I tried these exercises for about 15-20 mins. In that time, I tried cutting-and-counting like 10 times, and I was off-by-one every time *curses*. I managed to repeat the cut a few times—I am unsure whether you’re supposed to move the cards around a bit after cutting, or whether you’re allowed to hold them identically when repeating; they’re often a little bit uneven at the place I just cut, which feels like an unfair advantage. I did not manage to get the riffle-peek-then-cut right any times. I took a few goes at riffling really slowly, and failed often to see the card (because two cards would flip together), which I felt unhappy about until I saw you explain that sometimes you don’t always see it on a single pass through, and then I felt like I wasn’t failing too hard.
I think this will be really useful if I ever seriously try to learn close-up magic, and much better than other intros I’ve seen. I really appreciated being guided in what to notice. It reminds me of The Inner Game of Tennis, which talks a lot about using S2 to guide where your attention is as you do the task, and then letting S1 take in that data and use it better—as opposed to getting S2 to tell S1 what to do (or not do) directly. I feel like the OP doesn’t split close-up card magic into tricks but atomic moves, and helps guide my attention to learning the key skills that make-up those moves.
I feel some motivation to try to write a similar guide for playing the classical guitar, if only for my own benefit of making the moves explicit, and running metacognition on what to notice.
If you ever are interested in learning close-up magic some more, I have lots more thoughts on what good resources are for learning / have strong opinions on what makes a good magic effect. I haven’t written about them for the LW audience, but maybe more of this hybrid stuff will manifest later on.
My thoughts:
I tried these exercises for about 15-20 mins. In that time, I tried cutting-and-counting like 10 times, and I was off-by-one every time *curses*. I managed to repeat the cut a few times—I am unsure whether you’re supposed to move the cards around a bit after cutting, or whether you’re allowed to hold them identically when repeating; they’re often a little bit uneven at the place I just cut, which feels like an unfair advantage. I did not manage to get the riffle-peek-then-cut right any times. I took a few goes at riffling really slowly, and failed often to see the card (because two cards would flip together), which I felt unhappy about until I saw you explain that sometimes you don’t always see it on a single pass through, and then I felt like I wasn’t failing too hard.
I think this will be really useful if I ever seriously try to learn close-up magic, and much better than other intros I’ve seen. I really appreciated being guided in what to notice. It reminds me of The Inner Game of Tennis, which talks a lot about using S2 to guide where your attention is as you do the task, and then letting S1 take in that data and use it better—as opposed to getting S2 to tell S1 what to do (or not do) directly. I feel like the OP doesn’t split close-up card magic into tricks but atomic moves, and helps guide my attention to learning the key skills that make-up those moves.
I feel some motivation to try to write a similar guide for playing the classical guitar, if only for my own benefit of making the moves explicit, and running metacognition on what to notice.
Thanks for trying these out, Ben!
If you ever are interested in learning close-up magic some more, I have lots more thoughts on what good resources are for learning / have strong opinions on what makes a good magic effect. I haven’t written about them for the LW audience, but maybe more of this hybrid stuff will manifest later on.