Yet To Turn A Profit, Resorts World Catskills Casino Puts

Note: The particularly important details and music artist names are in bold text. Licensed music track names are in italics.
The year is 1973, five years after the events of the Mafia III, and 22 years since Vito Scaletta’s seen or heard from his old friend Joe Barbaro. The canon ending of Mafia III with this Mafia IV story is Vito taking over the city after Lincoln skipped town, however Cassandra and Burke are left alive and loyal to both Vito and Lincoln still. Burke was able to survive his liver cancer by getting a black market liver transplant in Mexico, like he did in his ending, except with Vito running the city. On Vito and Lincoln’s behalf, Burke and Cassandra agree to stay behind in New Bordeaux and keep the city locked down, incase Leo Galante and the Commission try anything.
The beginning cutscene is Vito answering his telephone after getting up in the morning in his new penthouse, on the top floor of the New Bordeaux casino he finished that was once Sal Marcano's, and grabbing a cup of coffee. It's Alma with some urgent news. Lincoln Clay came down to the cigar warehouse to visit her after 5 years of silence, and he has big news.
Joe is alive in Empire Bay and has been this entire time. However, as punishment for his actions, he's become Leo Galante's personal driver against his will and is forbidden from contacting Vito ever again, or else him and Vito will be killed. Alma then tells Vito to meet Lincoln at the airport to learn more, as he's already there awaiting Vito's arrival. When they're away from anyone who could listen in on their conversation, Lincoln tells Vito he has a friend named John Donovan he's going to introduce him to, hiding in the outskirts of Empire Bay, ready to help Vito and Lincoln with their new mission
Vito gets dressed in one of his signature trench coats with a suit and tie, ready to rain down hell on the Vinci crime family and their allies, and finally be reunited with his lifelong friend he previously thought was dead, Joe Barbaro.
Here is my idea for the kill list, all related to the Commission in Empire Bay and their allies.

Leo Galante - Top target on the list, Vinci family consigliere who's in with the Commission and the man you thought put Joe in the ground for the past 22 years. Bury this wrinkly old cocksucker.
Johnny Galante - Vinci family capo and younger relative of Leo's mentioned in Cassandra's ending, possibly Leo's cousin even. John Donovan knows that the two are close, and that Johnny's a valuable asset to Leo's organization. Kill him both to hurt Leo's earn and influence, and to hit him straight in the heart by taking away his family and everyone he loves
Michele Galante Jr. - Another Vinci family capo, and Leo Galante’s youngest brother. Killing Leo’s little brother will both take away one of his most reliable allies, and leave him stricken with grief and enraged, and more prone to making mistakes.
Nunzio Galante - Leo’s seasoned older brother by 3 years, and yet another Vinci family capo. He knows enough about smuggling that he worked out an ingenious plan for smuggling military grade weapons into the city. He pays off corrupt officials at Empire Bay International Airport, to allow guns to be loaded inside the walls and floors of planes, unknown to everyone onboard save for the palms the Galantes and Frank Vinci have greased to cooperate and keep quiet. The time has come to put this crafty old bastard in the ground.
Don Frank Vinci - Frank Vinci is the boss of the Vinci crime family, the family Leo's been a consigliere of for decades, and a lifelong friend of his. Kill Frank, and Leo loses more ground than he could ever imagine, and will be forced to deal with both the loss of his boss, and the loss of his lifelong childhood friend.
Don Ennio Salieri - Longtime close friend of both Frank Vinci and Leo Galante, Don of the Salieri crime family, and a third party Frank and Leo call in to crush Vito's uprising, when it becomes too big of an issue for Vinci alone to handle. Salieri was eventually able to grease enough palms while behind bars to have his life sentence overturned, and he got released from prison on good behavior in 1953, after he served 15 years of his sentence. He’s since relocated to his main operations to Empire Bay, having already had connections and men present there while he was in prison, backed by the Commission and the Vinci crime family. He's seasoned, but he’s nothing Mr. Scaletta can't handle. Give this tired old fuck the gangland ending he's had coming.
Isaac - Isaac is the personal assistant to an influential loan shark named Bruno Levine, who handles the money of the Commission, including the Vinci crime family and the Salieri crime family. He does anything from serve his boss coffee, to count incoming and outgoing money for Bruno. Because of his duties, he's aware of Bruno's location at all times. You’ll need to get to Isaac to get information on his boss out of him, and dispose of him afterwards if you want to get to Bruno.
Bruno Levine - Bruno is a Jewish-American loan shark who kicks up all of his earn to both Frank Vinci and Ennio Salieri, and the Commission in Empire Bay. Killing him kills a lot of earn for the Commission, and they loses a valuable asset. In addition to getting rid of him being practical, to add insult to injury, he gave your father that loan. It's about time to put this asshole out of business.
Mr. Chu & Mr. Chu Jr. - This old man has been leading the Empire Bay Triads with an iron fist since before you were even born. The bastard has a son too, who eventually went on to become his underboss. The Empire Bay Triads became a close ally of the Vinci crime family, the Salieri crime family, and the Commission shortly after Vito killed Don Carlo Falcone in 1951, forming a lucrative partnership with the Commission. Mr. Chu and his eldest son are valuable assets for Leo Galante who give him extra reach. Melt their iron fists and show these two pricks just who they fucked with.
Eddie Scarpa - This cocksucker used to be Carlo Falcone's underboss for as long as you could remember. After you whacked Falcone in the fall of 1951, he decided to throw in with Vinci to save his own skin. He took over the smuggling and dock union extortion that fat fuck Derek Pappalardo used to run. You know all too well how to deal with this sorry fuckin' rat.

