Who is Rick Smith Jr?
When you're an entertainer, you need to find something that makes you stand out from the rest of the pack. This is also true for performers in the magic industry. With magic man Rick Smith Jr, it's easy to see that he has what it takes to stand out from your run-of-the-mill magician. To begin with, Rick has three Guiness World Records.
But it's not just that Rick Smith Jr is a world record holder that makes you sit up and take notice, but it's especially the kinds of records that he holds. Rick is an expert in throwing playing cards, and holds the record for the furthest distance ever thrown with an ordinary playing card. But that's just one of the ways he's made headlines with his card throwing skills. He's also developed an incredible accuracy with his card throwing, and his insane skills have seen him hit the big time in a "trick shots" collaboration with Dude Perfect, which features his card throwing. The video went viral, and at the time of writing it has around 150 million views! In the summer of 2020 he made a return visit to Dude Perfect, the result being this latest video with even more amazing stunts.
With his unique fusion of magic and card throwing, Rick Smith Jr is in high demand around the world. He's performed on television many times, for some of the biggest names in the business. Each year he does more than 600 shows for a steady stream of clients, who want to bring his exciting brand of magic and card throwing to their homes, businesses, and events. With a background in marketing, Rick is well placed to serve the needs of corporate customers, while entertaining them with an unforgettable performance at the same time.
Rick has been amazing audiences for around 20 years, and with his remarkable skills and talents, he knows how to use playing cards in a way that few others do. We're grateful that he was willing to do this interview with us, giving us the opportunity to get a unique insight look at his world, and get some helpful pointers for taking our playing cards to the next level - literally!
https://preview.redd.it/ec4kogd9oyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=019748d63fabef77cefe20d5b02c351848bdacec
THE INTERVIEW
For those who don't know anything about you, what can you tell us about yourself and your background?
Well, I've been performing magic for over 30 years. I perform close to 600 magic shows a year right now, with my card-throwing being a niche of my act. So I'm not just a card thrower, but I am a professional entertainer. I was an NCAA pitcher in college, and I developed my strength of my card throwing by throwing a baseball 90-plus miles per hour.
What can you tell us about the Guinness World Records you have set?
I have three Guinness Book world records for throwing playing cards. My first world record was set in 2002, for throwing a playing card 72 yards at a speed of 92 miles per hour.
My other two world records were set in 2015 and 2017, one for throwing a card the most accurate, which was 46 out of 52 cards to a target in under a minute. The other world record was for throwing the highest, which was 70 feet and some odd inches straight up in the air.
What does a typical day or month in the life of Rick Smith Jr look like?
Typically, I have been a prize for a fundraising company for the past ten years. I would perform three school shows during the week, Monday through Friday. My weekends, I would travel. I would perform for different companies and corporations around the world, and the school tour thing lasted for ten years. There was 400 shows a year.
An average day: I'll try to come up with some new material, perform the shows, post on social media, and hang out with family and friends when I can. I work a lot.
What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of magic and throwing playing cards?
Going to sporting events. I was a baseball player, and we're from Cleveland, so we go to different Cleveland Indian games. I played baseball up until a couple years ago, after I had an elbow injury, where I had to have surgery, which was both baseball and card-throwing-related. So I gave up baseball.
Also four-wheeling, hanging out with family, cooking on the grill - those are my hobbies right now.
Aside from your world records, what would you consider to be your biggest accomplishments, and things you're most proud of?
I guess my girls. I have a three-year-old, Aubrey, and I have a five-year-old, Averie. Having kids now, it's changed my life. When I'm not performing, I'm going to dance recitals and taking them for swimming lessons and Little Gym and getting them into sports and baseball and soccer and basketball. So I'm spending a lot of my time with those two, and there's one more on the way in August. So it's going to change my life even more, coming up.
What instructional videos have you produced that we should know about?
