My creations

What really hap­pens behind a magic show? This book is about everything the audi­ence never sees.

La magia fuera de plano is not a tech­nique book or a col­lec­tion of tricks: it's the story of what really hap­pens in a magi­cian's life when the cam­eras go off, the audi­ence leaves and the applause fades. Start­ing from the day that changed my life at ten, I tell my jour­ney: the first attempts, the mis­takes, the doubts, the first shows and tele­vi­sion. (The book is writ­ten in Span­ish.)

And you don't need to be a magi­cian to enjoy it. This book is also for magic lov­ers and for any­one who has ever wondered what goes on behind the cam­eras: stor­ies from cast­ings and TV sets, curi­os­it­ies that never make it to the screen, and encoun­ters with fam­ous people that turned into anec­dotes. For any­one who wants to under­stand why we keep believ­ing in magic, even when we know we're being fooled.

And if you already work in magic or dream of doing so, you'll also find:

I've redesigned and improved one of the most fam­ous card effects in the world. Ima­gine prov­ing that the spec­tator's card isn't just the only one face down, but the only poker card in an entire UNO deck.

UNOrtho­dox is a cus­tom-made deck, col­our­ful and with a design every­one recog­nises instantly. And for the new edi­tion Alakazam switched to a new man­u­fac­turer: the cards feel and handle far bet­ter.

The idea was born at the end of 2019, put­ting a new twist on the clas­sic reversed-card trick I saw Jorge Blass per­form on TV as a kid. UNO is known all over the world, so you can per­form it any­where. Alakazam came up with the name: it has UNO inside, and it means exactly what it says.

Today I per­form it at almost every show. Adults are amazed, but kids, as soon as they see the cards come out of the box, shout “It's UNO!”, almost annoyed, as if I'd picked the wrong deck.

The spec­tator picks a card, it goes into one box and comes out of the other. And you can repeat it instantly as many times as you like.

The idea was born on 21 Feb­ru­ary 2019, one after­noon when I ima­gined put­ting an object in one side and hav­ing it come out of another at the same time, like in the video game Portal. What magi­cians always carry is a deck of cards, so the boxes would be the portals and the cards the trav­el­lers. The idea was as beau­ti­ful as it was hard to solve.