I'm thinking Vito and Joe work with Lincoln Clay and John Donovan to split up Empire Bay and distribute territory to three other factions not unlike what Lincoln did with New Bordeaux. This time though, this is a much larger city in a much, much different part of the United States. The empire building mechanics would be a lot smoother, more robust, and streamlined compared to Mafia III. They would work similarly a more modernized version of how the hit city sandbox game Scarface: The World Is Yours handled it's empire building and management mechanics, minus the whole switching to other characters lower on the ladder to do your bidding. This would be ideal for a story rich organized crime game in my opinion. Here are my ideas for those factions, all close allies of the up and coming Scaletta crime family.
The Cuban mob led by Alma Diaz. Vito goes way back with Alma, and she does not hesitate to answer him and Lincoln's calls to save Joe's life and royally fuck both Leo Galante and the Vinci family.
Conti crime family, led by Enzo Conti. This Conti crime family formed sometime in late 1968, months after Lincoln helped Enzo flee New Bordeaux and drop off of Sal Marcano's radar. It turns out he fled north to Empire Bay and finally formed his own family, having more than enough years of experience in the underworld to handle the job. Lincoln's tight with him and manages to recruit him to Vito and Joe's cause.
The Yakuza, based out of Empire Bay's Japantown. Longtime sworn enemies of the Empire Bay Triads, with bad blood going back decades. They would greatly enjoy seeing Mr. Chu and his son's heads mounted on pikes, along with whacking everyone who's ever supported their organization. You don't know them well, and they're known to be very unpredictable and ruthless. Use these traits to your advantage when taking on the Commission of Empire Bay and their friends.
I should mention as expected, this entire 1973 section where you play as Vito is much shorter than Mafia III. Vito's takeover is shown much more quickly over time than Lincoln's, and there's time skips during it, to keep it short and sweet, and to show onscreen only what's important. There is also no option for your underbosses to betray you, as to reduce confusion and keep the story consistently the same each playthrough, like the first two Mafia games.
However, unlike Mafia III, after all of these tasks are completed and every single assassination target on Vito’s kill list is dealt with, the game does not end. In fact, it's not even anywhere near close to being over yet. Vito's 1973 section was merely the beginning act. It was really a lead up to an entirely new Mafia story, centering around a newcomer to the American mob. Fast forward two years following Vito’s rampage that led to him taking over Empire Bay and the Commission, in the year 1975 him and Joe now rule Empire Bay, with Vito as the Don of the Scaletta Crime Family, and Joe working as his loyal underboss. You play the rest of the game as a young up and coming soldato named Louis in his 20’s, who’s a rising star in Vito’s organization. Do right by Mr. Scaletta and Mr. Barbaro, understand kid?
My basic idea for the character and his backstory is that he's a young Italian-Canadian mobster from Toronto, Ontario, or whatever Mafia's equivalent of it could be called. Let's call him Louis DeSimone. His family hails from Tuscany in Italy and moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1939, shortly after World War II broke out in Europe. Louis DeSimone was born in July 1952 in Toronto, and was raised in Toronto's Little Italy. Being northern Italian and hailing from Tuscany, Louis has blond hair and green eyes, making him visually very distinct from past series protagonists, who were all dark haired brunets with brown eyes. Louis fled south to Empire Bay when the feds started cracking down on his old family and put his boss in prison, and he ended up finding a new home with the Scaletta crime family. The first few missions playing as Louis DeSimone involve shooting your away out of an arrest by a Toronto Police Service SWAT team in Toronto in December 1974, seeing the rest of the members of your old crime family either get arrested or shot in front of you as you make your escape. You spend the next two missions fleeing Ontario through Quebec and upstate New York, before finally arriving in Empire Bay in early 1975, late January to be exact. Winter is in full force with snow everywhere, Louis' arrival to Empire Bay for the first time in his life mirroring Vito's return to Empire Bay in 1945 30 years earlier, except under far different much more dire circumstances. Louis' older brother and his father, both capos in his old crime family in Toronto, are shown to be arrested by the TPS SWAT team in his first mission, the same one that attempted to gun him down when he resisted arrested. Louis knows someone had to have ratted out his old crime family, and he wants to find out who someday. The thing is though, he doesn't just want to kill them. He wants to get out of them why they did it before he kills them. More than anything else, he just wants to find out why his crime family was betrayed and served up to the feds on a silver platter, having most of his biological family sent to prison in the process. He’s out to uncover the mystery of why his family fell apart, and he’s more than willing to help people like Don Vito Scaletta and his underboss Joe Barbaro to eventually get the answers he seeks. In the end, he’s not even after revenge primarily, more than that, he wants answers and information regarding the fare of his old crime family, and wants to know why his family fell apart. I came up with the idea for this character because I figured that playing as a fugitive from the law made sense for the mob life, and I'm surprised we haven't had a fugitive protagonist in the Mafia series yet.
In the 1975 chapters while playing as Louis, the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the official end to the Vietnam War are all discussed on the in-game radio during news segments. In the last 1979 chapter, the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan War is also the subject of a news segment on the radio.
The story eventually transitions into the 1980's as years pass, with the scenery, cars, and music changing accordingly, and historical events of the time discussed in the game. In the 1989 section of the game, the murder of the infamous former Sinclair Parish Sheriff Walter “Slim” Beaumont is mentioned on the in-game radio, as just over 21 years ago Slim and his corruption ring were the top headline of national news. the time the game ends, it's 1992, and significant historical events from the past few years at the time that are covered on the radio in-game include anything from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the 1992 L.A. riots. The rise of the internet and home computers are briefly touched upon during news segments on the in-game radio during the early 1990's section of the story, but not greatly delved into given their relative infancy in that time period. During this entire 1975-1992 stretch of the story, Vito is no longer playable, and Don Scaletta takes a backseat in the story as a main supporting character, similar to Don Salieri throughout Mafia: Definitive Edition. You now play as the Italian-Canadian Scaletta family soldato Louis DeSimone, who is later promoted to being a capo in 1985. At the end of the game in 1992, Louis is promoted to Consigliere of the Scaletta crime family, and it’s revealed in the epilogue that he became the don of the family in 2006 at the age of 54, and his now released from prison older brother serving as his underboss, and and Enzo Conti’s grandson Giovanni Conti serving as consigliere, taking over from Louis’ previous position which before that belonged to his father and Enzo’s only son, Lorenzo Conti from 1973-1992. It is worth noting that unlike Don Salieri, Don Scaletta has much more integrity, and has more genuine loyalty for his men and his associates. If you've beaten Mafia 1 or Mafia: Definitive Edition, you'll know this is something Salieri lacked in the end. Over time, Louis also goes from having a strictly business relationship with Vito and Joe, to bonding with them and becoming a genuinely close friend and trusted member of the family, seeing Vito as something of a second father, and coming to see Joe as the fun uncle he never had. Another major character development theme is Louis DeSimone adapting and assimilating into Italian-American culture in his new home in the Northeastern US, it seeming like something new mixed with the familiar Italian-Canadian culture he was raised in back in Ontario just north of the border.
The game will include a number of hit music from the 70’s that played on the radio back then, such as Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street and Tony Christie’s (Is This the Way to) Amarillo, The Grateful Dead's Casey Jones and at least a few songs by the then new American rock band Cheap Trick, as well as popular songs from the 1960’s people still listened to at the time, such as Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ Wooly Bully, King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man, Zager and Evans' In the Year 2525, The Zombies' Time of the Season, and Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. When you progress through the game, especially after you switch to playing as Louis DeAngelo for the rest of the story, years change, and the music changes. Different songs start playing on the radio, such as Sylvester's You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), Randy Crawford's Street Life, and The Village People's Y.M.C.A., Cheryl Lynn's Got to Be Real, Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive, and the Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive start playing in the 1979 portion of the game. After you've completed the 1975 section of the game, Foghat's Slow Ride starts playing on the radio. Starting in the 1977 section of the game, Cheap Trick's I Want You to Want Me and Heart's Barracuda start playing on the radio. In the 1980's portion of the game, Thomas Dolby's songs Hyperactive! and She Blinded Me with Science, in addition to Night Ranger's Sister Christian also start playing on the radio. If Hangar 13 can afford the licenses, I also think a few Michael Jackson and Madonna songs should definitely be on the radio during the 1980's portion of the story, given the immense popularity and regular radio airtime those two had in that decade. If this ended up being possible, I imagine that Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal, Beat It, Bad, and Billie Jean being on the radio in the 80's sections would be a must, Smooth Criminal especially because of how well it suits the series. Madonna's Lucky Star, Burning Up, Like a Virgin, and Borderline would also be perfect for the 80's portion of the game to me. Also mentioned by NPCs and civilians in the game are topical events of the time period, such as the release of the groundbreaking 1973 horror film The Exorcist at the end of Vito's playable portion of the game.
Other music of the 1980's segment when playing as Louis DeAngelo for the remainder of the game includes hits of the era such as Joe Jackson's Steppin' Out, The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star, Corey Hart's Sunglasses at Night, Laura Branigan's Self Control and Gloria, The Weather Girls' It's Raining Men, A-ha’s Take On Me, Men at Work's Down Under, Kim Wilde's Kids in America, The Gap Band's You Dropped a Bomb on Me, Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon, Michael Sembello’s Maniac, Twisted Sister's I Wanna Rock and We're Not Gonna Take It, Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive and Bad Medicine, Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible, Rick Astley’s Together Forever, Whenever You Need Somebody, and Never Gonna Give You Up, Cutting Crew’s [I Just] Died In Your Arms, Loverboy's Working for the Weekend, Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) and That's the Way (I Like It), Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now, Daryl Hall & John Oates' Maneater, Aneka's Japanese Boy, Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood, Girls, Girls, Girls and Kickstart My Heart, Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, Huey Lewis And The News' Hip To Be Square, Bill Medley's (I've Had) The Time of My Life, The Police's Every Breath You Take, Whodini's Magic's Wand, Guns ‘N Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle and Paradise City, Tears For Fears' Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me, Regina's Baby Love, Nena's 99 Red Balloons, Earth, Wind, and Fire's Let's Groove and September, Billy Idol's Eyes Without a Face and White Wedding, Rick James’ Give It To Me Baby, Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, The S.O.S. Band’s Take Your Time (Do It Right), Kenny Loggins’ Highway to the Danger Zone, Wham!’s Everything She Wants, George Michael's Careless Whisper, Toto's Hold the Line and Africa, Blondie's Heart of Glass and Atomic, and Mai Tai's History.
**Note that not every single year and moment of the 17 year 1975-1992 section playing as Louis DeAngelo is playable or chronicled. My idea is it would be handled similarly to how the time skips in Mafia 1/Mafia: Definitive Edition were handled. Time skips of two or more years, or in this case, even longer such as 4 years sometimes, the game skipping from 1979 to 1983. This is to keep the game and story length ideal, and not risk it getting boring or repetitive, or going on for too long. Repetition was a big problem in Mafia III even if I still thought it was a superb game, so I think it'd be best to learn from that for the next big entry. The games story will skip ahead and show onscreen only what's significant, similar to the first Mafia game and it's remake, as well as certain aspects of Mafia II. Louis starts his section as a 22 year old fugitive soldato who got picked up by another crew south of the Canadian border, and in the epilogue of the game in 1992, is promoted to the consigliere of the Scaletta crime family at the age of 40, being set to take over the family once Vito and Joe become too old to run the day to day on a regular basis. Louis DeSimone is promoted to don of the Scaletta crime family following Vito and Joe being officially retired as of 2006. They’re both still involved and paid huge amounts of money by Louis out of respect, but keep a much lower profile by then since they have handpicked successors and aren’t worried about where the business is going.
The years chronicled in the main gameplay segments are as follows:
1973
1975
1977
1979
1983
1985
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
Much more of the rural areas and countryside outside of Empire Bay are included than what was available in Mafia II. The way rural environments are handled for this hypothetical Mafia IV is akin to how Mafia: Definitive Edition and Mafia III handled their rural environments outside the main cities, except much larger in scale, given the increased power of the current new consoles such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X. This region is based off of upstate New York and the surrounding areas across multiple states in the Northeastern US, and includes forests, fields, mountains, rivers, lakes, beaches, and small towns. Also included are other cities and towns, based off of other large cities in New York like Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester, where other story missions, business activities, and side missions take place, along with smaller notable places like Ithaca, Binghamton, and Utica. The entire states of New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, Maryland, and Ohio are also included, including places based off of all of their major cities and most of their notable towns in between. Large portions of Pennsylvania are included as well, including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Scranton. All of the province of Nova Scotia including the city of Halifax, and Large portions of the eastern half of the Canadian province of Ontario are included as well, including cities based off of Toronto, Ottawa, and Niagara Falls. There's even a small portion of Quebec included, including Montreal and the surrounding countryside of the province outside that city, including a few small towns in southern Quebec. The player must pass a quick border patrol check when crossing the US-Canada border in a car or other ground vehicle.
Wildlife is present in the game, mostly to add to the background, scenery, and immersion in rural environments on the map. These are all animals native to the Northeastern US, ranging from white tailed deer, coyotes, bobcats, Canada lynxes, rabbits, hares, groundhogs, gophers, beavers, raccoons, opossums, bats, chipmunks, red and gray squirrels, mice, and rats to more formidable and potentially dangerous animals that may sometimes attack the player, such as grey wolves, black bears, mountain lions, and moose. These last four animals are known to spawn in the mountainous regions, especially in New York, Ohio, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Ontario, including the rural regions based off of the Catskills and the Adirondack mountains. Dogs are present in the cities, towns, and settlements where humans live and keep them as pets, being walked and sometimes found in people's yards. Some are used as guard dogs by enemies and are aggressive towards the player on sight. Domestic cats are also present in the background of residential areas, and both Louis and Vito own them as pets throughout the game in their safe houses, as well as other onscreen characters we see the homes of throughout the game.
Aircraft make their first usable appearance in the Mafia series too, from airplanes to helicopters. Vito cannot use planes or helicopters in his playable 1973 portion of the game, as he does not know how to pilot, being a paratrooper in World War II who never actually flew any of the planes himself. Aircraft are unlocked to use when Louis DeSimone gets his pilot’s certificate offscreen in 1977, and at the end of a chapter set that year, Louis has to fly Vito in a helicopter to a penthouse in Downtown Empire Bay acting as a family safe house, equipped with a helipad. Louis frequently serves as a personal driver and pilot for both Vito and Joe afterwards, having done a lot in his time serving the family to earn their trust and respect.
Melee weapons also make a return from Mafia: Definitive Edition, with even more variety this time. In their respective sections of the game, Vito and Louis may use anything from baseball bats, pipes, shovels, brass knuckles, golf clubs, police batons, switchblades, kitchen knives, bowie knives, ice picks, 2x4s, claw hammers, crowbars, tire irons, chain links, machetes, meat cleavers, pickaxes, hatchets, sledgehammers, to fire axes. This amount of melee weapons is so no matter what environment the player finds themselves in during a mission or any other game activity, there is usually a weapon of some sort nearby. If the player has obtained piano wire, you may also strangle an enemy to death with it from behind as a stealth kill, this being a classic assassination method infamous for being used by the Italian Mafia. Rope can also be found and used for similar strangulation stealth kills, appearing in the gameplay environments where piano wire can’t be found. There is a wide variety of new guns and explosives to use in this concept for Mafia IV, going with the new weapons of the time the game takes place that criminals quickly got their hands on. This includes the SPAS-12 combat shotgun, the Beretta 92 pistol, the AK-74 assault rifle, the mini uzi, the MAC-10 submachine gun, both suppressed and unsuppressed variants, the Beretta 92 pistol, the Taurus raging bull revolver, Glock handguns, the TEC-9 machine pistol, illegally modified to be full auto, the Ruger Mini-14 full auto variant, and even Vietnam war era flamethrowers, which I think is only natural given that as of Mafia III, we already have RPGs and grenade launchers. Late in the game from the 1989 section and onwards, the Benelli M3 combat shotgun becomes available. The Milkor MGL grenade launcher becomes available beginning in the 1983 portion of the game. Attached grenade launchers are also available for the AK-47, AK-74, and M16 assault rifles. More advanced rocket launchers of the 1970’s and 1980’s are naturally included as well.
Free ride makes a return in Mafia IV, with the player having the options to change the weather, time period, and an option to play as Louis, Vito, Joe, Lincoln, or John Donovan. Naturally, a multitude of new free ride missions are available as well.
I previously posted a much earlier and less detailed draft of this on the old Mafia3 subreddit 3 years ago back in 2017 as an idea for a hypothetical Mafia 3 expansion where you play as Vito, but have since updated and revamped it to a possible Mafia IV plot, and fixed any plot holes I noticed and made it much more fleshed out and in depth, and focus on more than just Vito in the end. You may view my original here if you so desire, to compare. https://www.reddit.com/Mafia3/comments/6sldhp/spoiler_mafia_iii_vito_dlc_basic_plot_idea/
Feel free to give me constructive criticism on this, as I encourage this discourse and believe it is integral to growing and improving, to build upon or improve these ideas I've come up with, or say whether or not you think something like this should happen in the future. Thank you for reading!

WHO IS JEFF MCBRIDE?
Chances are you are reading this article because you already have some interest in magic. So maybe you've already heard of the name Jeff McBride. If you have, you'll already be familiar with his credentials, so you'll be itching to get straight the good stuff and read what he's got to say, because you know it's going to be worth reading.
But if you haven't heard of Jeff McBride before, let me tell you why this interview is a must-read: ● Are you into card magic? Jeff has been doing card magic his whole life, and is one of the very best in the world at card manipulation and sleight of hand. He has also been running his famous Magic & Mystery School for over 30 years. ● Are you into cardistry? Jeff's instructional Art of Card Manipulation videos were some of the foundational materials that shaped fathers of the cardistry movement like Dan and Dave Buck. Card manipulation is his speciality, and if there's anyone that we can learn a thing or two about card handling from, it's him. ● Are you into card collecting? Jeff's entire career has been built with a deck of cards in his hands, and he also collects some playing card memorabilia himself.
So if you are a magic enthusiast in any way, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn from one of the greatest living card men. We were delighted when Jeff agreed to do this interview with us, and couldn't wait to hear some of his thoughts about various topics relating to his own career with playing cards. We even got opportunity to visit him at his own place, and take some photos of his memorabilia and more, which we have permission to show our readers for the first time! But first let's share some of his credentials, so that we can appreciate what he has to say in the context of his own accomplishments and achievements.