If you want to learn some magic and some card-throwing, I have a free tutorial and some more tutorials on my YouTube channel. I also have some behind the scenes of the card-throwing and some in-depth training on a DVD called Velocity, which is available on my website.
What playing cards have you personally been involved with producing?
I developed the whistle for the Banshee throwing playing cards. Banshees were created by Murphy's Magic, while the whistle was created by me. So Banshees and Banshees Advanced are playing cards that you can throw that have a measuring system. I used the Chrome Kings that De'Vo developed for most of the first video for Dude Perfect. In my second collaboration video, I used my new Falcons, which have a gold and silver edition. We just released a cool Kickstarter for the Falcon Razor deck.
What playing cards do you use for performing magic?
My magic deck is still Bicycle. I still prefer them over any other deck that I've used for performing magic, unless I'm at a really high-end event and I want to have a fancy deck of cards. I will browse my collection and grab one of De'Vo's earlier decks. I'm not against other companies though, and I have decks from David Blaine, Art of Play, and Theory 11. I probably have thousands different decks of cards, if not more. Some decks of cards, other magicians give to me. Some decks of cards, I've received as gifts. So I like playing cards all around.
https://preview.redd.it/70ev4ltioyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=67f2ee860b5441acf7a7ce22be8c7d5a8c150c7e
When did you first get involved in magic and what first sparked your interest in it?
I was seven years old. I always did card tricks. My dad knew one card trick, my uncle knew a coin trick, and that was what really sparked my interest - being able to handle cards and being able to do one-handed cut and shuffle the cards and be able to do little tricks, where I could do some betting things with family and friends. That's how I really got into card magic. The coin trick was just the scotch and soda trick, and that was the trick that my uncle knew and taught me. He ended up giving me the coins to be able to perform that trick for my friends. So that got me interested to it.
Back in the day we also had World's Greatest Magic every Thanksgiving. That sparked an interest from illusions to close-up magic to all those other things that just got me into magic even deeper.
How have your own performances and shows changed since you first became involved in magic?
I've made myself more of an entertainer. I'm not the best or most technical magician in the world. But I feel that I'm a good entertainer. I'm out there performing and doing things that are not easy to figure out, but they're also fun. They're not drawn out, and they're exciting.
I try to create some magic tricks that would fit in with my card-throwing For example, there's my own version of a card stab and instead of using a knife I do this: I have someone select a playing card, lose it in the deck, throw the cards in the air, and then I throw a playing card and pin their sign card to a board.
I also create tricks that fit in with my personality, which is just have a good time, make sure the audience is having a good time, and keep people entertained. I'm always there to talk with my audience. And if people see me at a show, I'm the same person that they would see if I was just walking down the street. Those are the people that got me into magic, and I'm always there for those types of people as well.
How has technology impacted the magic industry over the last couple of decades, and is this good or bad?
I think it's enhanced the magic community a ton. I use technology magic in my act now, and I don't see a weakness in it yet, other than someone thinking that it might be an app. But if you can use somebody else's cell phone or somebody else's technology in their hands and end up doing something with their props, you can sometimes just get rid of that whole idea of "That was an app" or "That was something that had to do with technology." If you're a good storyteller, you can kind of work around that.
Do have any good stories you can share about an epic "fail" that you experienced?
I haven't really had any card-throwing things gone wrong, aside from not hitting the target the first time. But I did have one epic fail. At the end of my shows, I would throw playing cards as far as I could, for example at an outdoor show in the summertime. If it was a kids' show, I'd tell the kids: "Whoever catches this card wins a deck of cards, one of these Chrome Kings" (or a Bicycle deck or whatever I had at the time). I would throw the card as far as I could or as high as I could, and outside it would definitely travel sometimes farther than world record distance because of wind and things like that.
Well, one day, I had two kids run into the card at the very same time, and they kind of ran face-to-face, ran into each other. The one kid's tooth popped right out. So that was an epic fail. I was pretty upset about that. But they went to the hospital, and they got the tooth back in, and I never heard from that family again, even in a bad way. But I felt bad.
