The first time someone told me I should learn the linking rings, I almost laughed.
I was about a year into my magic journey, deep in the rabbit hole of card magic, watching tutorials on my laptop in hotel rooms across Austria and ordering decks of cards the way some people order books — compulsively and with a growing storage problem. A more experienced magician I had met at a magic gathering in Vienna mentioned, casually, that he thought every working performer should have a linking rings routine.
I remember my internal reaction. Linking rings? Those big metal hoops that every birthday party magician in the history of the world has done? I was studying sophisticated card work, sleight of hand that took real skill and knowledge, and this person was suggesting I learn something that looked like it came out of a children’s magic kit.
I did not say any of this out loud, of course. I nodded politely and changed the subject. But I was thinking it. And in thinking it, I was falling into one of the most common and most expensive traps in magic: the trap of being a magic snob.
The Snobbery Problem
Magic snobbery is the belief that certain effects are beneath you. That classic, well-known effects are somehow less impressive, less worthy of your time, less deserving of a place in your show than newer, cleverer, more obscure material. It is an attitude that is rampant in the magic community, and it is almost always wrong.
I encountered this attitude everywhere once I started recognizing it. In online forums, experienced magicians would dismissively refer to classic effects as “beginner stuff” or “hack material.” At magic gatherings, performers would compete to show each other the most obscure, the most technically demanding, the most cutting-edge effects they could find. Showing someone a classic effect was like showing up to a wine tasting with a bottle of grocery store Zweigelt. It might be perfectly good, but nobody was going to be impressed.
Darwin Ortiz addresses this directly in Strong Magic when he writes about effect selection. One of his core principles is that the fact that a trick fooled you is not enough reason to perform it, and its corollary: the fact that a trick seems “too simple” to you is not enough reason to dismiss it. What fools magicians often bores laypeople, and what seems too basic to magicians often delights audiences.
This insight took me longer to absorb than it should have, probably because my own snobbery kept getting in the way. I came to magic as an outsider — a strategy consultant with no performing background — and I overcompensated by trying to learn the most difficult, most impressive material I could find. I wanted to earn my place in this world by mastering things that were hard. Classic effects did not feel hard enough to be worth mastering.
I was wrong.
What Makes a Classic a Classic
Scott Alexander lays out in his lecture notes exactly what makes classic effects classic, and the criteria are worth examining because they are also the criteria for what makes any effect work in a professional show.
First, classics are simple and easy to follow. The audience can track the plot without effort. Something that was separate is now linked. Something that was empty now has something inside it. Something that was in one place is now somewhere else. There is no complicated setup, no multi-step procedure, no need for the audience to remember what happened three phases ago. The effect is immediately clear.
Second, classics are strong without words. They work even in pantomime, even for audiences who do not speak your language, even in noisy environments where nobody can hear what you are saying. The magic is visual, visceral, and self-evident. You do not need to explain what just happened because the audience can see what just happened.
Third, classics are extremely deceptive. They have been refined over decades, sometimes centuries, by thousands of performers. The methods have been tested, improved, simplified, and tested again. The weak versions died out. The strong versions survived. What remains is material that fools people under virtually any conditions, because it has been subjected to the most rigorous testing process in all of magic: repeated performance for real audiences over generations.
Fourth — and this is the one that took me the longest to appreciate — classics are a blank canvas. They have no inherent personality. They do not come with a built-in character or a fixed presentation. They are structures that you can fill with your own voice, your own story, your own perspective. A linking rings routine performed by a comedy magician looks nothing like a linking rings routine performed by a serious dramatic performer, which looks nothing like a linking rings routine performed by a consultant using it as a metaphor for connection in a keynote about team building.
That adaptability is not a weakness. It is the defining strength of classic material. It is why these effects have survived while thousands of clever, original, personality-specific effects have been forgotten. The classics endure because they work for anyone who takes them seriously.
The 90% Principle
There is a claim, attributed to Fielding West, that 90% of Lance Burton’s Monte Carlo show came from classic texts. Ninety percent. One of the most successful and acclaimed magic shows in the history of Las Vegas, and the vast majority of it was material pulled from books that had been available to every magician on the planet for decades.
Think about what that means. It means that the difference between a world-class show and a mediocre one is not the material. It is the performer. It is the presentation, the character, the staging, the timing, the emotional arc, the production value. It is everything that surrounds the effect, not the effect itself.
This is liberating if you let it be. It means you do not need to discover or invent original effects to build a great show. You need to take proven effects and make them yours. You need to find the presentation that only you can give, the framing that only your character can provide, the emotional context that only your specific perspective can create.