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Jeff McBride the Performer
Jeff McBride has had a love for magic that goes back to his childhood in New York's Catskill mountains, where he grew up. As a young boy he stumbled across The Golden Book of Magic in a library, which quickly became his first magic Bible. He performed gigs locally, did street performances, and eventually moved to Las Vegas, where he successfully built a career in magic, and performs his award-winning stage magic and runs a magic school.
His performance style is highly praised for its unique blend of traditional magic with a form of Japanese theater called kabuki. Drawing on an unusual mix of skills that includes martial arts, philosophy, and more, Jeff's stage act combines an unorthodox blend of sleight of hand with masks and mime, to create a unique show like no other. Besides his "home" stage in Las Vegas, he's performed on stages and in theaters around the world, including touring with The Illusionists. A Jeff McBride show never fails to showcase his dynamic, innovative, and creative personality, from someone who has proven himself over time to be a master entertainer, showman, and sleight-of-hand artist.
Jeff McBride's list of awards is too lengthy to cover all of them. But to mention just a few, he's received recognition from exclusive and respected organizations, including "Magician of the Year" by The Magic Castle's The Academy of Magic Arts and "Magician of the Year" by the Society of American Magicians. In 2018 the International F?d?ration Internationale des Societes Magiques (FISM) gave him their "Theory & Philosophy Special Award", in tribute for his lifetime contribution to magic from a viewpoint that is analytical and academic. This illustrious award has previously been given only to Tommy Wonder, Juan Tamariz, Eugene Burger, and Roberto Giobbi. Most recently in January 2020 he was inducted into the prestigious Hall of Fame by the Society of American Magicians. He is part of a very small group of living magicians that are part of this exclusive club, which includes David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy. He's even the holder of three world records - don't worry, we'll be sure to ask him about that in our interview!
And of course he has appeared on television many times, already back in 1995 as part of the "World's Greatest Magic, and more recently on shows like Masters of Illusion, Criss Angel's Mindfreak, and Penn & Teller's Fool Us. But he's not just "another magician", as his selection as a judge for the 2008 reality celebrity-magic show Celebradabra confirms. Already more than ten years ago filmmakers produced a documentary about him, entitled Jeff McBride: A Magickal Life. This has been highly praised by magicians and viewers for how it shows his journey from a boy magician to a headline act in Las Vegas, and also his personal spiritual journey and development from a brash young man into a mature and caring magician who is keen to pass on the art of magic to the next generation. He really is one of the best.
Jeff McBride the Teacher
While the first part of his career was all about performing in his inimitable style, as the years have passed Jeff McBride has more and more mellowed into a highly respected teacher, with a keen interest in sharing his wisdom with others, and helping young magicians develop their skills in magic. Besides many written works, he's produced best-selling and highly influential instructional videos on the art of card manipulation, and on stage magic. His current passion is to serve as a sage that helps other magicians make their dreams as performers come true.
Perhaps his crowning achievement and lasting legacy is the McBride Magic & Mystery School, which he established in 1991. This is a world-renowned training ground for stage magic, and is generally regarded as the very best and most prestigious institution in the world for receiving magic instruction. There's simply no better place for aspiring magicians to go, in order to take seminars, classes, and workshops, to help raise their magic to a higher level, and to learn the true secrets of the craft.
Highly respected magician and lecturer Eugene Burger (pictured below with Jeff McBride) served as Dean of this school until his sad passing in 2017. It was from him that Jeff learned the importance of burning one end of your own candle in order to light someone else's candle. Many leading magicians have served on the faculty or as guest instructors, including big names like Lance Burton, Johnny Thompson, and Max Maven.
Jeff McBride is a wonderful entertainer himself, but his current passion is to be a mentor to others, and he will leave a lasting stamp in the lives of many magicians of the future. But now it's time for us to sit at his feet, and learn a thing or two from his life, and about his experiences with playing cards in particular.

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THE INTERVIEW
GENERAL BACKGROUND
For those who don't know anything about you, what can you tell us about yourself and your background?
I started my career with a pack of playing cards. Now I headline Las Vegas shows, and theaters and festivals all over the world. I also run a very successful magic school in Las Vegas, and I teach online.
I am one of the first magic teachers to create a video series, and my breakthrough videos on card manipulation taught the world how to perform flourishes and card manipulation, which happened to grow into a new cardistry movement. I was fortunate enough to train with great old-school masters and I put out The Art of Card Manipulation which caught on in Asia. The material contained within those DVDs - they were VHS videos at that time - did not need words to understand how to perform the magic, so they had international appeal. Many people like An Ha Lim and leading Asian manipulators found these, and my videos were their original training tools.
What would be some of the highlights in your career in magic?
Performing at Radio City Music Hall, the largest theater in the world with no screen support, no image magnification, and performing my card manipulation routine. The only other person that had that experience was Cardini. That was one of the highlights.
And of course, being inducted into the Society of American Magicians Hall of Fame. Also winning the FISM Special Award for Theory and Philosophy was a highlight. That's an award I share with Tommy Wonder, Juan Tamariz, and Eugene Burger.
How would you describe the style of the amazing act that you are known for?
I call it "sorcerer" style, which is very fiery and dynamic. There are many types of card routines, and mine is very explosive and dynamic. In fact during my touring seasons with the hit show The Illusionists, the closing number of the show was my card routine, just before the snow storm sequence. So my card routine can fill a giant theater. At that time of The Illusionists we were working a 7,000 seat theater. So my motto was "pack small, play big."
What were your major influences for this style of performance?
My influences came from many directions. I realized early on that performing standard magic was not a path to success. It was a path to working weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthday parties. In order to break out, I had to become a much more dynamic performer and I added other skillsets I had studied, like classic pantomime theater, which I'd studied at the American Mime Theater. I combined martial arts and my passion for masks and quick change, and dance. And it was this fusion of all of these different theatrical elements that made a huge difference. It was much more than magic, it was a total theatrical experience.
Where can people go to see you perform today?
I teach magic on a platform called MagicFlix. There's performances and tutorials. It's the world's leading streaming platform for magic. So you can immediately see me there. If you want to trial it, all you have to do is go to MagicFlix's website, enter your information, and put in the code MCBRIDE, and you can get 30 days for free. You can see not only myself, but the great masters of magic, and some of the great card magicians in history, as well as learn my card manipulation sequences.
Also if you want to see my live shows, I perform in Las Vegas at Wonderground, which is the longest running independent variety magic show in the history of Las Vegas. It is not attached to a casino, so we can do some pretty wild stuff! That's been running 11 years, and has hosted more variety entertainers on its stage than any other stage in Las Vegas.
What should we know about the McBride Magic & Mystery School, which has now been running for around 30 years?
It's now over 30 years. The McBride Magic and Mystery School came out of a great desire to study with masters. The challenge I see these days is that most people are learning magic from their peers, from people in their own age group. And not necessarily looking up the ladder at masters that have achieved great amounts of success.
So what I did 30 years ago, is I decided to host a retreat for masters to come and teach hungry students, mostly professionals, that were willing to empty their cup and fill up on wisdom and on the experience of great masters. And over the years we've had Eugene Burger, Johnny Thompson, Max Maven and many, many other masters come to the school to help our students understand the path to mastery. So not just learning from your pals online or at magic class, but really top-down training from experts in the field.
What are some of your interests outside of magic?
I spend a lot of time going to other conferences learning more skills on how to facilitate life-transforming experiences. So I spend a lot of time still studying how to teach more effectively, both in person and online.

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MAGIC
What quality in magic makes it so enjoyable for people to watch?
I think there is not one thing. People like engineers have a really different relationship with magic; if you watch them squint their eyes and wrinkle their forehead while they watch magic, they're only interested in the puzzle aspect. Other people are interested more in the mystery aspect. So there's different types of audiences. There's the audiences that like to sit there and try to figure the tricks out. And then there's the audiences that like to sit back and enjoy the mystery.
I was having this conversation with Judge Gary Brown, who's a wonderful magician, creator, inventor, and writer. He sent me a quote from Dariel Fitzkee, which talks about "Is magic more than fooling?" Fitzkee says - and this is written up in The Fitzkee Trilogy - "Don't put too much stress on the trick itself as a mystery. Your audiences might suddenly think of television, which is much more miraculous. Stress it in terms of human interests, of human relationships, of character response, of human situations. If the mystery were important, the much greater miracles of our everyday world would far outshadow it. Method is important only as a means of accomplishing a desired end, like the grindstone which sharpens the headman's ax. The ultimate objective is something entirely different."
Our Dean of the Mystery School, Larry Hass, entered this conversation and read it like this: "It isn't not knowing or fooling that is important, and it isn't even encountering mystery. It is what a human artist expresses about humanity and life itself that is the real core of the experience of magic." Penn and Teller do both: making it hard with the fooling method, but their show and their stories are also about issues in politics, in relationships, in critical thinking, in skepticism. They have many, many presentational frames that are about more than just mystery or fooling.
That's what I saw in Eugene Burger so many years ago. His magic was coming from a deep, philosophical perspective and experience that gave it a richer meaning than just Instagram magic and flashy, "How does he do that?" sort of stuff that is so pervasive on YouTube and social media. Perhaps performers will soon be able to give more depth to their magic instead of just what I call eye-candy. My goal is to transform eye-candy into soul food.
What first sparked your interest in magic?
I talk about it at the end of my show each and every day. My life was changed forever when a magician said, "Pick a card." And this magician was actually a young girl named Linda Van Etten who had a twin sister named Susan, and they knew card tricks. And they showed me a card trick, and from that moment on I knew what I wanted to do. It was a card reversal in a deck with a card turned face up in the deck. I was six years old at the time. And by seven years old I was deep into magic.
I think sometimes we forget - because magic and cards are so familiar to us - that the simple task of having somebody pick a card can change their lives. That's an important thing to remember.
What is the key to your longevity in the magic industry over several decades, and what keeps you going as a performer and teacher?
I think my longevity is due to being able to adapt and recreate myself to make my magic relevant at the different stages of a magician's life. At the Mystery School there's kind of a typology that we use: "The trickster, the sorcerer, the oracle, and the sage." Those are the four stages of the magician's life. From learning simple tricks, to being able to perform, to learning all of the meaning and interior worlds of magic, and then being able to pass that knowledge onto the magicians of the future.
I've worn the mask of the trickster in my younger days, and in mid-life, the sorcerer, burning up stages all over the world. And then taking time out to reflect and look inside for meaning and taking time for introspection. I'm now at the stage of my life of being able to pass on a lifetime of wisdom and experience to future students. So I think it's a process of reinvention that has helped me endure and keep my passion for magic.
I try to read as much as I can. I try to watch as much as I can. I try to get together live with magicians as much as I can. And teach and go study as much as I can. Zero TV. I have not had a working TV in my home since 1979. Most people spend way too much time on the internet and television, and way too much time on Facebook and social media.
What's the path to mastery: Facebook and social media? Or reading and practicing and videoing and refining your show? That's not for everyone, because that's not everyone's goal. Some people are very content to sit on magic forums and ask "What's the best trick? What's the best three tricks for close up?". That's okay, but that's not getting real world experience and going out and doing it.

