About

Sleightless explains card magic that works by method rather than by hand — arithmetic, arrangement and memory — and gives you the drill that turns knowing it into being able to do it.

Why it exists

Magic shops sell tricks. Almost nobody sells the part that makes a trick performable: the sum done fast enough that you are still looking at the person, the deck order recalled without a pause, the calculation that stopped being a calculation. That part is trainable and almost nothing trains it.

So the site has two halves. The trick pages explain a method properly and let you run it on screen. The trainers — being built — drill the underlying skill until it is automatic.

How a trick page gets written

Three rules, because a page that explains a method badly is worse than no page:

The maths is checked, not asserted. Every claim about how a trick behaves is verified against every possible case before it is published. The 21 card trick page says the card lands eleventh because all twenty-one starting positions were followed through all three deals. The Si Stebbins stack is generated from its own two rules rather than typed out, so the deck on the page cannot disagree with the deck on your table.
You can run it, not just read it. Everything else written about these tricks describes a procedure. If you can deal it through and watch the method happen, you understand it in a way a paragraph cannot deliver.
Nothing gets explained that somebody is still selling. Tricks covered here are out of copyright, out of secret, or both — the 21 card trick is folklore, Si Stebbins was published in 1898. Exposing a working magician's living to win a search result is not a trade worth making.

Who writes it

One person, working on evenings, who wanted these trainers to exist and could not find them. Not a magic shop, not a content farm, and not a team — which is why there are two trick pages rather than fifty, and why each one is right.

Corrections are genuinely welcome. If something here is wrong — a method, a date, a piece of arithmetic — say so and it gets fixed and credited. [email protected].

What it costs

The trick pages are open to anyone and need no account. There is a mailing list, which is one email when something new goes up and nothing else, and you can leave it in one click. Nothing on this page is a promise about future pricing, because promises about future pricing are usually broken.