First in our room was Brad Henderson standing in for Glen Farrington. Brad performed Play it Straight Triumph, a Copper Silver Transpo, Simon Aronson/Michael Close’s Diary Prediction Trick, a Matching card trick where the pairs of Kings and Queens matched up. Finally Brad closed with a quick chop cup routine.

Derek Delgaudio started off with some mentalism with card, having a card peeked in an incredibly fair manner, and reading the spectators mind, attempting it a second time it looked like a mistake had been made, but was corrected in a magical fashion. Derek then performed what looked like a version of Roy Walton’s Smiling Mule. Finally Derek moved into the gambling portion, with a demonstration of shuffle tracking he was able to dead cut a selection. A second and bottom deal demonstration followed, and Derek finished by dealing a round of bridge hands, giving himself all the spades, which he magically reordered, and then showed the rest of the hands were separated into suit order. Great card work!

Bob Kohler performed a couple of pieces which were one of my highlights of the convention. His Coins and Cylinder routine is pure magic, but the best was to come with his rising card routine, three cards were made to rise from a glass, which was then covered with another glass and a bell jar, yet they still rised from the pack under the command of the spectator, rising all the way out of the deck, and yes the deck was given to the spectator as a souvenir… awesome!

Jason England was up next, with a strong trick to start where he dealt piles of cards to arrive at the values of two selections. He showed he was able to dead cut to named aces, and finally finished by shuffling the cards face up into face down, and then showing he was able to deal out all the face up cards, apart from five which turned out to be a Royal Flush.

Jon Armstrong has one of my favourite styles of magic, he started off with two spectators, one who peeked a card and the other who was able to direct Jon to find it in a fan of cards. He then performed his standard opener, with the rubber banded deck, and finally produced a spectators phone number from the deck magically producing face up cards from the rest of the face down deck.

To finish off this strong gala, one of our own UK performers Nicholas Einhorn. Nick started off by producing four coins from a spread of cards, and went into his magical looking matrix/translocation routine and ended by vanishing the coins. He found the four aces, lost them again and performed what I think was a version of the Christ Aces each ace turning up in unexpected ways. Finally he finished with a ring on string routine, combined with ring to keychain and ring to nest of purses, and as a kicker a quick card trick which caused the printed deck to turn blank.