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How important is one's own personality in performing magic, and how did this play a role in your own career?
I think that magicians discover their personality through performance. I know that I have become many different versions of Jeff McBride over the years. Because when we're young, magic is just about learning the trick, and doing it and getting the `wow'. Then as we get older, magic gets to be a way of interacting and getting a social edge, and being able to be seen and stand out from the crowd. And if people pursue it more, they develop a personality and a connection to performing magic that might take them around the world. Or just to make them the hit at the family reunion, so that people can have a peaceful time at the Thanksgiving table!
People have different reasons for performing magic at different times in their lives. Some people use it to compete. Other people use it to teach and instruct. Other people use it to wind down after a hard day's work. But I think magic is a way to develop aspects of your personality. And I think that is a very powerful role that magic plays in our lives.
Are there differences in how an amateur and a professional approach magic?
Absolutely. I started reading a blog and books on a website called The Jerx, which is a very opinionated, very humorously yet potently written blog about magic from an amateur's point of view. Different rules apply if you want to be a professional: there's costuming, there's lighting, there's sound, there is scripting, and all of these other theatrical components that are essential in creating a theatrical magical experience, if that is your goal.
However the writer at The Jerx - and I really am entertained and often enlightened by his writing - has a completely contrary view to this. Instead of me trying to rehash his personal experience writing and philosophy, if you are an amateur magician and want to read about other people's opinion on amateur magic and non-professional magic, just take a visit to The Jerx - you'll find some very interesting information there.
It was a wake up call to me, because not everybody that performs magic wants to be professional. Some people just want to do it for their friends and have fun, and that's a perfectly satisfying lifestyle of magic. And they don't need scripting and they don't need all of the other requirements of the theater, because they're not working in theater; they're just doing it for their friends at the office. And that's perfectly fine.
However, the rules do change when you get up onstage in front of 5,000-6,000 people in a theater! Then you need to consider some of those elements.
But as Eugene Burger reminds us, "There are many rooms in the house of magic." There are many rooms for all of us, including rooms for the people that are passionate amateurs, whom I call "enthusiasts". I don't like the word "amateur" myself, so I use the word "enthusiast", because there are many great magic enthusiasts that have never been full time and professional magicians. And that's perfectly valid. Magic is not about tricks, and magic is not gauged on the box office success. Magic is really a way to enhance the quality of your life, and there's many ways to do that. If a person is collecting cards, they don't have to collect every deck to feel complete, they can collect the ones they like, and that's fine, right? Everybody has their own path to walk.
How has the magic industry changed since you first became involved in it, and how has technology impacted it?
It's a double-edged sword. We talk about YouTube and Instagram and all these different ways that people consume magic, but most of this magic is eye-candy and very shallow. There are archives of great performers on YouTube, but it's still mediated and it's not the same as being there.
It makes me sad when I see a clip of Fred Kaps on YouTube and then some bozo going, "Fake, fake, fake, he has a thing in his hand, it's frame 725!" My response would be: "You're critiquing Fred Kaps? Go practice. Don't be giving critiques to Fred Kaps, who won FISM like three times, hello? And you're 14, and you've stopped a frame because you've watched it 15 times, and you're so clever, really?" That's what hurts magic, I think.
What also hurts is when you look up a great performer, say Cardini, and right next to it there are sixteen YouTube clips of 12 year old kids in their pajamas teaching a bad back palm, just because they want clicks and hits on their YouTube site. It's disgraceful. So that's what hurts magic.
However technology has also made possible sites like MagicFlix, which have a bit of a firewall to them, so that people have to be invited to it to get there. Those people that have serious passion can now study with all of the great masters. They can study with Karrell Fox, Jay Marshall, Tom Mullica, Johnny Thompson, Daryl, and so many others. And it's very convenient for learning. So that's the good side of it.
When people get interested in magic on the internet, hopefully they'll find a teacher. But what mostly happens today is they just stay online. That's not really learning magic, that's collecting secrets. That's collecting postage stamps. That's not transforming these into meaningful, magical experiences.
What we do at Mystery School is create a learning environment that's a safe place for people to come to, in order to really study the secrets of magic. Everyone here signs a secrecy agreement, so that the things that we teach won't be bastardized by exposure on the internet. We feel that Mystery School is one of the last great holdouts of secret information. When all of the secrets are just out there, there is no magic. There has to be secrecy, in order to create very effective magic.
And we keep working and innovating, and looking through the old books and digging out the gems, polishing them up, and fusing them with new materials and new technology to create hybrid magic effects that have never been seen before. That's a passion of ours: resurrecting some of these old magic gems and bringing them to new audiences.
So there's a struggle, these days with exposure. But the good news is that it's just too much for any one person to observe. A lot of the real secrets of magic are in the books. The internet is just a little tiny tip of the huge iceberg of magical literature that is hidden away. Many people call themselves, as Scott Alexander puts it, "visual learners." That means they don't read books. That means they won't ever have the depth of knowledge of someone that can learn visually and can read books. They cut off more than half of the resources that exist for them, and that's a shame.

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What is the most difficult trick you ever performed, and what made it so hard?
Double One-Handed Waterfall. I used to have showdowns with Ricky Jay on the streets of Madrid, Spain. Ricky and I would basically do cowboy showdowns, gun-slinging with cards, late at night. We were attending the FISM convention in Madrid, and we'd have challenges back and forth with card spinning. He definitely could throw much further, but I definitely could do a One-Handed Waterfall in each hand. That's probably the most difficult feat. I actually performed it, I believe, on The Art of Card Manipulation, in one of the little quick cuts.
Do have any good stories you can share about a magician "fail" that you experienced?
There's an old formula that says, "Tragedy plus time equals comedy." All magicians have challenges and barriers on stage, and so have I. In the moment, they're never fun, but you can retell these stories to friends. Everybody has war stories! Let's see if I have one that stands out...
I remember being on stage, and I had to pull some paper ribbons out of my mouth, and then I produced a dove from the paper ribbons. Then I would secretly switch out that bird for a rubber bird, and put it in a paper bag. I would blow up the paper bag, then pop the paper bag, and little feathers would drop out. However, on this day I was pulling the paper ribbons out, and I decided to use scissors to cut the paper ribbons, and I cut a hole inside my lip! I quickly shut my mouth, and my mouth filled with blood. This was my grand finale - I'm thinking "Oh, this is very bad," but the audience can't see anything yet.
So I get to the part where I produce the live dove, and I switch it for the rubber dove, and put it in the bag. But now I have to blow up the bag - I didn't see that coming! And I figure this is a really good time to get all that blood out of my mouth. So I blow up the bag, and it's filling with blood. And when I pop the bag, there's nothing but blood and feathers everywhere, and people screaming! Some teenagers thought it was just so rock and roll, and other mothers and children thought it was so horrible. It was this mixture of some people going out of their mind applauding, and other people going out of their mind screaming. So we never know - even when the worst can go wrong, people will still love it!
How would you like to be remembered in the magic community, and what accomplishments would you still like to make?
I feel like I already am remembered in the magic community. I've accomplished more than all my childhood dreams: headlining Vegas, Magic Castle Magician of the Year, Hall of Fame, FISM Award winner, Guinness World Records - I've done a lot.
Now my goal is to help other people's dreams. So when I see a student of mine like Mat Franco win America's Got Talent and get his own show in Vegas, and my student Aaron Crow win on Britain's Got Talent and come on America's Got Talent with a magic routine that I'd helped him design - that's what I want to be remembered for. When I have students getting their own shows and winning awards. I'm a magic teacher, and I love to give. That's what I love to do now. I still tour and perform internationally all the time, but my passion right now is teaching and helping other people achieve their dreams.
What is one piece of work you have released that you'd like to be remembered by, or which might be of interest to the playing card enthusiast?
Anybody that watches Jeff McBride The Art of Card Manipulation will see how I researched all of the old school material and the stuff that I'd learned in my generation, and put it all together in one place. Those are the videos that the Buck twins - Dave and Dan - saw. Many of the people that first started card manipulation and cardistry saw me on those World's Greatest Magic specials back in the '90s that were filmed at Caesar's Palace. This was one of the first modern versions of card manipulation on TV.
So I think my series on The Art of Card Manipulation imprinted a lot of young magicians, young card handlers, and then the cardistry movement. I was not singularly responsible for that, but The Art of Card Manipulation was definitely essential fuel for it, because it was the most comprehensive card manipulation series ever put out.
What advice would you give to a young person just starting to learn card magic or card manipulation?
Learn from your pals, but study in person with a great master. It will shave years off your learning curve.
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CONCLUSION
It takes a lot for the Society of American Magicians to vote you into their Hall of Fame, especially when you're still active performing and teaching. Jeff McBride is one of the few in the world who can lay claim to being part of that select group.
Jeff is first and foremost a performer with a love for entertaining people, and the unique combination of elements that helps make his stage act stand out from other performers will always be a memorable trademark style that people associate with his name. But perhaps his lasting legacy will be the new role he has taken on as a sage and mentor to others. His Magic & Mystery School has been instrumental in producing new magicians who will continue to entertain us in years to come.
With this interview we've had a wonderful opportunity to have a glimpse of his thinking and learn about some of his experiences. Thank you Mr McBride for all that you've given to magic! May this inspire all of us to turn that pack of playing cards in our hands as a tool to develop our own skills, and to share our love for the arts with those around us!
Where to learn more? Check out Jeff McBride's resources here: - McBride Magic: Official site, promo video - Performance videos: Fool Us (2017), Masters of Illusion (2009), Masters of Illusion (2017) - Card manipulation: "Shaman Cards" performance, "King of Cards" performance - Magic & Mystery School: Official site, shop, Facebook - Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube - Teaching resources: MagicFlix (code: MCBRIDE), Art of Card Manipulation DVDs, Essential Card Manipulation video

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Author's note: I first published this article at PlayingCardDecks here.

WHO IS JEFF MCBRIDE?
Chances are you are reading this article because you already have some interest in playing cards. So maybe you've already heard of the name Jeff McBride. If you have, you'll already be familiar with his credentials, so you'll be itching to get straight the good stuff and read what he's got to say, because you know it's going to be worth reading.
But if you haven't heard of Jeff McBride before, let me tell you why this interview is a must-read: ● Are you into card magic? Jeff has been doing card magic his whole life, and is one of the very best in the world at card manipulation and sleight of hand. He has also been running his famous Magic & Mystery School for over 30 years. ● Are you into cardistry? Jeff's instructional Art of Card Manipulation videos were some of the foundational materials that shaped fathers of the cardistry movement like Dan and Dave Buck. Card manipulation is his speciality, and if there's anyone that we can learn a thing or two about card handling from, it's him. ● Are you into card collecting? Jeff's entire career has been built with a deck of cards in his hands, and he also collects some playing card memorabilia himself.
So if you are a playing card enthusiast in any way, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn from one of the greatest living card men. We were delighted when Jeff agreed to do this interview with us, and couldn't wait to hear some of his thoughts about various topics relating to his own career with playing cards. We even got opportunity to visit him at his own place, and take some photos of his memorabilia and more, which we have permission to show our readers for the first time! But first let's share some of his credentials, so that we can appreciate what he has to say in the context of his own accomplishments and achievements.