I guess the first show ever I ever did in my entire life was an epic fail as well. I was 15 years old. I thought flash paper and smoke powder and sparkle dust type of stuff that was flammable would be a cool idea to set on fire in somebody's living room. Well, it started sparkling and sparkling and sparkling, and it never stopped until it hit the floor and then burned a nice quarter-inch hole in their carpet. This was a housewarming party for their first house that they ever bought. Now they have a quarter-inch burn hole in the middle of their thing! 20 or more years later, they come up to me, and say: "That burn hole is still there, and we love that you're performing still. We tell everybody that you did it."
What advice would you give to a young person just starting to learn card magic for the first time today?
Just practice. Don't necessarily practice in front of a mirror. It's good to practice your angles, but practice on your family. Practice on your brother or your sister, your aunt or your uncle. The more that you're out there, performing these tricks on people, the better you'll get.
I've seen some of the best magicians in the world technically who can show the most incredible card move that I've ever seen in my entire life, but they don't have the courage to walk up to a real person and perform that trick. Even though they would blow me away technically, they don't have the social or people skills. So develop your people skills. It's going to help you with school. It's going to help you with presentations in college. It's going to help you with anything. The more that you can be in front of people and the more that you feel comfortable with people, the better you'll get with your act. People will see that you're comfortable, and they'll like you as a person, as well as your act.
Do you have any thoughts and opinions on cardistry?
I think cardistry's pretty cool. I have a lot of friends that do cardistry. I know De'Vo was one of the first to do extreme card manipulation, and he popularized it. Then it became cardistry, and then the Buck twins made it a little bit more popular, which is great.
Back in the day all of those fancy card moves were used as performance pieces. Nowadays they're used as things added to enhance your performance. While you're performing a trick, you do a little bit of cardistry in the middle of it, finish your trick, and you're done. It just gives you something you can do with cards that no one else can.
What has been your experience with social media, and what role do you think it plays for your career?
I never liked social media. I hated that kind of stuff. But I guess I followed just on what everybody was doing. I thought, "I don't want to be left behind too far. I'll post here and there." Now I have an audience of over half a million people. It's not a lot yet, but it's getting there, and it's growing every day. I'm getting sponsors from different companies, and I'm doing sponsored posts. I'm becoming an influencer. I'm making money on YouTube. I'm making money on Instagram. So I'm going to continue to do that, because, as of right now, during this time in the world [COVID-19 crisis] it's the only way for an entertainer to make money.
https://preview.redd.it/rhtq2unyoyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a71bf400135306955f1659a0f86f18d1f9b6cf50
Do you have any goals or accomplishments that you would still like to achieve in your lifetime?
That's a tough one. Just keep performing. I feel like I've accomplished so much, so young. I would love to build up my YouTube subscribers. I would love to continue that and present card-throwing, magic, and tutorials to the younger people out there in the world, give them a place that they could learn and collaborate with others. I would like to just continue doing what I'm doing, collaborating with different artists, making different trick shot videos, trying to always get better. That would be the goal, never to let it get stale, never let it get old.
I had a mentor as a kid when I went on Ripley's Believe It or Not say, "Enjoy your 30 seconds of fame, because it's not going to last more than a couple of weeks." When that mentor said that to me, I was like, "Well, I'm going to prove him wrong." I've been doing card-throwing now for 18, 19 years, making a significant living off that and off my magic. So it's been going on for 18 years. Ricky Jay did it his whole career. I think I can keep enhancing it and making it better, keeping it popular.
What should we know about Magic Gives Back, which you founded and are the director of?
Magic Gives Back is a platform that I created for my Las Vegas-style magic show. Originally for ten years I was performing at 400 schools a year, as a prize for a local fundraising company. Kids would sell magazines, cookie dough, and wrapping paper and I was the prize for their reward. Instead I basically made Magic Gives Back, the ultimate family night, as a fundraiser. I grabbed 15 of my closest friends, from lighting engineers, sound engineers, to special guest entertainers to dancers to assistants, built some of the best illusions from big magic builders in Las Vegas, like Magic Ventures, and I have tons of different illusions from around the world. We put all that stuff together.
