Inventor magician Vinny Sagoo discusses games, creativity… And making magic mainstream

Vinny, where do we start?! You’re a magician but I make a point of saying you’re more than that: you invent your own magic tricks, which is not as common as one might think…
Yes. I’ve got various hats but, interestingly, I learned my first magic trick when I was about eight years old. Soon after, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “Either an inventor or a magician…” Then, for some reason, I became a lawyer. Ha!

Ha! That’s what you were doing before you set up your magic company?
Absolutely. I was a lawyer for over twenty years, specialising in fraud. Then, in 2017, I had a big car accident, and it made me rethink what I wanted to do. It was about six months before I was due to get married, but I said to my fiancé, “I think I’m going to leave law and start a magic company.”

A tale as old as time… I imagine she was thrilled at that?
Ha! She’s been amazingly supportive – but yes, she did think I’d lost the plot. Ha! I called the company Neo Magic – from the Greek word neos – meaning ‘new’ since it was a new beginning for me… So now Neo Magic brings new magic tricks to magicians – professionals, hobbyists and amateurs alike. Of course, within a couple of years of starting that, the pandemic kicked in! Even so, I now lecture all over the country and the rest of the world – as well as through Zoom – teaching magicians my brand of magic.

Great stuff! Just before it drops off the radar, you mentioned the first trick you learned… What was that?
Well, I was growing up in Glasgow in the the eighties and nineties. When I was about eight, my youngest brother, Ricky, was born. When my dad took me to this party up the road, there was a kid there with what I now know to be a very old trick: the ball and vase.

Oh, lovely!
Oddly, this one didn’t have a stem on it… It was just a circular plinth, I suppose; a stand in which a little ball sat. And this boy took the ball and put it in his pocket… He put a lid on the little stand, clicked his fingers – and the ball came back! It was just amazing to me! I was like, “How’d you do that?” He did it about a hundred times; making it vanish, reappear, vanish again and invisibly jump to his pocket! As an eight-year-old, I was totally enamoured by it. Then, when I was leaving at the end of the night, this boy said, “Hey! I’ve got a present for you…” And he showed me how it worked and gave it to me.

Wow! That is an enormously generous gift… To enchant someone with a magic trick, then give them the trick.
I thought it was the best thing ever! So I went home and played with it forever. When I was good at it, I took it to school. After that, I tried to go to various supermarkets to find other magic tricks. I don’t even know if Marvin’s Magic was around by then – for the most part, there were the same kinds of blister pack stuff. But there was, in Glasgow City Centre, a shop called Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop which was owned by the late Roy Walton…

Bloody hell. Roy Walton was a god of magic! And – correct me if I’m wrong – Tam Shepherd’s was the oldest joke and magic shop in the world… Around 100 years old. I think it’s still going online… But Roy Walton and his family still ran the shop when you were a boy?
You’re exactly right. It was founded in 1886 and went online late last year. Anyway, when I got a little older, my mum used give me pocket money to go there and buy a lot of my tricks and jokes and a weekly magic magazine called Abracadabra. And because it was called Tam Shepherd’s, I always thought Roy Walton’s name was Tam! So I always used to say, “Thanks, Tam!” as I left. He never once corrected me… But I bought lots of my books and stuff from there – that’s where my journey started.

From there, my interest led me into maths and tricks with maths, buying books, reverse engineering things and thinking about how things work – all sorts of stuff. Ever since I started to come up with ideas, my focus has always been on trying to keep things simple… So if a magic effect has got moves and sleight of hand in it, I try to remove all that to bring it right down to the bare minimum… I want to focus on the presentation.