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Jeff McBride the Performer
Jeff McBride has had a love for magic that goes back to his childhood in New York's Catskill mountains, where he grew up. As a young boy he stumbled across The Golden Book of Magic in a library, which quickly became his first magic Bible. He performed gigs locally, did street performances, and eventually moved to Las Vegas, where he successfully built a career in magic, and performs his award-winning stage magic and runs a magic school.
His performance style is highly praised for its unique blend of traditional magic with a form of Japanese theater called kabuki. Drawing on an unusual mix of skills that includes martial arts, philosophy, and more, Jeff's stage act combines an unorthodox blend of sleight of hand with masks and mime, to create a unique show like no other. Besides his "home" stage in Las Vegas, he's performed on stages and in theaters around the world, including touring with The Illusionists. A Jeff McBride show never fails to showcase his dynamic, innovative, and creative personality, from someone who has proven himself over time to be a master entertainer, showman, and sleight-of-hand artist.
Jeff McBride's list of awards is too lengthy to cover all of them. But to mention just a few, he's received recognition from exclusive and respected organizations, including "Magician of the Year" by The Magic Castle's The Academy of Magic Arts and "Magician of the Year" by the Society of American Magicians. In 2018 the International F?d?ration Internationale des Societes Magiques (FISM) gave him their "Theory & Philosophy Special Award", in tribute for his lifetime contribution to magic from a viewpoint that is analytical and academic. This illustrious award has previously been given only to Tommy Wonder, Juan Tamariz, Eugene Burger, and Roberto Giobbi. Most recently in January 2020 he was inducted into the prestigious Hall of Fame by the Society of American Magicians. He is part of a very small group of living magicians that are part of this exclusive club, which includes David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy. He's even the holder of three world records - don't worry, we'll be sure to ask him about that in our interview!
And of course he has appeared on television many times, already back in 1995 as part of the "World's Greatest Magic, and more recently on shows like Masters of Illusion, Criss Angel's Mindfreak, and Penn & Teller's Fool Us. But he's not just "another magician", as his selection as a judge for the 2008 reality celebrity-magic show Celebradabra confirms. Already more than ten years ago filmmakers produced a documentary about him, entitled Jeff McBride: A Magickal Life. This has been highly praised by magicians and viewers for how it shows his journey from a boy magician to a headline act in Las Vegas, and also his personal spiritual journey and development from a brash young man into a mature and caring magician who is keen to pass on the art of magic to the next generation. He really is one of the best.
Jeff McBride the Teacher
While the first part of his career was all about performing in his inimitable style, as the years have passed Jeff McBride has more and more mellowed into a highly respected teacher, with a keen interest in sharing his wisdom with others, and helping young magicians develop their skills in magic. Besides many written works, he's produced best-selling and highly influential instructional videos on the art of card manipulation, and on stage magic. His current passion is to serve as a sage that helps other magicians make their dreams as performers come true.
Perhaps his crowning achievement and lasting legacy is the McBride Magic & Mystery School, which he established in 1991. This is a world-renowned training ground for stage magic, and is generally regarded as the very best and most prestigious institution in the world for receiving magic instruction. There's simply no better place for aspiring magicians to go, in order to take seminars, classes, and workshops, to help raise their magic to a higher level, and to learn the true secrets of the craft.
Highly respected magician and lecturer Eugene Burger (pictured below with Jeff McBride) served as Dean of this school until his sad passing in 2017. It was from him that Jeff learned the importance of burning one end of your own candle in order to light someone else's candle. Many leading magicians have served on the faculty or as guest instructors, including big names like Lance Burton, Johnny Thompson, and Max Maven.
Jeff McBride is a wonderful entertainer himself, but his current passion is to be a mentor to others, and he will leave a lasting stamp in the lives of many magicians of the future. But now it's time for us to sit at his feet, and learn a thing or two from his life, and about his experiences with playing cards in particular.

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THE INTERVIEW
GENERAL BACKGROUND
For those who don't know anything about you, what can you tell us about yourself and your background?
I started my career with a pack of playing cards. Now I headline Las Vegas shows, and theaters and festivals all over the world. I also run a very successful magic school in Las Vegas, and I teach online.
I am one of the first magic teachers to create a video series, and my breakthrough videos on card manipulation taught the world how to perform flourishes and card manipulation, which happened to grow into a new cardistry movement. I was fortunate enough to train with great old-school masters and I put out The Art of Card Manipulation which caught on in Asia. The material contained within those DVDs - they were VHS videos at that time - did not need words to understand how to perform the magic, so they had international appeal. Many people like An Ha Lim and leading Asian manipulators found these, and my videos were their original training tools.
What would be some of the highlights in your career in magic?
Performing at Radio City Music Hall, the largest theater in the world with no screen support, no image magnification, and performing my card manipulation routine. The only other person that had that experience was Cardini. That was one of the highlights.
And of course, being inducted into the Society of American Magicians Hall of Fame. Also winning the FISM Special Award for Theory and Philosophy was a highlight. That's an award I share with Tommy Wonder, Juan Tamariz, and Eugene Burger.
How would you describe the style of the amazing act that you are known for?
I call it "sorcerer" style, which is very fiery and dynamic. There are many types of card routines, and mine is very explosive and dynamic. In fact during my touring seasons with the hit show The Illusionists, the closing number of the show was my card routine, just before the snow storm sequence. So my card routine can fill a giant theater. At that time of The Illusionists we were working a 7,000 seat theater. So my motto was "pack small, play big."
What were your major influences for this style of performance?
My influences came from many directions. I realized early on that performing standard magic was not a path to success. It was a path to working weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthday parties. In order to break out, I had to become a much more dynamic performer and I added other skillsets I had studied, like classic pantomime theater, which I'd studied at the American Mime Theater. I combined martial arts and my passion for masks and quick change, and dance. And it was this fusion of all of these different theatrical elements that made a huge difference. It was much more than magic, it was a total theatrical experience.
Where can people go to see you perform today?
I teach magic on a platform called MagicFlix. There's performances and tutorials. It's the world's leading streaming platform for magic. So you can immediately see me there. If you want to trial it, all you have to do is go to MagicFlix's website, enter your information, and put in the code MCBRIDE, and you can get 30 days for free. You can see not only myself, but the great masters of magic, and some of the great card magicians in history, as well as learn my card manipulation sequences.
Also if you want to see my live shows, I perform in Las Vegas at Wonderground, which is the longest running independent variety magic show in the history of Las Vegas. It is not attached to a casino, so we can do some pretty wild stuff! That's been running 11 years, and has hosted more variety entertainers on its stage than any other stage in Las Vegas.
What should we know about the McBride Magic & Mystery School, which has now been running for around 30 years?
It's now over 30 years. The McBride Magic and Mystery School came out of a great desire to study with masters. The challenge I see these days is that most people are learning magic from their peers, from people in their own age group. And not necessarily looking up the ladder at masters that have achieved great amounts of success.
So what I did 30 years ago, is I decided to host a retreat for masters to come and teach hungry students, mostly professionals, that were willing to empty their cup and fill up on wisdom and on the experience of great masters. And over the years we've had Eugene Burger, Johnny Thompson, Max Maven and many, many other masters come to the school to help our students understand the path to mastery. So not just learning from your pals online or at magic class, but really top-down training from experts in the field.
What are some of your interests outside of magic?
I spend a lot of time going to other conferences learning more skills on how to facilitate life-transforming experiences. So I spend a lot of time still studying how to teach more effectively, both in person and online.

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PLAYING CARDS & CARD MANIPULATION
You have set several Guinness World Records. What can you tell us about these?
I have three Guinness World Records, two of them for coin rolling, and one of them for card spinning. My Guinness World Record certificate states that I was able to "single handedly spin or scale a record of 106 playing cards within 60 seconds." That was set in 2004 for speed, for card throwing.
You are known for your skill in card manipulation. How would you distinguish magic from cardistry?
When they're fused together, they're indistinguishable, because of the flow state. Here are some flourishes, here are some card tricks - I think it can be seamlessly blended together. When I watch young cardists out there, I'm just amazed by the things that I see them doing these days. I'm totally delighted, and it's magical for me. Magicians that call cardistry "juggling" are just not getting what it's about. It's about entering a flow state, mastering these series of moves, and then pushing the envelope, until you have many of these different flourishes that you can string together seamlessly. That's the elegance of it.
What is one piece of work you have released that you'd like to be remembered by, or which might be of interest to the playing card enthusiast?
Anybody that watches Jeff McBride The Art of Card Manipulation will see how I researched all of the old school material and the stuff that I'd learned in my generation, and put it all together in one place. Those are the videos that the Buck twins - Dave and Dan - saw. Many of the people that first started card manipulation and cardistry saw me on those World's Greatest Magic specials back in the '90s that were filmed at Caesar's Palace. This was one of the first modern versions of card manipulation on TV.
So I think my series on The Art of Card Manipulation imprinted a lot of young magicians, young card handlers, and then the cardistry movement. I was not singularly responsible for that, but The Art of Card Manipulation was definitely essential fuel for it, because it was the most comprehensive card manipulation series ever put out.

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What advice would you give to a young person just starting to learn card magic or card manipulation?
Learn from your pals, but study in person with a great master. It will shave years off your learning curve.
Do you have any thoughts about the current boom in cardistry, and how this has become immensely popular in recent years?
The deck of cards is a great equalizer, isn't it? Here you have 52 objects, and now all you have to do is add your creativity and countless hours of practice and commitment to perfection. It's not like you can buy it. Acquiring the next magic illusion is quite different than acquiring the next impossible flourish with cards. You just can't do it, it has to come from the heart and soul. That's why I think cardistry became such a phenomenon. It doesn't have any language barriers, cultural barriers, or status barriers. All that separates one from being average or great is the commitment to perfection, artistry, and beauty.
What brand/type playing cards did you first use when you started magic and card manipulation?
I used every card I could get my hands on. There were bridge-size decks for card fanning that would have four different colors or four different patterns, so you could get the different color fans out of them. Really good fanning decks are sorely lacking today; I very rarely see any of these new decks being good fanning decks. But I would collect every thin card I could possibly find at that time. Very few people at that time were making flesh colored cards. Sometimes you had to strip cards down, and then paint them flesh colored, and use lots of powder to make them fan again.
Early on I used Crusaders, because in my teens that's what Jeff Sheridan was using, so I used Crusaders that you could get at Woolworth's. Bee cards are okay, but when they reach a certain age they just crack. A lot of the `old school' used and swore by the old Denver Plaids and the old Steamboats. So when I was in my tens and early teens (11-15 years old), there was a lot of Steamboats, and in my later teens I used Crusaders.
What brand/type playing cards do you mostly use today?
I switched over to my own brand, when I had my own cards printed by Phoenix (my cards are available on my site here). Phoenix really pays attention to their cutting and I'm very fond of Phoenix brand cards published by Christian Schenk from Card-Shark.
What do you think are the essential qualities of a good deck of playing cards?
The ability to fan them out of the pack, and their ability to faro shuffle. Those are the two prime ingredients. That they don't need fanning powder. That they're not too slippery, so you don't have to work with them too long to get the finish off, and that they faro well. I'm mostly a stage performer, and I do close up as well. I love some of the decks that you have, with the very whimsical face designs. But for me it's the way the cards handle more than the way they look.
Has the quality of playing cards has improved over the years?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely the quality has improved over the years. The finishes these days and the deck designs are just incredible.