We ended up going into schools, offering them 50% of the profit. So instead of kids selling magazines and cookie dough, they would sell tickets to the show. They would be the promoters to the show, and then we would bring that show to their facilities, their auditoriums. In one night, we could raise anywhere from $20,000-$40,000 and split the money, with the school perhaps doing absolutely nothing. And we had a sold-out show and were able to perform our Las Vegas Dallas show without ever having to spend any money on advertising. So it was a win-win for everybody.
Where can people go to see you perform today?
Most of my shows are private. We do probably 15 Magic Gives Back shows a year. Just say keep an eye out on my social media. If there are public appearances, I put them on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, and if they want to come to a Magic Gives Back big show, the next shows will be in the spring, 2021.
https://preview.redd.it/nw3x9vrdpyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a9f515bed9049fd2a419878f8ae3321e307fda5b
CONCLUSION
There's no doubt that Rick Smith Jr is a unique individual with a remarkable set of talents. He has shaped himself into an entertainer like no other. His path to the record-setting top has been shaped by a few key events, especially his baseball background, his first world record, and his Dude Perfect collaboration video. But he's also not afraid of hard work, as his busy schedule of 600+ shows a year makes clear. He's honed and polished his craft, enabling him to do things with playing cards that nobody else in the world can do.
But even if we're not about to contest Rick Smith Jr for his world records, that doesn't mean we can't have fun with playing cards in unusual ways. So why not grab a deck of playing cards and give card throwing a shot yourself!
https://preview.redd.it/uxxjg7bfpyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=178561667eb0a61cc79d52ea4bc97d1b298b18a5
Author's note: I first published this article at PlayingCardDecks here.
submitted by EndersGame_Reviewer to Magic [link] [comments] When you're an entertainer, you need to find something that makes you stand out from the rest of the pack. This is also true for performers in the magic industry. With magic man Rick Smith Jr, it's easy to see that he has what it takes to stand out from your run-of-the-mill magician. To begin with, Rick has three Guiness World Records.
But it's not just that Rick Smith Jr is a world record holder that makes you sit up and take notice, but it's especially the kinds of records that he holds. Rick is an expert in throwing playing cards, and holds the record for the furthest distance ever thrown with an ordinary playing card. But that's just one of the ways he's made headlines with his card throwing skills. He's also developed an incredible accuracy with his card throwing, and his insane skills have seen him hit the big time in a "trick shots" collaboration with Dude Perfect, which features his card throwing. The video went viral, and at the time of writing it has around 150 million views! In the summer of 2020 he made a return visit to Dude Perfect, the result being this latest video with even more amazing stunts.
With his unique fusion of magic and card throwing, Rick Smith Jr is in high demand around the world. He's performed on television many times, for some of the biggest names in the business. Each year he does more than 600 shows for a steady stream of clients, who want to bring his exciting brand of magic and card throwing to their homes, businesses, and events. With a background in marketing, Rick is well placed to serve the needs of corporate customers, while entertaining them with an unforgettable performance at the same time.
Rick has been amazing audiences for around 20 years, and with his remarkable skills and talents, he knows how to use playing cards in a way that few others do. We're grateful that he was willing to do this interview with us, giving us the opportunity to get a unique insight look at his world, and get some helpful pointers for taking our playing cards to the next level - literally!
https://preview.redd.it/ec4kogd9oyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=019748d63fabef77cefe20d5b02c351848bdacec
THE INTERVIEW
For those who don't know anything about you, what can you tell us about yourself and your background?
