effects.

A while ago I bought the Royal Road and decided I want to be able to take part in what I enjoy so much.

Now, im fully aware that the royal road is old, but is it still around for good reason? Or is there a more modern book/video i should learn the basics with?

For instance flash and cooler methods whixh i dont think are considered in the book?

So Hi from me and look forward to exploring the forum and meeting you all

Hi Ben, welcome to TM!

Royal Road can be a bit old fashioned compared to more modern books, DVDs etc but it's still the standard work for card and other magic. There are alternatives, or more accurately, additional works, such as Mark Wilson, Nic Einhorn etc and people like R.Paul Wilson have successfully produced DVDs to further illustrate Royal Road techniques.

Best suggestion is to visit the dealers, on line and bricks and mortar, and see what they offer - the choice is very wide!

Thanks. Ive decided to concentrate on learning the classic pass as theres plenty i can do with that for starters. A little a day. Question though... When you make the pass should the cards make a noise or should it be silent?

I'll leave that question for the cardies on here, my attempts at the pass are purely farcical!

The cards should be silent when making the pass. The exception is if you use the riffle pass of course since the riffle isn't silent. Mind you neither am I so I should really take this opportunity to mention that with regard to the Royal Road to Card Magic I have an updated version coming out soon in printed form. Same book but I have added various annotations to it. It will be coming out in printed form in a few weeks but the e-book version is already out. I do consider ebooks to be against the laws of nature but here it is anyway.

https://www.lybrary.com/the-annotated-r ... 23422.html

Thanks guys. Seen plenty of video tutorials too so ill spend my time mastering the pass first.

With regard to the Pass here is something I wrote in my annotations to the Royal Road:

"All this talk about the difficulty of the pass prompts me to recount a very odd tale. When I first started doing magic all the books, including this one, scared me to death informing me that it would take months, if not years to learn this intricate move. At the time I was struggling with the DL and in fact it took me a couple of years (at least!) to learn it. I hinted at this a trifle in the preceding DL chapter. And yet hardly anywhere in the literature has anyone mentioned that the DL is a particularly difficult move to do deceptively. In fact it seems to be regarded as a very basic sleight in card magic. Yet the Pass is regarded almost with hushed tones to be a very advanced sleight indeed.
Accordingly when I first started magic I avoided learning the pass for a long while. However, one day I got hold of a little book called Tricks With Cards and therein was a description of the sleight in question. I decided to see what progress I could make with it and started to study it. Lo and behold ten minutes after reading the description I could do the move passably well. And thirty minutes later could more or less do it perfectly! And all the books told me that it would take months if not years to learn!
I was flabbergasted that it took me ten minutes to learn the pass and several years to learn how to do the DL! I still haven’t quite fathomed as to why I learned the pass so quickly and the DL so slowly. I can only put it down to a fluke aided by the excellent description in Tricks With Cards. It wasn’t until many years later that I found out that the book was authored by Angelo Lewis better known as Professor Hoffman and was a very old book written in 1889.
The Royal Road to Card Magic description of the sleight is an excellent one and just as good as the Professor Hoffman explanation so perhaps the reader will be able to learn the move in ten minutes just like I did! "

And here is a much longer annotation from the book. This should keep you busy in thought for a while!

As I mentioned previously a lot of magicians are against shuffling after the card is replaced and the pass is made. They reason that there is no necessity to do this since the audience will assume the card is lost in the deck and there is no need to muddy the waters since all is how it is supposed to be. They say that if you are going to shuffle anyway you may as well use one of the other controls where you do this such as the overhand shuffle control etc.

They may be correct regarding the last point since these other controls have made the pass outmoded to a certain extent and there is not the same necessity to use the pass as a control method as there used to be in days of yore. However, it is a very good thing to vary your methods and the pass still has a place where this is concerned. I do use the pass myself as an alternative method for certain tricks.

So the arguments put forward by others that it isn’t necessary to shuffle after the pass seems logical at first but not when you dig a bit deeper. The reason I advocate some kind of shuffle keeping control of the card after the pass, is that although in theory everyone assumes the card is lost somewhere in the deck, this assumption may not be as accurate as one might imagine. Some audiences can be very sharp animals and can sense something is not quite right. The true facts of the matter is that very few magicians can do the pass so perfectly that not a flicker or suspicious movement can be seen when spectators are looking at their hands. They really have to use misdirection and it is generally not good policy to execute the move when undue attention from onlookers is on the hands of the performer.

A lot of magicians kid themselves that their pass is undetectable but I really believe that it may not be as deceptive as they think it is.
Even when misdirection is used there may be a chance that an astute spectator senses that things are not quite right. Or even if the execution of the move is beyond perfection. Possibly the body language or the demeanor of the magician gives the game away. The onlooker does not know what has happened but he somehow senses that “something” has happened. Of course this scenario will not happen at every performance since not every spectator is as astute as my example. However, why take a chance?
So I shuffle “just in case” my execution of the pass is not enough to satisfy the more observant members of my audience. The shuffling cements the idea in their minds that the card really is completely lost. It is a kind of insurance against astute audience members sensing something is not quite right.

I do find it interesting that some of the tricks in this chapter give examples of shuffling after the pass is made while still controlling the location of the selected card. Of course in “Righting a Wrong” you are compelled to shuffle the cards in order to get it eight from the top!

Incidentally if you refer to my annotations on the Spread Pass a few pages ago you will notice my reference to this matter which I consider further validation of this position.
However, here is one last point to consider. In days of yore when the pass was the only method of control available the magicians of the day almost universally had a standard procedure. They would not shuffle the cards themselves but would get members of the audience to do it! They would palm off the selected card and then hand the deck out to be shuffled. After doing so the deck would be returned and the card would be secretly replaced. A leisurely procedure to be sure but one which fitted the times. My point is that the magicians of the day didn’t think, “The audience assumes the card is lost so there is no need to shuffle.” They realized instinctively that audiences needed a bit of extra convincing.
There. I rest my case!