“A magician” is eight different jobs.

A performer works with a borrowed or examined deck, in the hands, usually for six to twelve people at a time. The technical ceiling is extremely high and almost none of it is visible to an audience, which is precisely the problem: a card worker with thirty years of practice and one with three can look similar for the first two minutes.

What separates them is not the sleights. It is what happens when a guest does something unexpected — cuts to the wrong place, refuses to pick, tries to catch them out. The recovery is the craft.

Coins, rings, banknotes, borrowed objects. Because the props are ordinary and often the guest's own, there is nowhere to hide: no deck to shuffle, no case to reach into.

It travels across languages better than card magic, because it depends less on instruction and more on what a guest can see happening in their own hand.

Parlour is the most useful discipline in this category and the least known outside it. The performer stands, the audience sits, and the material is built to read at ten metres rather than at arm's length — but it needs no stage, no lighting and no sound beyond a microphone.

For a private dining room, a members' club or a drawing room, it is very often the right answer where the buyer assumed they had to choose between close-up and a full stage show.

Cards, coins, silks, billiard balls appearing and vanishing at the fingertips, visible to a full theatre. It is typically performed in silence, which removes every crutch: no patter to cover a move, no dialogue to carry a weak moment.

Years of daily practice sit behind a ten-minute act. It is also the discipline that travels furthest — a silent act works identically in any language.

Larger props than manipulation, spoken rather than silent, usually with guests brought up to take part. Because it is spoken it can be tailored to the room, the company and the occasion in a way a silent act cannot.

This is the discipline most often booked for corporate rooms, and the one where volunteer handling matters most: a guest brought on stage and made to look foolish in front of their own team is the single most common way a stage booking goes wrong.

Performed close-up or on stage. It suits audiences who consider themselves hard to impress, which is most senior rooms, because the effect is not that an object moved — it is that something private was known.

The important question about any mentalist is what they claim. A performer who presents genuine psychic ability reads as either silly or dishonest to exactly the audience they were booked for. One who presents it as performance keeps the room's respect. We ask, and we tell you the answer.

The magic is real and the timing is the craft. It is the most forgiving discipline for a difficult room — a late slot, a warm ballroom, an audience three courses in — because laughter re-engages a room that has stopped paying attention.

It is also the least forgiving of a mismatch in register. Material that lands in one company culture can be a problem in another, which is why the content conversation happens before the shortlist rather than after.

Large apparatus, often assistants, and a genuine technical footprint: load-in, rigging, sightlines, wing space, crew.

It produces the largest single visual moment available in this category. It is also the discipline where the venue decides whether the booking is possible at all, which is why the conversation starts with the room rather than with the act.