This will seem like more like an endorsement than Magic News.  And it is an endorsement but not paid or even asked for by Jay Sankey.

Mr. Sankey has released, by our last count, a billion or more effects on the market and has very effective email and Twitter campaigns.  It could be that he also is in Instasnap, Facegroup or the other sites the kids use to share important selfies and ponderings about their selfies but we don’t have accounts on those services because we are very old – at least over 24 – and so are, as the kids say, “not down with them.”

We could have written this endorsement and fanboy tract at any time but we were struck by the beauty of a force taught for free by Mr. Sankey last night.  You can see it for yourself here.  We had never considered the very simple move taught but will now use it frequently.

The force taught is like most of the things offered by Mr. Sankey: easy to perform, effective and highly commercial.  We know he lectures like no other from our personal attendance at several of his teaching sessions over the years.  His prices are fair; maybe even a little low for the volume of effects and moves you receive.  His instructions are clear; even we can understand and use them with relatively little practice time.  Keep in mind that it took us 30 years to learn how to effectively perform a push-off second deal and we still cannot perform a pressure fan – much to our embarrassment and shame amongst the professionals with whom we associate.

If you haven’t heard of Mr. Sankey, it could be that you are new to magic or don’t have friends in magic or have never used the internet to look up “magic.”  That doesn’t make you a bad person – there may be other things that could be the basis for such an accusation about your character.  Perhaps you cut in line, make questionably shaped balloon animals for your own private enjoyment, or copy DVDs purchased by others.  But we assume readers of Inside Magic are good people.  The kind who would never do such things.  We also assume readers of Inside Magic understand we often stray from our main topic and do not have our text properly reviewed by a team of editors to remove such strayings.  For instance, we don’t even thing “strayings” is a word but our editor quit over a wage dispute.  She wanted to be paid for her work and would not accept our promise to pay when we sold the insidemagic.com domain.

Anyway, back to Mr. Sankey.  We have attended lectures where he spent extra time to help the slow among the audience – primarily us – to learn his effects even though the tricks were not ones he was selling.  He just did it because … well, we don’t know why.  Perhaps he likes to teach magic.  As a community, magicians are fortunate that this is his motive.  He does it well and often.

You can check out his site here.  You can learn the force we mentioned by going here.

Mr. Sankey didn’t ask us to write this and certainly didn’t pay us – otherwise we would still have our editor.

Jay Sankey is an official Inside Magic Favorite.