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What are your thoughts on the explosion of custom playing cards that we are seeing today?
For me personally, I don't see enough nice fanning decks. I would collect them, but they're not out there.
I think the next step for card collectors is: how do you store and display them? The serious person will start to make floor to ceiling displays for walls of cards with a giant ladder, like a library so you can have these decks on display. I've seen some people have little wall panels that will hold 20 decks or so, but how about something like a turning rack, like the racks for displaying CDs or a turning poster rack? If somebody could come up with some sort of system.
And now we have some place to display them and take them out, then the great question is: do I take them out of the box, or are they just sealed? Or do I always have to buy two decks - one to play with, one to keep sealed? I see people doing both.
However I have yet to see a really beautiful card collection display that goes beyond `decks in a drawer', or `decks on a wall', or `decks on a tabletop'. If you consider these cards art (and they are - the back designs and the front designs are art), how do you display this art? How do you put it in a frame, and how do you appreciate it? Do you put it in a shoebox and say "Here's my card collection"? Do you have it in a little wall display of 20 decks and say "Here are my 20 decks"?
What impact has crowdfunding like Kickstarter had on the custom playing card industry and collecting?
People feel part of the creation, and feel like they can be patrons of the art. It's like: "Oh, I can be part of this, I can be part of this creative process, I can be a co-collaborator." So that's a good thing that I'll say about it. People support what they help create, and people feel like they're helping create art. I think we need more people that are patrons of the arts. And playing cards is a very good way to share your wealth, and support other people's creative enterprises.
Do you recommend performing magicians get their own branded custom deck of playing cards?
Absolutely. But it depends on what impression you want to make. Some people like to use regular cards because they look very normal. I use my own cards because they're very special, and they have my name on them. If somebody looks at my cards, they'll say, "Wow, Jeff has his own brand of playing cards, he must be very good." You can drive a car, but you can design and manufacture your own car. Who do you deem more magical? Probably the person that's designed their own car.
And when I throw my cards into the audience, it's not the end of my show. It's the beginning of an adventure, because on the back the card it says: "Every card has a special meaning. To discover this card's secret, you have to go to my website." So now they have to go on this mysterious quest to find out the meaning of their card. It's a tarot information site. And when they get to my website after they catch one of my special cards, now they have an opportunity to pick an email address of a friend, and throw that card around the world to them. So I'm continuing the tradition that got me into magic; I'm throwing a card out and saying, "Here, pick this card." And they pick up that card in the audience, and hopefully it will take them on a magical adventure for the rest of their lives.
How many decks or cards have I gone through throughout the years? Tens of thousands. I go through at least two decks a show, for tens of thousands of shows.
Do you personally collect playing cards?
I'm not manic about it, but I collect good fanning decks. If a particular design of a more standard deck hits my radar, I'll pick it up. I like some of your decks, they're very beautiful.
Sometimes it's the box - it makes a statement. Sometimes the card box is the tuxedo for the cards. So the card box in my opinion has a lot to do with matching the performer's style and creating an aesthetic for the magical performance.
And it's even how you take the cards out of the box. If you read Roberto Giobbi's books, he's got very special ideas on how to remove the cards from the box, and how the box is put away. The Dean of the Mystery School teaches what he feels is the proper way to present a pack of cards out of your pocket, remove it from the deck gracefully, and place the box away. There are more refined ways to present a deck of cards to people than just tossing a box of cards on the table.
A deck of cards is a wonderful, mysterious, enchanting object. Fortunes are won and lost, and lives have come and gone on the turn of a single playing card. I live in Las Vegas, which is a town that was built on playing cards, divination systems, dice, and spinning wheels of fortune. Cards have an incredibly deep history and connection to mystery, and they're inherently very mysterious. So it's no wonder how people are attracted to their many different manifestations these days, whether it's a special box, or a back design, or a limited edition.

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Do you use playing cards for anything besides card magic and card manipulation?
I give very extensive workshops on the history of Tarot. We have an extraordinary collection of Tarot decks here, and also Tarot books. We also collected the greatest Tarot teachers from around the world to come and teach every year at the Las Vegas Tarot Summit.
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
I did an entire performance based on two cards. I did an off-Broadway show called Mask of the Mystic, and it was about two playing cards: the Magician card and the Fool card of the Tarot. I had originally designed an entire show around the Major Arcana of the Tarot cards back in the '80s, with a performance piece for each and every card. But the show was so dense with symbolism and meaning and complex, that I decided to keep it to just the first two cards. I played the Magician card, and a juggler named Michael Marlon played the Fool card, the innocent. There was a great dynamic between a trickster and an all too serious mage wizard character, and it was about the relationship between being blissfully ignorant, and being overly-fixated on the symbolism and meaning of magic.
That really sums up the experience with playing cards. Playing cards can be used for gambling. They can be used as a pastime to pass the time and play solitaire. They can be used for card magic. They can be used for cardistry. And for me, a deck of playing cards is a magic carpet that has taken me all over the world and has introduced me to incredible experiences, taken me to incredible places, and introduced me to all of the people I love most dearly in life.
So whether you're a fool just beginning your journey through the playing card story, or if you're at the end of your story as a wizard counting down your days, remember that there is a deck of playing cards - and perhaps a single playing card - that can change a person's life. So next time a person says "Pick a card," remember that this moment can change a life forever.

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CONCLUSION
It takes a lot for the Society of American Magicians to vote you into their Hall of Fame, especially when you're still active performing and teaching. Jeff McBride is one of the few in the world who can lay claim to being part of that select group.
Jeff is first and foremost a performer with a love for entertaining people, and the unique combination of elements that helps make his stage act stand out from other performers will always be a memorable trademark style that people associate with his name. But perhaps his lasting legacy will be the new role he has taken on as a sage and mentor to others. His Magic & Mystery School has been instrumental in producing new magicians who will continue to entertain us in years to come.
With this interview we've had a wonderful opportunity to have a glimpse of his thinking and learn about some of his experiences. Thank you Mr McBride for all that you've given to magic! May this inspire all of us to turn that pack of playing cards in our hands as a tool to develop our own skills, and to share our love for the arts with those around us!
Where to learn more? Check out Jeff McBride's resources here: - McBride Magic: Official site, promo video - Performance videos: Fool Us (2017), Masters of Illusion (2009), Masters of Illusion (2017) - Card manipulation: "Shaman Cards" performance, "King of Cards" performance - Magic & Mystery School: Official site, shop, Facebook - Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube - Teaching resources: MagicFlix (code: MCBRIDE), Art of Card Manipulation DVDs, Essential Card Manipulation video

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Author's note: I first published this article at PlayingCardDecks here.

WHO IS JEFF MCBRIDE?
Chances are you are reading this article because you already have some interest in playing cards. So maybe you've already heard of the name Jeff McBride. If you have, you'll already be familiar with his credentials, so you'll be itching to get straight the good stuff and read what he's got to say, because you know it's going to be worth reading.
But if you haven't heard of Jeff McBride before, let me tell you why this interview is a must-read: ● Are you into card magic? Jeff has been doing card magic his whole life, and is one of the very best in the world at card manipulation and sleight of hand. He has also been running his famous Magic & Mystery School for over 30 years. ● Are you into cardistry? Jeff's instructional Art of Card Manipulation videos were some of the foundational materials that shaped fathers of the cardistry movement like Dan and Dave Buck. Card manipulation is his speciality, and if there's anyone that we can learn a thing or two about card handling from, it's him. ● Are you into card collecting? Jeff's entire career has been built with a deck of cards in his hands, and he also collects some playing card memorabilia himself.
So if you are a playing card enthusiast in any way, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn from one of the greatest living card men. We were delighted when Jeff agreed to do this interview with us, and couldn't wait to hear some of his thoughts about various topics relating to his own career with playing cards. We even got opportunity to visit him at his own place, and take some photos of his memorabilia and more, which we have permission to show our readers for the first time! But first let's share some of his credentials, so that we can appreciate what he has to say in the context of his own accomplishments and achievements.

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Jeff McBride the Performer
Jeff McBride has had a love for magic that goes back to his childhood in New York's Catskill mountains, where he grew up. As a young boy he stumbled across The Golden Book of Magic in a library, which quickly became his first magic Bible. He performed gigs locally, did street performances, and eventually moved to Las Vegas, where he successfully built a career in magic, and performs his award-winning stage magic and runs a magic school.
His performance style is highly praised for its unique blend of traditional magic with a form of Japanese theater called kabuki. Drawing on an unusual mix of skills that includes martial arts, philosophy, and more, Jeff's stage act combines an unorthodox blend of sleight of hand with masks and mime, to create a unique show like no other. Besides his "home" stage in Las Vegas, he's performed on stages and in theaters around the world, including touring with The Illusionists. A Jeff McBride show never fails to showcase his dynamic, innovative, and creative personality, from someone who has proven himself over time to be a master entertainer, showman, and sleight-of-hand artist.
Jeff McBride's list of awards is too lengthy to cover all of them. But to mention just a few, he's received recognition from exclusive and respected organizations, including "Magician of the Year" by The Magic Castle's The Academy of Magic Arts and "Magician of the Year" by the Society of American Magicians. In 2018 the International F?d?ration Internationale des Societes Magiques (FISM) gave him their "Theory & Philosophy Special Award", in tribute for his lifetime contribution to magic from a viewpoint that is analytical and academic. This illustrious award has previously been given only to Tommy Wonder, Juan Tamariz, Eugene Burger, and Roberto Giobbi. Most recently in January 2020 he was inducted into the prestigious Hall of Fame by the Society of American Magicians. He is part of a very small group of living magicians that are part of this exclusive club, which includes David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy. He's even the holder of three world records - don't worry, we'll be sure to ask him about that in our interview!
And of course he has appeared on television many times, already back in 1995 as part of the "World's Greatest Magic, and more recently on shows like Masters of Illusion, Criss Angel's Mindfreak, and Penn & Teller's Fool Us. But he's not just "another magician", as his selection as a judge for the 2008 reality celebrity-magic show Celebradabra confirms. Already more than ten years ago filmmakers produced a documentary about him, entitled Jeff McBride: A Magickal Life. This has been highly praised by magicians and viewers for how it shows his journey from a boy magician to a headline act in Las Vegas, and also his personal spiritual journey and development from a brash young man into a mature and caring magician who is keen to pass on the art of magic to the next generation. He really is one of the best.
Jeff McBride the Teacher
While the first part of his career was all about performing in his inimitable style, as the years have passed Jeff McBride has more and more mellowed into a highly respected teacher, with a keen interest in sharing his wisdom with others, and helping young magicians develop their skills in magic. Besides many written works, he's produced best-selling and highly influential instructional videos on the art of card manipulation, and on stage magic. His current passion is to serve as a sage that helps other magicians make their dreams as performers come true.
Perhaps his crowning achievement and lasting legacy is the McBride Magic & Mystery School, which he established in 1991. This is a world-renowned training ground for stage magic, and is generally regarded as the very best and most prestigious institution in the world for receiving magic instruction. There's simply no better place for aspiring magicians to go, in order to take seminars, classes, and workshops, to help raise their magic to a higher level, and to learn the true secrets of the craft.
Highly respected magician and lecturer Eugene Burger (pictured below with Jeff McBride) served as Dean of this school until his sad passing in 2017. It was from him that Jeff learned the importance of burning one end of your own candle in order to light someone else's candle. Many leading magicians have served on the faculty or as guest instructors, including big names like Lance Burton, Johnny Thompson, and Max Maven.
Jeff McBride is a wonderful entertainer himself, but his current passion is to be a mentor to others, and he will leave a lasting stamp in the lives of many magicians of the future. But now it's time for us to sit at his feet, and learn a thing or two from his life, and about his experiences with playing cards in particular.

