Coin tricks have been the staple of magicians for years. Here are two very simple ones that anyone even you can do at home… Even you! However make sure you practice in front of a mirror and then in front of friends before you try it out on strangers!

For your first trick, you will need a coin, a handkerchief, and a friend in the audience. Here’s the presentation: you hold a coin out in your hand, palm up, so that everyone can see the coin. After placing the handkerchief over the coin and your hand, you invite several audience members to come up and feel that the coin is still in your hand. Ask them to feel under the handkerchief if they feel that is necessary, and then announce that the coin will vanish. Wave your hands over the handkerchief, say some magic mumbo jumbo, and the coin is vanished. The audience is amazed and questions how it is done.

Well, it’s actually done very simply, and with a little bit of cheating. After you drape the handkerchief over your hand, you ask people to come up and feel for the coin. Your friend in the audience is the last person to feel for the coin. When your friend ‘feels’ the coin, he or she takes it. It would help to have someone do this that is familiar with palm concealment techniques, or the whole trick could be blown. In this case, the sleight of hand is done by the other person, not you, so all you have to do is sell the trick to the audience, and it will baffle them to no end.

You next trick will be a bit more difficult, but again, with a little practice, you can do it. You are going to make a coin disappear, but in a different way. The first thing the audience sees is the coin you are working with – make it a big coin if possible so they can see it, and you can hide it better in your hand. You appear to put the coin in the palm of the other hand, and moments later, it’s gone, mysteriously reappearing in the other hand.

The real trick to this is a palm concealment. When you move the coin from your right hand to your left hand (or the other way around, whichever way you like to do the trick), close your left hand around the coin as if you were taking it with that hand. At the same time, you pull the coin back into the palm of your right hand, and trap it in the wrinkles of your palm. This is called palming the coin. You can now reveal to the audience that the coin in your left hand has vanished.

These two magic tricks with coins are very good examples of simple tricks that kids and adults alike love. They are classics that with a little bit of practice and hard work, you can master without any previous experience at magic. Try them and you’ll see that impressing people with magic tricks isn’t as hard as you think.