Well, I've been performing magic for over 30 years. I perform close to 600 magic shows a year right now, with my card-throwing being a niche of my act. So I'm not just a card thrower, but I am a professional entertainer. I was an NCAA pitcher in college, and I developed my strength of my card throwing by throwing a baseball 90-plus miles per hour.
What can you tell us about the Guinness World Records you have set?
I have three Guinness Book world records for throwing playing cards. My first world record was set in 2002, for throwing a playing card 72 yards at a speed of 92 miles per hour.
My other two world records were set in 2015 and 2017, one for throwing a card the most accurate, which was 46 out of 52 cards to a target in under a minute. The other world record was for throwing the highest, which was 70 feet and some odd inches straight up in the air.
What does a typical day or month in the life of Rick Smith Jr look like?
Typically, I have been a prize for a fundraising company for the past ten years. I would perform three school shows during the week, Monday through Friday. My weekends, I would travel. I would perform for different companies and corporations around the world, and the school tour thing lasted for ten years. There was 400 shows a year.
An average day: I'll try to come up with some new material, perform the shows, post on social media, and hang out with family and friends when I can. I work a lot.
What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of magic and throwing playing cards?
Going to sporting events. I was a baseball player, and we're from Cleveland, so we go to different Cleveland Indian games. I played baseball up until a couple years ago, after I had an elbow injury, where I had to have surgery, which was both baseball and card-throwing-related. So I gave up baseball.
Also four-wheeling, hanging out with family, cooking on the grill - those are my hobbies right now.
Aside from your world records, what would you consider to be your biggest accomplishments, and things you're most proud of?
I guess my girls. I have a three-year-old, Aubrey, and I have a five-year-old, Averie. Having kids now, it's changed my life. When I'm not performing, I'm going to dance recitals and taking them for swimming lessons and Little Gym and getting them into sports and baseball and soccer and basketball. So I'm spending a lot of my time with those two, and there's one more on the way in August. So it's going to change my life even more, coming up.
What instructional videos have you produced that we should know about?
If you want to learn some magic and some card-throwing, I have a free tutorial and some more tutorials on my YouTube channel. I also have some behind the scenes of the card-throwing and some in-depth training on a DVD called Velocity, which is available on my website.
What playing cards have you personally been involved with producing?
I developed the whistle for the Banshee throwing playing cards. Banshees were created by Murphy's Magic, while the whistle was created by me. So Banshees and Banshees Advanced are playing cards that you can throw that have a measuring system. I used the Chrome Kings that De'Vo developed for most of the first video for Dude Perfect. In my second collaboration video, I used my new Falcons, which have a gold and silver edition. We just released a cool Kickstarter for the Falcon Razor deck.
What playing cards do you use for performing magic?
My magic deck is still Bicycle. I still prefer them over any other deck that I've used for performing magic, unless I'm at a really high-end event and I want to have a fancy deck of cards. I will browse my collection and grab one of De'Vo's earlier decks. I'm not against other companies though, and I have decks from David Blaine, Art of Play, and Theory 11. I probably have thousands different decks of cards, if not more. Some decks of cards, other magicians give to me. Some decks of cards, I've received as gifts. So I like playing cards all around.
https://preview.redd.it/70ev4ltioyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=67f2ee860b5441acf7a7ce22be8c7d5a8c150c7e
When did you first get involved in magic and what first sparked your interest in it?
I was seven years old. I always did card tricks. My dad knew one card trick, my uncle knew a coin trick, and that was what really sparked my interest - being able to handle cards and being able to do one-handed cut and shuffle the cards and be able to do little tricks, where I could do some betting things with family and friends. That's how I really got into card magic. The coin trick was just the scotch and soda trick, and that was the trick that my uncle knew and taught me. He ended up giving me the coins to be able to perform that trick for my friends. So that got me interested to it.
Back in the day we also had World's Greatest Magic every Thanksgiving. That sparked an interest from illusions to close-up magic to all those other things that just got me into magic even deeper.
How have your own performances and shows changed since you first became involved in magic?
