100 Trick Repertoire Redux: Part One

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I want to go back to my concept of a 100 Trick Repertoire, which is something I wrote about in The Amateur at the Kitchen Table. It’s a simple idea. You don’t need that book to understand it. It’s just the idea that the old adage that you should know six tricks that you do very well, is horseshit when it comes to the amateur/social performer. (And probably hasn’t even made sense for the professional performer since, like, the vaudeville days—but magicians are slow to evolve.)

First off, if you’re mentally satisfied and stimulated by regularly performing six tricks, then you are—I’m guessing—about three firing neurons away from being totally fucking braindead. You’re a dullard.

Second, the amateur/social performer needs a larger repertoire because they would quickly burn through their audience with their material otherwise. And they need stuff that works in various situations (where as a professional can more often dictate the situations in which they perform).

Today I’m going to give you my current philosophy/process for developing a 100 Trick Repertoire.

My repertoire has evolved and changed a lot since I came up with the idea. Not just in regards to the tricks that make up the repertoire (which should always be morphing and changing as you learn new effects and swap them in), but also in regards to the nature of the list itself. I used to include every type of trick on the list. Now I don’t.

These days I don’t include any big “special occasion” types of tricks that require crafting a very specific experience for someone. Instead I keep a separate list of those tricks and if someone is coming over, or I’m visiting someone, or I’m going to a party, or whatever the case may be, and I think I might want to do something “big,” then I’ll look over the list and pick something that would be good for that situation. Because these tricks aren’t ones I’ll be performing super regularly, I don’t include them in my 100 Trick Repertoire.

I also don’t include any tricks that require a specific prop or gimmick that I don’t intend to have on me day to day. So, for example, let’s say I have a trick I like that uses a specific gimmicked coin. Instead, of putting that in my 100 trick repertoire, what I do is add it to a list of “gimmick” tricks. Then what I do is start at the top of that list and carry around whatever gimmick is needed for that trick. Eventually, some days later, I’ll have the opportunity to perform it. Once I do, I’ll stop carrying around that gimmick and move to the next trick on the list and start carrying around whatever gimmick that requires. So I have pretty much a limitless list of gimmicked tricks I might use, but at any point in time there’s just one I’m actively carrying around with me. Obviously, if there’s something I’m really enjoying performing, then I’ll find some way to carry it around more frequently (perhaps keeping it in my computer bag) or I just won’t move to the next trick on the list until I feel I’ve burned out the current one.

Objects/Props/Gimmicks

So the tricks that make up my 100 Trick Repertoire currently are tricks that use:

  1. Objects I frequently have on me

  2. Objects that are readily accessible in many places

  3. Objects that are commonly found in my primary social environments

  4. Utility gimmicks that I plan to have on me regularly

Let’s break that down further.

Items I “frequently have on me” include:

Coins/Bills
A couple business cards
Credit cards
Ring
Keys
Pen
Rubber bands
Watch
Sunglasses
Phone (and things “in” the phone)

  • Calculator

  • Notepad

  • Drawing App

  • Photo Album

  • Music

  • Internet browser

  • Camera

  • etc.

Items that are readily accessible in many places:

Paper
Pen/Pencil/Sharpie
Books
Deck of cards (Which could be included in the above list as well. I don’t carry one in my pocket, but usually have one in my computer bag or car.)

If I had an office job, or went to the same pub a few times a week, those would be my “primary social environments.” Since I don’t at the moment, then it’s going to be coffee shops/cafes. Objects found in my primary social environments include:

Loyalty cards
Napkins
Sugar packets
Stirrer sticks
Coffee cups
Straws

The “utility gimmicks that I plan to have on me regularly* ” include:

Thumbtip
Loops
Thumb-writer
Peek Wallet

*I don’t usually have these “on me” as in “in my pockets.” But they’re frequently in my bag or in my car.

These lists aren’t complete, obviously, but they’ll give you an idea what I’m talking about.

Now, not everything in the 100 Trick Repertoire is completely impromptu (by my definition (the right definition)). Some stuff requires a small set-up that I need to do when no one is watching. But the idea is that the tricks don’t use anything that isn’t common to me or common to the environments in which I spend significant amounts of time.

Weighting

Okay, so now I have the list of potential objects I can work with. So at this point I’ll divvy up a sort of “theoretical” list of tricks to give myself a good variety. So it would be something like this:

30 card tricks (that’s quite a bit, but it’s easy to have 30 card tricks with very different premises.)
5 tricks that use a deck of cards and a Sharpie
10 tricks using my phone
10 non-card mentalism tricks (some using the nailwriter)
5 money tricks
3 propless tricks
3 rubber band tricks
3 ring tricks
3 loop tricks
3 thumbtip tricks
1 or 2 tricks each for the other items in the lists above that I have not yet mentioned

Rules

From there I get even more granular and come up with some specific requirements for my 100 Trick Repertoire. For example:

I want to always have one impromptu book test in my repertoire
I want to always have three good tricks for couples in my repertoire
I want to always have a completely impromptu trick with a time-travel premise in my repertoire
I want to always have at least five tricks in my repertoire that take no longer than 15 seconds each

The idea is to track any kind of specific things you want to make sure are always included in some form in your repertoire. If you go to the pool hall a lot, you might want to have three tricks that are specific to the pool hall. Maybe after a couple instances where you met some poker players socially and you felt like you missed an opportunity to do something that would appeal specifically to them, you decide to always have two pokers/gambling effects in your repertoire. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.

So, up to this point, we’ve looked at the repertoire as sort of an abstract thing. And we’ve done some categorizing in a few different ways:

The props/objects/gimmicks readily available to us
How we want to weight our usage of these objects/gimmicks
Any rules we want to have for our repertoire

And then comes the fun part as you build up your repertoire. At first it will just be a matter of making a list of tricks you like and want to perform. Then, as your repertoire begins to grow, you’ll notice gaps in it based on the rules and categories you’ve established and you’ll want to focus on trying to track down tricks specifically to fill those gaps.

One final note on crafting your working repertoire…In my opinion, there’s no reason to have duplicate effects taking up multiple spaces. Knowing six different Collectors routines seems wildly unnecessary.

Yes, but this one requires a table, this one I do standing, this one uses a gimm—

Bah-bah-bah… yeah, okay, I get it. But your mental processing power and practice time are finite resources. I believe you’re better off using them on a few different tricks rather than the same trick with various methods. When you have a large repertoire, you’re bound to have options. You don’t need force one given trick into every situation. But you do whatever the hell you want.

In two weeks I’ll do the second post in this series and tell you about my current way of maintaining my 100 Trick Repertoire in a way that keeps the tricks fresh in my mind while minimizing the time I need to spend practicing.