Sleight of Hand

What exactly is sleight (pronounced "slite") of hand? This term refers to a broad category of magic tricks that relies on your skills and techniques as well as the facility of your fingers and hands. In other words, these are tricks that depend on your skill and dexterity to fool the audience, much more so than on props or gimmicks. It's your fingers that do the work, not a manufacturer's product.

Another way of saying all this is that a sleight of hand is a trick that is performed so well and so deftly that the audience can't tell precisely how it was done!

There's a great word for this that every magician should know: "legerdemain." This word comes to us from the old French phrase "leger de main," in which "leger" translates as light, and "de main" means "of hand." So if you perform with a light touch, that's the ideal form of legerdemain.

This deftness applies to most magic tricks, though, not just sleight of hand! In fact, most of tricks we're going to discuss involve sleight of hand, from shuffling cards to palming coins. Even levitation, which we'll discuss in Chapter 4, involves sleight of hand-although that's more like "sleight of foot!"

Easy Does It - Small-Scale Tricks to Dazzle Your Audience

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