When I finally accepted this — and it took me an embarrassingly long time — it changed how I approached my entire repertoire. I stopped chasing novelty for its own sake. I stopped assuming that newer meant better. I started looking at classic effects not as relics of a bygone era but as proven frameworks waiting for a modern interpretation.
Why Magicians Get This Wrong
The snobbery problem has a specific psychological root, and understanding it helped me overcome it in myself.
Magicians watch magic differently than audiences do. When a magician sees a classic effect, they see something familiar. They know the method, or they think they know the method. The element of surprise is gone for them. And since they experience no surprise, they assume the audience will not either.
This is a catastrophic error of perspective. The audience has not seen these effects performed well. Most of the audience has never seen them performed at all. The linking rings are not old hat to a corporate audience in Innsbruck. The cups and balls are not tired material for a group of tech founders in Vienna. These effects are new to them, and when performed well, they are astonishing.
Ortiz captures this beautifully with his observation that any generalization about lay audiences based on your experiences with magician audiences is likely to be wrong. Magicians have seen everything. Audiences have seen almost nothing. What feels stale to you is fresh to them. What feels obvious to you is mysterious to them. The skill gap you have developed through years of study has created a perceptual gap that makes you the worst possible judge of what your audience will find impressive.
I learned this lesson in the most direct way possible: by performing a classic effect I had dismissed and watching the audience lose their minds.
The Corporate Event That Changed My Thinking
It was a product launch event in Salzburg. I had been asked to do a twenty-minute set as part of an evening program, and I had my usual lineup of mentalism pieces and card effects — the material I thought was sophisticated and impressive.
At the last minute, I decided to add a classic visual effect as an opener. Not because I thought it was the strongest piece in my arsenal, but because the venue was large, the audience would be spread out, and I needed something that would read from the back of the room. My mentalism pieces required the audience to think. This classic required them only to watch.
The reaction was unlike anything I had gotten from my “sophisticated” material. The room erupted. People were pointing, grabbing each other’s arms, shouting. The simple, clean, visual impossibility of a classic effect — an effect I had considered too basic for my show — produced a stronger response in sixty seconds than my carefully constructed mentalism pieces produced in five minutes.
I stood on that stage and felt something shift in my understanding of what I was doing. The audience did not care that this effect was centuries old. They did not care that every magic shop in the world sold the props. They did not care that thousands of performers had done it before me. They cared that they had just seen something impossible, something beautiful, something that connected with them on an immediate, visceral level that my clever mentalism pieces had to work much harder to achieve.
The Director’s Perspective on Classics
From the director’s perspective — the perspective of someone evaluating material for its effectiveness in a complete show — classic effects have qualities that are almost impossible to replicate with original material.
They are tested. You know they work because they have been working for decades or centuries. When you choose a classic, you are not gambling on untested material. You are building on a foundation that thousands of performers have already validated.
They are reliable. The methods are proven and robust. They are less likely to fail under pressure, in unusual venues, or with difficult audiences. When everything else goes wrong, a well-rehearsed classic will still deliver.
They anchor your show. A strong classic effect gives the audience a touchstone — the moment they will remember, the moment they will describe to friends. And because it is simple and clear, they can actually describe it. Try asking an audience member to describe a complex multi-phase card routine. Then try asking them to describe seeing solid metal rings link and unlink in your hands. One of those descriptions will be vivid and enthusiastic. The other will trail off into confusion.
Overcoming Your Own Snobbery
If you are a magician who has been dismissing classic effects, I want to suggest an exercise. Pick one classic that you have never seriously worked on — something you have always considered beneath your skill level or unworthy of your time. Learn it. Not from a YouTube tutorial, but from a quality source, a book or lecture by someone who has performed it thousands of times. Learn the handling, the timing, the presentation structure. Then rehearse it until it is performance-ready.
Now perform it for a real audience. Not for magicians. For normal people who have come to be entertained.
Watch what happens.
I am willing to bet that the reaction will surprise you. Not because the effect is secretly more clever than you thought, but because the effect was designed, over generations, to produce exactly this reaction. The simplicity you dismissed is the reason it works. The clarity you found boring is the reason it reads. The familiarity you thought was a weakness is actually invisible to the audience, because the audience does not share your frame of reference.
I went back to that experienced magician in Vienna who had originally suggested I learn the linking rings. I told him he had been right. He smiled and said something I have thought about many times since: “The best effects are always the ones that feel too simple to the performer and too impossible to the audience.”
That gap — between what feels simple to you and what feels impossible to them — is where the magic lives. Classic effects live permanently in that gap. They have been living there for centuries. The only thing keeping you from using them is your own snobbery.
Let it go. Your audience will thank you. And your show will be stronger for it.