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THE INTERVIEW
GENERAL BACKGROUND
For those who don't know anything about you, what can you tell us about yourself and your background?
I started my career with a pack of playing cards. Now I headline Las Vegas shows, and theaters and festivals all over the world. I also run a very successful magic school in Las Vegas, and I teach online.
I am one of the first magic teachers to create a video series, and my breakthrough videos on card manipulation taught the world how to perform flourishes and card manipulation, which happened to grow into a new cardistry movement. I was fortunate enough to train with great old-school masters and I put out The Art of Card Manipulation which caught on in Asia. The material contained within those DVDs - they were VHS videos at that time - did not need words to understand how to perform the magic, so they had international appeal. Many people like An Ha Lim and leading Asian manipulators found these, and my videos were their original training tools.
What would be some of the highlights in your career in magic?
Performing at Radio City Music Hall, the largest theater in the world with no screen support, no image magnification, and performing my card manipulation routine. The only other person that had that experience was Cardini. That was one of the highlights.
And of course, being inducted into the Society of American Magicians Hall of Fame. Also winning the FISM Special Award for Theory and Philosophy was a highlight. That's an award I share with Tommy Wonder, Juan Tamariz, and Eugene Burger.
How would you describe the style of the amazing act that you are known for?
I call it "sorcerer" style, which is very fiery and dynamic. There are many types of card routines, and mine is very explosive and dynamic. In fact during my touring seasons with the hit show The Illusionists, the closing number of the show was my card routine, just before the snow storm sequence. So my card routine can fill a giant theater. At that time of The Illusionists we were working a 7,000 seat theater. So my motto was "pack small, play big."
What were your major influences for this style of performance?
My influences came from many directions. I realized early on that performing standard magic was not a path to success. It was a path to working weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthday parties. In order to break out, I had to become a much more dynamic performer and I added other skillsets I had studied, like classic pantomime theater, which I'd studied at the American Mime Theater. I combined martial arts and my passion for masks and quick change, and dance. And it was this fusion of all of these different theatrical elements that made a huge difference. It was much more than magic, it was a total theatrical experience.
Where can people go to see you perform today?
I teach magic on a platform called MagicFlix. There's performances and tutorials. It's the world's leading streaming platform for magic. So you can immediately see me there. If you want to trial it, all you have to do is go to MagicFlix's website, enter your information, and put in the code MCBRIDE, and you can get 30 days for free. You can see not only myself, but the great masters of magic, and some of the great card magicians in history, as well as learn my card manipulation sequences.
Also if you want to see my live shows, I perform in Las Vegas at Wonderground, which is the longest running independent variety magic show in the history of Las Vegas. It is not attached to a casino, so we can do some pretty wild stuff! That's been running 11 years, and has hosted more variety entertainers on its stage than any other stage in Las Vegas.
What should we know about the McBride Magic & Mystery School, which has now been running for around 30 years?
It's now over 30 years. The McBride Magic and Mystery School came out of a great desire to study with masters. The challenge I see these days is that most people are learning magic from their peers, from people in their own age group. And not necessarily looking up the ladder at masters that have achieved great amounts of success.
So what I did 30 years ago, is I decided to host a retreat for masters to come and teach hungry students, mostly professionals, that were willing to empty their cup and fill up on wisdom and on the experience of great masters. And over the years we've had Eugene Burger, Johnny Thompson, Max Maven and many, many other masters come to the school to help our students understand the path to mastery. So not just learning from your pals online or at magic class, but really top-down training from experts in the field.
What are some of your interests outside of magic?
I spend a lot of time going to other conferences learning more skills on how to facilitate life-transforming experiences. So I spend a lot of time still studying how to teach more effectively, both in person and online.

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PLAYING CARDS & CARD MANIPULATION
You have set several Guinness World Records. What can you tell us about these?
I have three Guinness World Records, two of them for coin rolling, and one of them for card spinning. My Guinness World Record certificate states that I was able to "single handedly spin or scale a record of 106 playing cards within 60 seconds." That was set in 2004 for speed, for card throwing.
You are known for your skill in card manipulation. How would you distinguish magic from cardistry?
When they're fused together, they're indistinguishable, because of the flow state. Here are some flourishes, here are some card tricks - I think it can be seamlessly blended together. When I watch young cardists out there, I'm just amazed by the things that I see them doing these days. I'm totally delighted, and it's magical for me. Magicians that call cardistry "juggling" are just not getting what it's about. It's about entering a flow state, mastering these series of moves, and then pushing the envelope, until you have many of these different flourishes that you can string together seamlessly. That's the elegance of it.
What is one piece of work you have released that you'd like to be remembered by, or which might be of interest to the playing card enthusiast?
Anybody that watches Jeff McBride The Art of Card Manipulation will see how I researched all of the old school material and the stuff that I'd learned in my generation, and put it all together in one place. Those are the videos that the Buck twins - Dave and Dan - saw. Many of the people that first started card manipulation and cardistry saw me on those World's Greatest Magic specials back in the '90s that were filmed at Caesar's Palace. This was one of the first modern versions of card manipulation on TV.
So I think my series on The Art of Card Manipulation imprinted a lot of young magicians, young card handlers, and then the cardistry movement. I was not singularly responsible for that, but The Art of Card Manipulation was definitely essential fuel for it, because it was the most comprehensive card manipulation series ever put out.

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What advice would you give to a young person just starting to learn card magic or card manipulation?
Learn from your pals, but study in person with a great master. It will shave years off your learning curve.
Do you have any thoughts about the current boom in cardistry, and how this has become immensely popular in recent years?
The deck of cards is a great equalizer, isn't it? Here you have 52 objects, and now all you have to do is add your creativity and countless hours of practice and commitment to perfection. It's not like you can buy it. Acquiring the next magic illusion is quite different than acquiring the next impossible flourish with cards. You just can't do it, it has to come from the heart and soul. That's why I think cardistry became such a phenomenon. It doesn't have any language barriers, cultural barriers, or status barriers. All that separates one from being average or great is the commitment to perfection, artistry, and beauty.
What brand/type playing cards did you first use when you started magic and card manipulation?
I used every card I could get my hands on. There were bridge-size decks for card fanning that would have four different colors or four different patterns, so you could get the different color fans out of them. Really good fanning decks are sorely lacking today; I very rarely see any of these new decks being good fanning decks. But I would collect every thin card I could possibly find at that time. Very few people at that time were making flesh colored cards. Sometimes you had to strip cards down, and then paint them flesh colored, and use lots of powder to make them fan again.
Early on I used Crusaders, because in my teens that's what Jeff Sheridan was using, so I used Crusaders that you could get at Woolworth's. Bee cards are okay, but when they reach a certain age they just crack. A lot of the `old school' used and swore by the old Denver Plaids and the old Steamboats. So when I was in my tens and early teens (11-15 years old), there was a lot of Steamboats, and in my later teens I used Crusaders.
What brand/type playing cards do you mostly use today?
I switched over to my own brand, when I had my own cards printed by Phoenix (my cards are available on my site here). Phoenix really pays attention to their cutting and I'm very fond of Phoenix brand cards published by Christian Schenk from Card-Shark.
What do you think are the essential qualities of a good deck of playing cards?
The ability to fan them out of the pack, and their ability to faro shuffle. Those are the two prime ingredients. That they don't need fanning powder. That they're not too slippery, so you don't have to work with them too long to get the finish off, and that they faro well. I'm mostly a stage performer, and I do close up as well. I love some of the decks that you have, with the very whimsical face designs. But for me it's the way the cards handle more than the way they look.
Has the quality of playing cards has improved over the years?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely the quality has improved over the years. The finishes these days and the deck designs are just incredible.

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What are your thoughts on the explosion of custom playing cards that we are seeing today?
For me personally, I don't see enough nice fanning decks. I would collect them, but they're not out there.
I think the next step for card collectors is: how do you store and display them? The serious person will start to make floor to ceiling displays for walls of cards with a giant ladder, like a library so you can have these decks on display. I've seen some people have little wall panels that will hold 20 decks or so, but how about something like a turning rack, like the racks for displaying CDs or a turning poster rack? If somebody could come up with some sort of system.
And now we have some place to display them and take them out, then the great question is: do I take them out of the box, or are they just sealed? Or do I always have to buy two decks - one to play with, one to keep sealed? I see people doing both.
However I have yet to see a really beautiful card collection display that goes beyond `decks in a drawer', or `decks on a wall', or `decks on a tabletop'. If you consider these cards art (and they are - the back designs and the front designs are art), how do you display this art? How do you put it in a frame, and how do you appreciate it? Do you put it in a shoebox and say "Here's my card collection"? Do you have it in a little wall display of 20 decks and say "Here are my 20 decks"?
What impact has crowdfunding like Kickstarter had on the custom playing card industry and collecting?
People feel part of the creation, and feel like they can be patrons of the art. It's like: "Oh, I can be part of this, I can be part of this creative process, I can be a co-collaborator." So that's a good thing that I'll say about it. People support what they help create, and people feel like they're helping create art. I think we need more people that are patrons of the arts. And playing cards is a very good way to share your wealth, and support other people's creative enterprises.
Do you recommend performing magicians get their own branded custom deck of playing cards?
Absolutely. But it depends on what impression you want to make. Some people like to use regular cards because they look very normal. I use my own cards because they're very special, and they have my name on them. If somebody looks at my cards, they'll say, "Wow, Jeff has his own brand of playing cards, he must be very good." You can drive a car, but you can design and manufacture your own car. Who do you deem more magical? Probably the person that's designed their own car.
And when I throw my cards into the audience, it's not the end of my show. It's the beginning of an adventure, because on the back the card it says: "Every card has a special meaning. To discover this card's secret, you have to go to my website." So now they have to go on this mysterious quest to find out the meaning of their card. It's a tarot information site. And when they get to my website after they catch one of my special cards, now they have an opportunity to pick an email address of a friend, and throw that card around the world to them. So I'm continuing the tradition that got me into magic; I'm throwing a card out and saying, "Here, pick this card." And they pick up that card in the audience, and hopefully it will take them on a magical adventure for the rest of their lives.
How many decks or cards have I gone through throughout the years? Tens of thousands. I go through at least two decks a show, for tens of thousands of shows.
Do you personally collect playing cards?
I'm not manic about it, but I collect good fanning decks. If a particular design of a more standard deck hits my radar, I'll pick it up. I like some of your decks, they're very beautiful.
Sometimes it's the box - it makes a statement. Sometimes the card box is the tuxedo for the cards. So the card box in my opinion has a lot to do with matching the performer's style and creating an aesthetic for the magical performance.
And it's even how you take the cards out of the box. If you read Roberto Giobbi's books, he's got very special ideas on how to remove the cards from the box, and how the box is put away. The Dean of the Mystery School teaches what he feels is the proper way to present a pack of cards out of your pocket, remove it from the deck gracefully, and place the box away. There are more refined ways to present a deck of cards to people than just tossing a box of cards on the table.
A deck of cards is a wonderful, mysterious, enchanting object. Fortunes are won and lost, and lives have come and gone on the turn of a single playing card. I live in Las Vegas, which is a town that was built on playing cards, divination systems, dice, and spinning wheels of fortune. Cards have an incredibly deep history and connection to mystery, and they're inherently very mysterious. So it's no wonder how people are attracted to their many different manifestations these days, whether it's a special box, or a back design, or a limited edition.

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Do you use playing cards for anything besides card magic and card manipulation?
I give very extensive workshops on the history of Tarot. We have an extraordinary collection of Tarot decks here, and also Tarot books. We also collected the greatest Tarot teachers from around the world to come and teach every year at the Las Vegas Tarot Summit.
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
I did an entire performance based on two cards. I did an off-Broadway show called Mask of the Mystic, and it was about two playing cards: the Magician card and the Fool card of the Tarot. I had originally designed an entire show around the Major Arcana of the Tarot cards back in the '80s, with a performance piece for each and every card. But the show was so dense with symbolism and meaning and complex, that I decided to keep it to just the first two cards. I played the Magician card, and a juggler named Michael Marlon played the Fool card, the innocent. There was a great dynamic between a trickster and an all too serious mage wizard character, and it was about the relationship between being blissfully ignorant, and being overly-fixated on the symbolism and meaning of magic.
That really sums up the experience with playing cards. Playing cards can be used for gambling. They can be used as a pastime to pass the time and play solitaire. They can be used for card magic. They can be used for cardistry. And for me, a deck of playing cards is a magic carpet that has taken me all over the world and has introduced me to incredible experiences, taken me to incredible places, and introduced me to all of the people I love most dearly in life.
So whether you're a fool just beginning your journey through the playing card story, or if you're at the end of your story as a wizard counting down your days, remember that there is a deck of playing cards - and perhaps a single playing card - that can change a person's life. So next time a person says "Pick a card," remember that this moment can change a life forever.

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CONCLUSION
It takes a lot for the Society of American Magicians to vote you into their Hall of Fame, especially when you're still active performing and teaching. Jeff McBride is one of the few in the world who can lay claim to being part of that select group.
Jeff is first and foremost a performer with a love for entertaining people, and the unique combination of elements that helps make his stage act stand out from other performers will always be a memorable trademark style that people associate with his name. But perhaps his lasting legacy will be the new role he has taken on as a sage and mentor to others. His Magic & Mystery School has been instrumental in producing new magicians who will continue to entertain us in years to come.
With this interview we've had a wonderful opportunity to have a glimpse of his thinking and learn about some of his experiences. Thank you Mr McBride for all that you've given to magic! May this inspire all of us to turn that pack of playing cards in our hands as a tool to develop our own skills, and to share our love for the arts with those around us!
Where to learn more? Check out Jeff McBride's resources here: - McBride Magic: Official site, promo video - Performance videos: Fool Us (2017), Masters of Illusion (2009), Masters of Illusion (2017) - Card manipulation: "Shaman Cards" performance, "King of Cards" performance - Magic & Mystery School: Official site, shop, Facebook - Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube - Teaching resources: MagicFlix (code: MCBRIDE), Art of Card Manipulation DVDs, Essential Card Manipulation video

https://preview.redd.it/sl52au4wl8751.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=be11a4655fe8e9f421594afdb3eed777a1e44fe7
Author's note: I first published this article at PlayingCardDecks here.

