There’s a piece of conventional wisdom in magic that gets repeated so often it’s practically an axiom: it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Presentation over technique. The performer over the trick. The sizzle over the steak.
Ken Weber puts it as directly as anyone: “Performance trumps trick every time.”
And he’s right. Mostly. I’ve seen enough evidence — in my own performing life and in watching others — to know that a simple effect performed with genuine personality, impeccable timing, and emotional connection will produce a vastly stronger audience experience than a technically complex effect performed with robotic competence and zero charisma.
But I’ve also learned that this principle, taken too far, becomes an excuse. An excuse to neglect technique. An excuse to stop practicing. An excuse to believe that personality alone will carry you, and that the technical foundation beneath the personality doesn’t matter.
Both halves of this truth nearly derailed me at different points. Let me explain.
Phase One: The Technique Obsession
When I first started in magic, I fell headfirst into the technique rabbit hole. This is natural for someone with my temperament — analytical, systematic, drawn to measurable progress. Card sleights became my obsession. The precision of the work, the gradual improvement tracked through success rates, the satisfaction of a move that started clumsy and became smooth — all of this fed something deep in my need for structure and visible advancement.
And for a while, it worked beautifully. My technique improved dramatically. The hotel room practice sessions produced real, measurable results. I could see myself getting better, week by week, and that progress was deeply motivating.
But I was building only half of what I needed. I was building the engine without building the car. The engine was powerful, refined, reliable — and nobody could ride in it, because there was no exterior, no seats, no steering wheel. All the technical capability in the world doesn’t matter if it’s not wrapped in a performance that gives the audience something to connect with.
I remember a specific moment at a private event in Innsbruck. I performed a piece that was, technically, the most demanding thing in my repertoire at the time. The handling was clean. The execution was smooth. And the audience response was… polite. Respectful. Mildly impressed. They could tell something skillful had happened, but they didn’t feel anything. They appreciated the competence the way you appreciate a well-made piece of furniture — nice work, clearly quality, but not something that moves you.
Later that same evening, another performer — someone with far less technical skill than me, to be perfectly honest — did something simple. Almost trivially simple from a technical standpoint. But the way he presented it — the story he told, the connection he made with the volunteer, the pause before the reveal that made the whole room hold its breath — produced a reaction that was orders of magnitude stronger than anything I’d gotten all night.
I walked away from that evening with a bruised ego and a crucial insight: technique is necessary but insufficient. It’s the foundation, not the building. And I’d been so focused on building the foundation that I’d forgotten to construct anything on top of it.
Phase Two: The Pendulum Swings
After that Innsbruck evening, and after reading Weber’s emphatic “performance trumps trick” principle, I overcorrected.
I started prioritizing presentation over everything. I focused on my patter, my stage presence, my audience interaction. I worked on being engaging, being funny, being personable. I started thinking of myself as an entertainer who happened to use magic rather than a magician who happened to entertain.
And my shows improved. Noticeably. The audience engagement went up. The reactions became warmer, more personal, more connected. People weren’t just watching tricks — they were having an experience with me. The shift from technique-first to personality-first produced immediate and gratifying results.
But something else happened, more gradually: my technique slipped.
Not dramatically. Not to the point of visible errors. But I was practicing less. The hotel room sessions shortened. The measurement systems I’d built — the success rate tracking, the systematic drill work — fell into disuse. I told myself that the practice revolution had served its purpose and now it was time to focus on the “real” work of performance.
Within a few months, the subtle erosion became not-so-subtle. My handling wasn’t quite as clean. My confidence in certain sequences wasn’t quite as rock-solid. The Superman facade held, but I could feel the wobble underneath. I was performing at the edge of my technical ability rather than well within it, and the edge is a nervous place to be.
The turning point was a corporate event where I attempted a piece that I used to perform with absolute confidence, and halfway through, I felt it — that moment of uncertainty where you’re not sure the technique is going to hold. I got through it. The audience didn’t notice. But I noticed. And the internal tension of that moment bled into the rest of the performance in ways I’m sure the audience felt, even if they couldn’t name what was different.
That night, I pulled out my practice notebook — the one I hadn’t opened in weeks — and I wrote a single sentence: “Performance trumps trick, but trick still has to work.”
The Both/And
The truth, as it usually does, lives in the middle.
Performance trumps trick — yes. A technically simple effect performed with genuine warmth, clever storytelling, and exquisite timing will create a better audience experience than a technically complex effect performed with wooden delivery and no personality. This is true, and every performer needs to internalize it.
But technique is the non-negotiable minimum — also yes. You cannot build a compelling performance on a shaky technical foundation. If the method fails, no amount of personality will save the moment. If the performer is visibly struggling with the mechanics, no amount of charisma will prevent the audience from feeling the struggle. If the handling draws attention to itself because it’s not quite smooth enough, the spell breaks regardless of how charming you are.