And today you’re the creator of dozens of effects – many of which are available on your website. You also lecture to other magicians…
Yes. I was at Bradford Magic Circle last week and I give talks and sell magic at conventions. I’m lecturing at Blackpool Magic Convention next year…

Which – for context – is the biggest magic convention in the world; a huge accolade! You mentioned maths in magic… How did you come to do a book on that?
During the pandemic, things slowed down a bit so I decided to write a book called Mind the Maths Magic. That’s done really well. The majority of those customers were lay audience: mums, dads, children and so on. That’s what led me to think more about the mainstream. When I looked around the various expos and toy fairs and online, I felt there wasn’t much of a range of magic on the market…

Right. There’s Marvin’s Magic and then a lot of compendium-style sets…
I know Marvin; he’s a great guy. But a lot of those compendium-style sets that are available elsewhere… Well. You never get through the tricks, do you? When I was eight years old, you could buy any number of those boxes with 50, 100, 250 tricks – whatever. And some of those are still on the shelves today – different packaging, but as soon as you open it, it’s got six plastic tricks in it and a pack of cards.

Yes – it’s a bug bear of mine. Parents buy a big set thinking they’re getting great value… And technically speaking there are that number of tricks! But so many of them are card tricks in which most children don’t have a great interest, it has to be said.
Yes – so not all those tricks are adding value. I’ve never met anybody in my life that’s done all 250 tricks in one of those sets! I wanted a bit of a fresh approach to my magic, so I go with what I call my E.S.P. philosophy. You’ll know E.S.P. as a different kind of concept…

Extra Sensory Perception?
Usually, yes! But in my philosophy towards magic, E.S.P. stands for Easy, Simple and Powerful. So all my magic has to be easy to perform, simple to understand and have a powerful kick at the end. In any case, I went on a bit of a reconnaissance to some toy fairs and the UK Games Expo last year to see what was out there – and there was nothing. So I decided to create a new company called Mind Burp Games because I like creating games as well.

Mind Burp Games?!
Yes! The name Mind Burp Games is meant to make you think: hold on! What has just happened there? But this year has been a bit of a learning curve. I’ve spent a lot of time working with my designer and now have two games to launch at UK Games Expo.

Tell me a little about them…
The first is called Scribble Snap. It’s a really cool storytelling effect in which you’ve got scribbles all over a deck of cards… It takes you back as you talk about your first deck of cards and how you drew them yourself. I won’t spoil the magic part for you!

So it’s part game, part magic trick?
Right. The second is called Mind Waves. That’s a mind-reading trick in which you find a chosen symbol – then do a little magic in which they all align as well. It’s quite cool. I’ve not filmed the demo yet… But my thinking is that people don’t need a box with 250 uninteresting tricks. Rather, I’m offering one thing that’s really cool – so cool that you can do it over and over again.

Which is somewhat akin to what a professional magician would do. And are there important differences, Vinny, between inventing magic tricks for experienced magicians and those intended for the general public?
There are, yes. I think the key component when creating for magicians is that you have to fool them in a slightly different way because they know all the slights and moves that you’re likely to be using. So when I create magic tricks or lecture for magicians, I have to think of them as magician foolers and put something extra in there to take them down the garden path…

That way, a magician may think they know what’s going to happen next and then: bang! You hit them with something which they weren’t expecting. So yes, that’s kind of the way I approach magicians. But with the lay public, they’ve not even seen a lot of the paraphernalia before… Most lay people have never seen a blank-faced playing card before, for example. But it is, of course, a lot easier to fool the lay public because they often don’t have any idea what to expect from an effect – let alone work out how it’s done.

And presumably, there are – among magicians – different skill levels that you have to account for? The professional, the part-time pro, the experienced amateur, the beginner…
This is true. So when I sell magic or do lectures, I’ve got different categories of magic. For the more experienced magicians, for example, I give some pro tips on doing business cards, say, or for doing this, that or the other. I’ll talk about how a certain idea is going to work to make their professional lives easier, or tell them how they can get more business. So yes, there’s a business element in there for the pros.