Qualquer explicação para Donald Trump concorrer à presidência que fuja da realidade imediatamente acessível é conspiratória ou beira à conspiração, pois a própria realidade é absurda. Eu acho que o jornal The Economist acertou em cheio a razão. Vou postar a matéria na íntegra aqui.
Resumo: Donald Trump está jogando verde para colher maduro, ou seja, chantageando o Partido Republicano com a ameaça de tirar-lhe a força na eleição (ele ameaçou concorrer com um terceiro partido, se for preciso, o que fortaleceria os democratas no sistema bipartidário deles), em troca de favores políticos na área imobiliária (desapropriações, etc).

Politics and deal-making
Donald Trump's brazen genius
Jul 23rd 2015, 17:06 BY W.W. | CHATTANOOGA
WHEN Donald Trump began roiling the calm but crowded waters of the Republican presidential race with slanderous comments about Mexican immigrants, it was hard not to wonder what the rentier reality-TV star was up to. When someone runs for president, the safest inference is that he or she wants to be president. Even if it's a longshot, the attention is nice, and something good might come from having raised one's public profile. So if you have the money, why not run? Mr Trump's lust for attention, combined with his fortune, seemed to be all the explanation needed. "Do I look like I have a plan?" says the Joker in "The Dark Knight". "I'm a dog chasing cars. I don't know what I'd do if I caught it". Mr Trump's havoc-spreading run seemed to share this improvisational spirit.
But now that he's leading the Republican field in national polls, it seems that Mr Trump may have already caught the car, and always knew what he'd do with it: sell it for a profit.
When asked if he would pursue a third-party candidacy should he fail to secure the GOP nomination, Mr Trump was coy: "so many people want me to, if I don’t win,” he said. "I’ll have to see how I’m being treated by the Republicans,” Mr Trump explained, with just a hint of blackmail. “If they’re not fair, that would be a factor.”
These are the words of a negotiator looking to cut a deal, and Mr Trump has put himself in a fine position to get one. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll not only has Mr Trump leading the Republican pack, but also shows that a third-party run by Mr Trump could very well ruin the party’s chances of winning back the White House. The poll has Hillary Clinton, who retains a commanding lead in the Democratic race, with a six-point lead in a hypothetical contest against, Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor and the likeliest GOP-establishment candidate. That gap would probably narrow into margin-of-error territory should the Republican electorate, whose loyalties are now fragmented, eventually coalesce behind Mr Bush. Which is to say, an election would probably be very close, but not if Mr Trump makes a third-party bid.
In a hypothetical three-way race, Mr Trump would steal enough votes from Mr Bush to put Mrs Clinton ahead by 16 points, according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll. The Donald’s conservative vote-siphoning effect would be less dramatic, no doubt, should Republicans settle on a candidate more appealing to the party's most conservative members. (There is method in Ted Cruz's refusal to condemn Mr Trump's madness.) Nevertheless, it appears that Mr Trump could very well hand the election to Mrs Clinton, even if he manages to draw only one or two percent of the voters who would have voted for the Republican candidate in a two-way race. And it’s a prospect he has yet to rule out.
It's tempting for establishment Republicans to write off Mr Trump as a flash in the pan, this election season's Herman Cain. There are signs that Mr Trump is peaking. In three key swing states, voters with a dim view of Mr Trump outnumber those who like him by a 2-to-1 margin. Still, Mr Trump is famous, which ought to be enough to keep him from sliding into oblivion. And he is willing and able to fund his own campaign. That makes the threat of a third-party candidacy something Republicans cannot afford to ignore.
And it’s a threat Mr Trump has made explicit. So what, Republicans may now be wondering, does the man mean when he demands “fair” treatment? A cabinet appointment is out of the question. Is he angling for an ambassadorship to Monaco (or somewhere else suitably glamorous and otherwise diplomatically inessential)? It’s unclear. But what we do know is that Mr Trump is in the real-estate business, an industry rife with red tape, in which a little political leverage can be worth a fortune.
In his bestseller, "Trump: the art of the deal", Mr Trump crows about a property-tax abatement he negotiated with the New York City government in the 1970s that saved him "tens of millions of dollars". Then in 1994 Mr Trump asked the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to condemn land already occupied by five businesses, and then sell him the parcels so that he could build a "world class" amusement park and seaport. Noting the difficulty of acquiring the property and the required development permits, Mr Trump said, "That's a political process. And I've probably been in more political fights than anyone my age". In 1996 Mr Trump tried and failed to push an elderly widow out of her house using Atlantic City's eminent domain powers, so that he could build a casino on her land. More recently, Mr Trump tried and failed to block the development of a casino in the Catskills, which he feared would cut into the profits of his New Jersey gambling operations. He had considered appealing to the Department of the Interior to stop the Native American-run Catskills casino, but gave up in the teeth of then-governor Eliot Spitzer's support for the project. "At some point there’s going to be competition," Mr Trump eventually conceded. But he hadn't in the previous ten years, during which time he successfully delayed the development through lobbying and litigation. Given his history of remunerative favour-seeking from government, it's doubtful he would have ever conceded if he thought he could get the federal government to put a stop to it.
You'd have to be astoundingly brazen to run for president, churning up toxic xenophobic sentiments, just to get the political leverage to win a huge tax break, or to build a casino or to stop somebody else's casino. But Mr Trump is neither a meek nor public-spirited man. And, astonishingly enough, he may have actually succeeded in putting the Republican Party in a corner.
If cutting a sweet deal is what Mr Trump was aiming to do all along, we might have to admit that he is more than the attention-seeking buffoon he appears to be. It may be that he is a attention-seeking, buffoonish genius. In any case, Mr Trump has floated the possibility that he may try to wreck the Republican Party's presidential chances unless it coughs up a little "fair" treatment, whatever that means. If the GOP doesn't think it can neutralise Mr Trump's threat of a third-party run by utterly demolishing his reputation, then they're going to have to consider a little fairness. Not a bad month's work for Mr Trump.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/07/politics-and-deal-making

Politics and deal-making
Donald Trump's brazen genius
Jul 23rd 2015, 17:06 BY W.W. | CHATTANOOGA
WHEN Donald Trump began roiling the calm but crowded waters of the Republican presidential race with slanderous comments about Mexican immigrants, it was hard not to wonder what the rentier reality-TV star was up to. When someone runs for president, the safest inference is that he or she wants to be president. Even if it's a longshot, the attention is nice, and something good might come from having raised one's public profile. So if you have the money, why not run? Mr Trump's lust for attention, combined with his fortune, seemed to be all the explanation needed. "Do I look like I have a plan?" says the Joker in "The Dark Knight". "I'm a dog chasing cars. I don't know what I'd do if I caught it". Mr Trump's havoc-spreading run seemed to share this improvisational spirit.
But now that he's leading the Republican field in national polls, it seems that Mr Trump may have already caught the car, and always knew what he'd do with it: sell it for a profit.
When asked if he would pursue a third-party candidacy should he fail to secure the GOP nomination, Mr Trump was coy: "so many people want me to, if I don’t win,” he said. "I’ll have to see how I’m being treated by the Republicans,” Mr Trump explained, with just a hint of blackmail. “If they’re not fair, that would be a factor.”
These are the words of a negotiator looking to cut a deal, and Mr Trump has put himself in a fine position to get one. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll not only has Mr Trump leading the Republican pack, but also shows that a third-party run by Mr Trump could very well ruin the party’s chances of winning back the White House. The poll has Hillary Clinton, who retains a commanding lead in the Democratic race, with a six-point lead in a hypothetical contest against, Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor and the likeliest GOP-establishment candidate. That gap would probably narrow into margin-of-error territory should the Republican electorate, whose loyalties are now fragmented, eventually coalesce behind Mr Bush. Which is to say, an election would probably be very close, but not if Mr Trump makes a third-party bid.
In a hypothetical three-way race, Mr Trump would steal enough votes from Mr Bush to put Mrs Clinton ahead by 16 points, according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll. The Donald’s conservative vote-siphoning effect would be less dramatic, no doubt, should Republicans settle on a candidate more appealing to the party's most conservative members. (There is method in Ted Cruz's refusal to condemn Mr Trump's madness.) Nevertheless, it appears that Mr Trump could very well hand the election to Mrs Clinton, even if he manages to draw only one or two percent of the voters who would have voted for the Republican candidate in a two-way race. And it’s a prospect he has yet to rule out.
It's tempting for establishment Republicans to write off Mr Trump as a flash in the pan, this election season's Herman Cain. There are signs that Mr Trump is peaking. In three key swing states, voters with a dim view of Mr Trump outnumber those who like him by a 2-to-1 margin. Still, Mr Trump is famous, which ought to be enough to keep him from sliding into oblivion. And he is willing and able to fund his own campaign. That makes the threat of a third-party candidacy something Republicans cannot afford to ignore.
And it’s a threat Mr Trump has made explicit. So what, Republicans may now be wondering, does the man mean when he demands “fair” treatment? A cabinet appointment is out of the question. Is he angling for an ambassadorship to Monaco (or somewhere else suitably glamorous and otherwise diplomatically inessential)? It’s unclear. But what we do know is that Mr Trump is in the real-estate business, an industry rife with red tape, in which a little political leverage can be worth a fortune.
In his bestseller, "Trump: the art of the deal", Mr Trump crows about a property-tax abatement he negotiated with the New York City government in the 1970s that saved him "tens of millions of dollars". Then in 1994 Mr Trump asked the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to condemn land already occupied by five businesses, and then sell him the parcels so that he could build a "world class" amusement park and seaport. Noting the difficulty of acquiring the property and the required development permits, Mr Trump said, "That's a political process. And I've probably been in more political fights than anyone my age". In 1996 Mr Trump tried and failed to push an elderly widow out of her house using Atlantic City's eminent domain powers, so that he could build a casino on her land. More recently, Mr Trump tried and failed to block the development of a casino in the Catskills, which he feared would cut into the profits of his New Jersey gambling operations. He had considered appealing to the Department of the Interior to stop the Native American-run Catskills casino, but gave up in the teeth of then-governor Eliot Spitzer's support for the project. "At some point there’s going to be competition," Mr Trump eventually conceded. But he hadn't in the previous ten years, during which time he successfully delayed the development through lobbying and litigation. Given his history of remunerative favour-seeking from government, it's doubtful he would have ever conceded if he thought he could get the federal government to put a stop to it.
You'd have to be astoundingly brazen to run for president, churning up toxic xenophobic sentiments, just to get the political leverage to win a huge tax break, or to build a casino or to stop somebody else's casino. But Mr Trump is neither a meek nor public-spirited man. And, astonishingly enough, he may have actually succeeded in putting the Republican Party in a corner.
If cutting a sweet deal is what Mr Trump was aiming to do all along, we might have to admit that he is more than the attention-seeking buffoon he appears to be. It may be that he is a attention-seeking, buffoonish genius. In any case, Mr Trump has floated the possibility that he may try to wreck the Republican Party's presidential chances unless it coughs up a little "fair" treatment, whatever that means. If the GOP doesn't think it can neutralise Mr Trump's threat of a third-party run by utterly demolishing his reputation, then they're going to have to consider a little fairness. Not a bad month's work for Mr Trump.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/07/politics-and-deal-making

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Interview with magician Jeff McBride

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