Darwin Ortiz makes a point in Strong Magic that crystallized this for me. He argues that showmanship isn’t a personality trait — it’s a body of technique, as learnable and practicable as any sleight of hand. Presentation isn’t the opposite of technique. Presentation is technique. It’s just a different kind of technique — theatrical and psychological rather than manual. And it requires the same rigor, the same practice, the same systematic development.
This reframe was transformative. Because it means the question isn’t “technique or presentation?” It’s “which techniques?” The manual techniques that create the effects. The theatrical techniques that create the experience. Both are technique. Both require mastery. Both have to be practiced with intention and improved over time.
The Balance in Practice
Once I understood that presentation is itself a form of technique, I was able to restructure my practice to include both without sacrificing either.
My hotel room sessions now have two distinct phases. The first phase is technical maintenance and development — the sleight work, the handling drills, the specific manipulations that need to stay sharp. This is non-negotiable. I will never again let this slip because “performance matters more.” It does matter more, but it matters more on top of a solid technical base, not instead of one.
The second phase is performance rehearsal — running through routines as if the audience were present. Speaking the patter aloud. Working the timing. Practicing the beats and the pauses. Rehearsing the transitions. This is the work that Weber emphasizes, and it’s the work I neglected for too long.
The ratio shifts depending on where I am in my development. When I’m learning new material, the technical phase dominates. When I’m preparing for a specific show, the rehearsal phase dominates. But neither phase ever drops to zero. The foundation and the building need continuous maintenance.
What “How You Do It” Really Means
Let me unpack Weber’s principle more carefully, because I think it’s often misunderstood.
“It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it” doesn’t mean the trick is irrelevant. It means the trick is the starting point, not the endpoint. You still need a strong effect — something that creates a clear, compelling moment of impossibility for the audience. Weak material performed brilliantly is still weak material. A boring effect doesn’t become interesting just because you’re charming while performing it.
What the principle actually means is that two performers can perform the same effect and produce wildly different audience experiences. The difference isn’t in the effect. It’s in everything surrounding the effect: the build-up, the pacing, the personality, the connection with the audience, the way the moment of impossibility is framed and delivered.
This is true in every performance domain. Two pianists can play the same Chopin nocturne and produce completely different emotional experiences for the listener. The notes are the same. The technique is the same. But the interpretation — the phrasing, the dynamics, the emotional intention behind each passage — transforms the piece. The what is identical. The how is everything.
But here’s the part that the simplified version misses: both pianists need excellent technique. If one of them can’t play the notes cleanly, no amount of emotional interpretation will compensate. The “how” builds on top of the “what.” It doesn’t replace it.
Fitzkee’s Warning
Dariel Fitzkee, writing decades before Weber, made a point that I’ve found increasingly important: audiences respond to effortless skill. Not skill itself — effortless skill. The sense that what you’re doing is easy for you, even though they know it shouldn’t be. The grace of a well-practiced action. The naturalness of a movement that has been rehearsed until it no longer looks rehearsed.
This effortlessness is itself a performance quality. It communicates confidence and competence to the audience on a level that words cannot. And it’s only possible when the technique underneath is so deeply mastered that it no longer requires conscious attention.
You can’t fake effortlessness. If you’re thinking about your technique during performance, some of that cognitive load bleeds through. The audience senses it as tension, as hesitation, as a subtle lack of ease. They might not know what they’re sensing, but they feel the difference between a performer who is fully present with them and a performer who is partially occupied by their own mechanics.
This is why the technical foundation matters even if the audience never sees it directly. Because the degree to which you’ve mastered the technique is the degree to which you’re free to focus on the performance. The deeper the mastery, the more cognitive room you have for personality, for connection, for the “how” that Weber says trumps the “what.”
The Integration
Derren Brown describes the goal of magic performance as creating moments where the audience’s emotional response overwhelms their intellectual one. Where they feel something has shifted in their world, rather than merely being puzzled by a clever trick.
Creating those moments requires both halves. You need technique that is so solid it’s invisible — that never draws attention to itself, that never introduces even a moment of visible effort. And you need presentation that is so compelling it becomes the audience’s entire experience — that makes them forget they’re watching a performance and feel like they’re participating in something real.
Neither half works without the other. Invisible technique with no personality is a puzzle. Compelling personality with shaky technique is a house built on sand.
The integration of both — technical mastery so deep it vanishes, combined with performance skill so developed it fills the room — is what “mastering your craft” actually means. It’s not either/or. It’s both, practiced with equal rigor, developed with equal intention, refined with equal discipline.
Weber is right: performance trumps trick. But the performance includes the technique. The technique is part of the performance. And both deserve the full weight of your practice time, your attention, and your commitment to getting better.
It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. But “how you do it” includes doing it flawlessly.