Mucking Hard Moves Made Easy by Ian Kendall
http://www.virtualmagicshow.com
VCD Format, playable on most DVD players, and 9.9999999999% of PCs & Macs.
Costs £15

I'm a big fan of Ian's video tutorials. Since buying Ian's orginal VCDs and signing up for his Virtual Session website, I have learned a ton of new techniques I probably wouldn't have learned otherwise (nailed the Faro shuffle with Ian's B*stard Hard Moves Made easy VCD, learned to juggle from his Virtual Sessions website, and much more). I'm a big fan of gambling and cheating moves (hence this themed collection of reviews) so I couldn't wait to get this VCD.

Let me get the bad (?) points over with first. Not necessarily a bad point, but it is obvisouly a no-frills production - Ian's trademark home-video-style production, and plain black on white printing on the CD label in a regular CD box. It's certainly not an L&L DVD, but that certainly doesn't make it any less of a quality product. Don't let the cosmetics (or lack of them) influence you.

It would be cool at some point for Ian to offer DVDs as well as VCDs - I have problems with VCDs on my DVD player - sometimes it plays them, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I even have trouble with my PC playing them (although when I told Ian this he told me to play the '.dat' files from the CD directly with Windows Media Player, which worked perfectly).

The title '...Made Easy' isn't strictly true... '...Made Easier' would probably be better Don't expect to pick up this CD and expect to be able to pull-off the moves first time The moves are hard as you would imagine, but Ian leaves nothing out when it comes to teaching them. And for people like me, being able to SEE what is being described is an absolutely invaluable feature of having these on disc rather than pages.

It contains about an hours worth of hand mucking (switching cards), similar to the stuff you see in the intro to the movie 'Shade'. They are all categorised well, so it is easy to find a particular muck if you need to. There are single and multi-card mucks, and these are divided depending on the hand movement preceeding the switch - 'thumb first' or 'pinky first'.

Ian's teaching is as always absolutely first class. I fully understand when people on forums so strongly uphold books as being the best place to learn from as most magic DVDs I have seen are little more than explanations on film. With Ian's material however, the move is not only demonstrated and explained, each little sticking point that you may or may not have is addressed, tips are given along the way, and the moves are broken down into tiny segments making it easier to digest, understand, and learn. Awesome.

I have a lot of books and have seen a lot of magic DVDs and NOTHING comes close to this when it comes to the content. I know George Joseph's book 'Hand Mucking' and used to own it, but after a long time working with it I was dissatisfied at how much I could do (I know, I know, practise makes perfect...). If you want to learn how to muck cards (especially if you want a visual source to learn from) then this is the ONLY choice as far as I am concerned.

A great product for those interested in this area, can't wait to get the time to study this more!

8/10