I've made myself more of an entertainer. I'm not the best or most technical magician in the world. But I feel that I'm a good entertainer. I'm out there performing and doing things that are not easy to figure out, but they're also fun. They're not drawn out, and they're exciting.
I try to create some magic tricks that would fit in with my card-throwing For example, there's my own version of a card stab and instead of using a knife I do this: I have someone select a playing card, lose it in the deck, throw the cards in the air, and then I throw a playing card and pin their sign card to a board.
I also create tricks that fit in with my personality, which is just have a good time, make sure the audience is having a good time, and keep people entertained. I'm always there to talk with my audience. And if people see me at a show, I'm the same person that they would see if I was just walking down the street. Those are the people that got me into magic, and I'm always there for those types of people as well.
How has technology impacted the magic industry over the last couple of decades, and is this good or bad?
I think it's enhanced the magic community a ton. I use technology magic in my act now, and I don't see a weakness in it yet, other than someone thinking that it might be an app. But if you can use somebody else's cell phone or somebody else's technology in their hands and end up doing something with their props, you can sometimes just get rid of that whole idea of "That was an app" or "That was something that had to do with technology." If you're a good storyteller, you can kind of work around that.
Do have any good stories you can share about an epic "fail" that you experienced?
I haven't really had any card-throwing things gone wrong, aside from not hitting the target the first time. But I did have one epic fail. At the end of my shows, I would throw playing cards as far as I could, for example at an outdoor show in the summertime. If it was a kids' show, I'd tell the kids: "Whoever catches this card wins a deck of cards, one of these Chrome Kings" (or a Bicycle deck or whatever I had at the time). I would throw the card as far as I could or as high as I could, and outside it would definitely travel sometimes farther than world record distance because of wind and things like that.
Well, one day, I had two kids run into the card at the very same time, and they kind of ran face-to-face, ran into each other. The one kid's tooth popped right out. So that was an epic fail. I was pretty upset about that. But they went to the hospital, and they got the tooth back in, and I never heard from that family again, even in a bad way. But I felt bad.
I guess the first show ever I ever did in my entire life was an epic fail as well. I was 15 years old. I thought flash paper and smoke powder and sparkle dust type of stuff that was flammable would be a cool idea to set on fire in somebody's living room. Well, it started sparkling and sparkling and sparkling, and it never stopped until it hit the floor and then burned a nice quarter-inch hole in their carpet. This was a housewarming party for their first house that they ever bought. Now they have a quarter-inch burn hole in the middle of their thing! 20 or more years later, they come up to me, and say: "That burn hole is still there, and we love that you're performing still. We tell everybody that you did it."
What advice would you give to a young person just starting to learn card magic for the first time today?
Just practice. Don't necessarily practice in front of a mirror. It's good to practice your angles, but practice on your family. Practice on your brother or your sister, your aunt or your uncle. The more that you're out there, performing these tricks on people, the better you'll get.
I've seen some of the best magicians in the world technically who can show the most incredible card move that I've ever seen in my entire life, but they don't have the courage to walk up to a real person and perform that trick. Even though they would blow me away technically, they don't have the social or people skills. So develop your people skills. It's going to help you with school. It's going to help you with presentations in college. It's going to help you with anything. The more that you can be in front of people and the more that you feel comfortable with people, the better you'll get with your act. People will see that you're comfortable, and they'll like you as a person, as well as your act.
Do you have any thoughts and opinions on cardistry?
I think cardistry's pretty cool. I have a lot of friends that do cardistry. I know De'Vo was one of the first to do extreme card manipulation, and he popularized it. Then it became cardistry, and then the Buck twins made it a little bit more popular, which is great.
Back in the day all of those fancy card moves were used as performance pieces. Nowadays they're used as things added to enhance your performance. While you're performing a trick, you do a little bit of cardistry in the middle of it, finish your trick, and you're done. It just gives you something you can do with cards that no one else can.
