How To Do Magic Tricks With Coins

Learning coin magic from magic books

This is the way many older magicians learned, because it was the only option available to them. The “bible” of coin magic always was, and still is, Bobo’s Modern Coin Magic. This will literally teach you everything you could ever want to know about the fundamentals of coin magic. It was published in 1952, but every magician I know would still recommend it as a core reference book. Although more modern coin magicians have developed new moves and sleights since it was published, it’s all you need to get started.

The other book you should get is David Roth’s Expert Coin Magic. This seminal text will really set you up for life.

Learning coin magic from video

Well, this is fortunately easy. Roth’s Expert Coin Magic was turned into a video series, Expert Coin Magic Made Easy. You can think of it like Royal Road but for coins. Every coin sleight you need is explained perfectly here by the late, great David Roth. Then there are routines. Oh, what routines. You really could make a career performing just the material contained here.

We’ve got a whole section of the site devoted to coin magic downloads, but if you want a short cut from browsing through everything there, just get The New York Coin Magic Seminar series. This has material from all the coin magic legends (David Roth, Michael Rubenstein, Geoff Latta and Mike Gallo) and will set you up for life.

Learning Coin Tricks From YouTube

Here’s the thing. Most of the people “teaching” coin magic for free on YouTube are not good teachers. Additionally, they’re often teaching material they’re not qualified to teach and do not have permission from the creator to expose in this way. When you start learning anything, “free” is an attractive price point. I get it. But, when you start learning something like a Classic Palm the wrong way, it could take years to correct the mistakes you’ve learned. If your financial situation is preventing you from investing in books or video to learn from, then I would really recommend you take a trip to your local library and ask them to order in some coin magic books for you so you can learn the right way. You’ll thank me in the long run!

Money magic has a built in emotional hook

Let’s get back to that emotional hook I mentioned at the start. Dai Vernon (The Professor) often spoke of one thing to make your magic resonate with your audience. Find an “emotional hook”: in short, a way to make your audience care about what you’re doing. If you take a coin, put it in your hand and vanish it, that’s all well and good. But if you can engage with your audience by telling a story about how and why the coin vanishes, they will be more emotionally involved with what they are watching. Money has a built in emotional hook. People care about money much more than they care about, say, playing cards. This is an advantage coin magic can give you.

Learning Coin Magic With Gaffed Coins

Gaffed coins are coins which have been altered in some way to allow certain magic to be performed more cleanly or more easily than using regular coins. We’ve got 337 coin gaffs on the site, but many beginners will initially pick something like a shell coin (or “turtle” as it’s known thanks to Penn and Teller’s Fool Us). Other popular choices are folding coins and flipper coins.

Learning Coin Tricks With Regular Coins

There are purists who feel that if all the coins cannot be examined, the magic isn’t pure. And that is a perfectly admirable approach to have. All of the material I’ve mentioned above contains swathes of tricks with regular coins, so if that is the approach you want to take, get stuck in!

However you choose to learn coin tricks, remember, people always have coins. You can approach any table at any gig and ask to borrow a coin and be able to. This is one of the advantages coin magic brings. There’s no need for you to remember anything, you can borrow some money and perform some miracles. Enjoy!