But for the magicians at lectures, I’d say probably about 90% of them are going to be hobbyist magicians. They mostly want to buy magic tricks to either just fool other magicians or do a few things down the pub or wherever. They just want to mess around with things, show them around a bit, then put them in the drawer. The flip side is that – if you’re buying magic from a demonstrator that’s just a very good salesman and people buy this stuff on the strength of that alone – they might then get buyer’s remorse.

Yes, and that certainly happens with some demonstrators at conventions, doesn’t it? But then I was looking at the reviews of your stuff on Google…
Ah! Well, I’ve been very lucky with the feedback on Google reviews. I’ve got hundreds of reviews on there, and they’re mostly five stars and brilliant comments. And to understand why people buy from you, you have to appreciate that whole philosophy. They have to know who you are. They have to like your stuff, and they have to trust in what you’re selling them… That’s especially true with magic because we’re selling them a deception!

Something I find unusual, Vinny, is that you have that background in law and an interest in maths: both rooted in logic and order and process and fact… But your creativity is the antithesis of all that. So let me ask you this: when you’re looking to invent a magic trick, where do your ideas come from?
I think the the logic gives me something of a grounding as to where things should go, and then the creativity lets me go off the beaten track a bit. But you’re right because although I don’t really like performing, I do like creating, lecturing and demoing. And when I demo magic at a convention, the majority of magicians will tell me I’m really creative, or that they don’t know how I’ve come up with this idea or that approach – and I find it a bit surprising.

As regards where my ideas come from… They come from all over the place! I don’t think there’s any kind of secret to sitting down and thinking I need to come up with something. For me, it sometimes happens by accident, sometimes it happens on a flight, or on a walk, or in the shower. Sometimes a whole idea comes to me; sometimes I have the idea for a plot or for a theme, and I don’t come up with a method for ages…

You only have one part of the idea? And it percolates? Can you give me an example of that?
The example that comes to mind is an effect called Word Up. It’s a little word-search puzzle that you can carry in your wallet. It’s a small card with lots of words printed on it… A person thinks of one of them. Without asking any questions, you tell them the word they’re thinking of. Then you make the word disappear from the grid and reappear printed on the back of the card! It’s really nice. They can examine it, of course.

Oh, that sounds cute!
Thank you. When I was growing up, my mum and dad used to buy me a word-search book before sending me to stay with my aunt in London. As I got older, I thought it’d be cool to do a trick with a word search… So I had the idea for the effect, but didn’t pursue it as such. Then, about five or six years later, I was on a flight back from Glasgow. I’d started thinking about it again, wondering about gimmicks methods – all sorts of stuff. I had a glass of red wine and was asking myself how I could do it. All of a sudden, I just wondered if one particular idea would work. Then I tried it out – and it did!

And this would be in the early days of Neo Magic, presumably?
Exactly, yes. When I launched it, I didn’t know if it was going to be well received or not, but it did really well. Quite a few people bought two of them. It sold out at the Blackpool convention. Then I started getting ideas from all around the world from people sending me their ideas and it just became a massive project. Last year, I released it again as Word Up: The Midnight Edition with black cards and white ink. It’s always evolving. That’s more a trick for professionals, of course.

Fantastic! Well, I could talk to you all day about this stuff, Vinny. Alas, we do need to start wrapping things up. One last question… What’s the most interesting thing in your office or on your desk?
Oh my god! I’ve got so much random stuff! I’ve got puzzles and playing cards and bits of tricks – all sorts of stuff. The most interesting thing, though… This is a tough question!

Oh, gosh! You’ve been so eloquent and erudite all the way through; I feel like I’ve broken you at the last minute!
You know what? I’ll say this… It’s quite nostalgic: it’s an old-school Tamagotchi. Sadly, I think I’ve killed it; it’s dead. But I think that’s probably one of the coolest things I’ve got in front of me right now because I’ve been playing around Tamagotchi’s and stuff like that.

Well, that’s a terrific answer! Thank you, Vinny. Keep us up-to-date with Mind Burp games and how you’re getting along. Thanks again.

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