What has been your experience with social media, and what role do you think it plays for your career?
I never liked social media. I hated that kind of stuff. But I guess I followed just on what everybody was doing. I thought, "I don't want to be left behind too far. I'll post here and there." Now I have an audience of over half a million people. It's not a lot yet, but it's getting there, and it's growing every day. I'm getting sponsors from different companies, and I'm doing sponsored posts. I'm becoming an influencer. I'm making money on YouTube. I'm making money on Instagram. So I'm going to continue to do that, because, as of right now, during this time in the world [COVID-19 crisis] it's the only way for an entertainer to make money.
https://preview.redd.it/rhtq2unyoyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a71bf400135306955f1659a0f86f18d1f9b6cf50
Do you have any goals or accomplishments that you would still like to achieve in your lifetime?
That's a tough one. Just keep performing. I feel like I've accomplished so much, so young. I would love to build up my YouTube subscribers. I would love to continue that and present card-throwing, magic, and tutorials to the younger people out there in the world, give them a place that they could learn and collaborate with others. I would like to just continue doing what I'm doing, collaborating with different artists, making different trick shot videos, trying to always get better. That would be the goal, never to let it get stale, never let it get old.
I had a mentor as a kid when I went on Ripley's Believe It or Not say, "Enjoy your 30 seconds of fame, because it's not going to last more than a couple of weeks." When that mentor said that to me, I was like, "Well, I'm going to prove him wrong." I've been doing card-throwing now for 18, 19 years, making a significant living off that and off my magic. So it's been going on for 18 years. Ricky Jay did it his whole career. I think I can keep enhancing it and making it better, keeping it popular.
What should we know about Magic Gives Back, which you founded and are the director of?
Magic Gives Back is a platform that I created for my Las Vegas-style magic show. Originally for ten years I was performing at 400 schools a year, as a prize for a local fundraising company. Kids would sell magazines, cookie dough, and wrapping paper and I was the prize for their reward. Instead I basically made Magic Gives Back, the ultimate family night, as a fundraiser. I grabbed 15 of my closest friends, from lighting engineers, sound engineers, to special guest entertainers to dancers to assistants, built some of the best illusions from big magic builders in Las Vegas, like Magic Ventures, and I have tons of different illusions from around the world. We put all that stuff together.
We ended up going into schools, offering them 50% of the profit. So instead of kids selling magazines and cookie dough, they would sell tickets to the show. They would be the promoters to the show, and then we would bring that show to their facilities, their auditoriums. In one night, we could raise anywhere from $20,000-$40,000 and split the money, with the school perhaps doing absolutely nothing. And we had a sold-out show and were able to perform our Las Vegas Dallas show without ever having to spend any money on advertising. So it was a win-win for everybody.
Where can people go to see you perform today?
Most of my shows are private. We do probably 15 Magic Gives Back shows a year. Just say keep an eye out on my social media. If there are public appearances, I put them on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, and if they want to come to a Magic Gives Back big show, the next shows will be in the spring, 2021.
https://preview.redd.it/nw3x9vrdpyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a9f515bed9049fd2a419878f8ae3321e307fda5b
CONCLUSION
There's no doubt that Rick Smith Jr is a unique individual with a remarkable set of talents. He has shaped himself into an entertainer like no other. His path to the record-setting top has been shaped by a few key events, especially his baseball background, his first world record, and his Dude Perfect collaboration video. But he's also not afraid of hard work, as his busy schedule of 600+ shows a year makes clear. He's honed and polished his craft, enabling him to do things with playing cards that nobody else in the world can do.
But even if we're not about to contest Rick Smith Jr for his world records, that doesn't mean we can't have fun with playing cards in unusual ways. So why not grab a deck of playing cards and give card throwing a shot yourself!
https://preview.redd.it/uxxjg7bfpyi51.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=178561667eb0a61cc79d52ea4bc97d1b298b18a5
Author's note: I first published this article at PlayingCardDecks here.
