Is Lennart's DVD a good one to add to the collection? Always up for new material and asking here is far better than reading any sort of a review.

Lennart has 5 or 6 DVDs. The top shot is explained (though not particularly thoroughly) on Green Magic, Classic Green 1. I think his magic is fantastic, though its not for everyone. Some of his effects are simple-to-learn stunners (one of the DVDs is on self-working tricks - Green Light). Many of his signature bits are knuckle-busters, though.

Definitely a wonderful set to add to a collection and highly recommended. But, keep in mind the difficulty level and also that he loves math/spelling/algorithm type tricks. I find a number of these can be boring if you are of that mind. I know a lot of magicians (including myself) aren't big fans of spelling effects or long tricks that operate on math principles.

Lennart is one of the great cardmen alive.

I think Ben might be refering to Kostya's Orlando Opener. I think that's the one he uses Topshot in. It is in one of his sets of lecture notes.

I found Topshot very tough to learn from Lennart's DVDs. The best place to learn is from Ian Kendall's "B*stard Hard Moves made Easy"

http://www.virtualmagicshow.com/shop/

Cheers,
Mark

I saw Eric Jones at the S.C.A.M Convention this past weekend, and he did something with it I thought was pretty cool.

He made a small one hand fan, used the fan to turn over a double, then top shot under the waving fan as a pretty wicked color change.

-Nathan

Thanks organicmagician appreciate the reply...any suggestions or personal favorites of his DVD's?

Unfortunatly we aren't all as obviously perfect as you are... .

WTF????????

Hey - I would personally recommend #1 in the DVD collection, which contains Lennart's dynamite FISM Act. This also includes a bunch of moves.

Then, if you aren't keen on the whole series, I might pick up #4, which has more of his interesting work on False Shuffles. Lennart is a false shuffle collector and has some interesting/unique ones (a number of which aren't too difficult).

My other favorite is #6, which has some great work on the lateral palm, Lennart's signature Laser Deal and snap deal. As for the Laser Deal, the people I know who have played with it tend to get it or really struggle with it, so I think hand size or something may play a role. I have big hands and got the basic Laser Deal sequence pretty quickly.

Mickey - What did you mean, WTF?

I am far from perfect. I do, however, try and keep people from making the
same mistakes I made. If that offends you, I apologize.

SEY

Haha. We appreciate the prickly Youell charm and at least you can back up with your great chops (unlike most of the %@%@$!@#'s who mouth off here). The point you make is worth considering (though I do tend to ignore posts that come across as unnecessarily confrontational). I bet you could make the same point to David Roth who burnt through hours and hours developing the ability to use six different palms simultaneously in order to hold a half dozen coins naturally. Why did he do that? Who the hell knows? Does it have any application? Nope - in fact, I've heard him say more than once that he only does it show he can show magicians and has no real use for it.

Am I David Roth - unfortunately not. But, I still want to learn a hard move just to learn it sometimes. Could that time be better spent on something else - probably. No, definitely. But, I loved that move from when I first saw it performed and knew I'd love to learn it even if I only used to produce cards at hyper speed.

At least I'm trying to find interesting applications and increase my knowledge now. I'm not sure that merits a knock. And, there is now a thread on this subject where once there was not. Future move monkeys can search here and find out what type of top shot stuff is out there before wasting their time shooting cards from hand to hand on their couch.

There are many moves that are hard to learn that have great utilitarian advantages:

The Pass; The Deliberate Steal, Various Palms, The Second Deal....

Hey-- I'm just saying.....

SEY

I understand what you're getting at. I've learned quite a few things just so that I would have a better understanding of them. Sometimes it's fun just to be able to talk to other magicians about a move, even if you're not using it all the time, or to decide to learn something as a challenge for yourself. At the same time, if you're going to do that, find moves that have plenty of uses and start with those.

Then again there are pleanty of other things we trough our time at anyways, like watching pointless tv shows or just spending way to much time reading crap on wikipedia, lol, so if we enjoy learning a "pointless" sleight... oh well!! Why dose magic always have to be all work no play?

ErickGibran,

Right on.