 Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a magic book review. Hey, today we're going to look at the annotated urdinaries from Darwin Ortiz and Mike Cavney. All right, so what is the annotated urdinaries? This is a book that expounds on the classic book, The Expert at the Card Table. So it's an entire copy of The Expert at the Card Table plus all of Darwin Ortiz's notes. This book retails for about $45. It's a hard-back book and it has over 260 pages and what Expert at the Card Table doesn't have, this has black and white photographs. Yep, photographs. All right, so what's it about? You know, the top card men in the world will agree and disagree on a ton of stuff, but one thing they all agree on is that there's no other book in all the history of card magic, card manipulation, that deserves careful study more than The Expert at the Card Table, but it is a very difficult book to read and to understand. After a hundred years, it's still considered the foundation upon which modern card magic is based and it contains some of the most perfectly constructed slides in all of card magic. For a century, the methods of urdinaries have been studied, practiced, written about by tons of people, but Darwin Ortiz has spent his lifetime studying every detail of this book. Now, if you don't know who Darwin Ortiz is, he was born and raised in New York, he had a keen interest in card tricks since his childhood and then in 1974 he dropped out of law school and pursued card magic full-time and during that time he initially supported himself playing blackjack and as an instructor at Harry Lorraine's Memory School in New York City. Darwin Ortiz is the author of books on gambling and magic. His major work for the lay public on gaming protection is called Gambling Scams and it came out in 1984. So, Darwin Ortiz is taking copious notes on The Expert at the Card Table. He's dissecting every move, every sentence of the book, and he then compiles all of that homework, that research in this book, The Annotated Urdinaries. Darwin has 273 annotations that shed new light on the history of the various moves and effects and he provides technical insight into the proper execution of each move. He gives you cross references for further reading and he includes hundreds of obscure bits of information. The final chapter of The Annotated Urdinaries is an article called The Mystery of Urdinaries written by the late Martin Gardner where Gardner recounts his search for the man behind this book that talks about the speculation about the true identity of the man who wrote The Expert at the Card Table. Was SW Urdinaries actually Milton Franklin Andrews who was a gambler and murderer who ended up taking his own life? Read this book and parts of it will feel exactly like a Hollywood movie. Alright, so how does this book work? I said it was The Expert at the Card Table, but it's also notes. So how does it all come together? Like when you're reading it through page by page, what are you gonna find? Well, if you've ever read an annotated book before, you know that the actual copy is right there, everything that you would remember from the book, the copy is there with the illustrations that came with it, obviously. So the inside column of each page, that's nearest to the spine and surrounded by a rectangular box, that's the original text from The Expert at the Card Table, and then the annotations appear in bold type outside those columns. And so what you end up with is a book that's double the size. It's almost two books in one, right? It's The Expert at the Card Table in its entirety and it's Darwin's notes in its entirety along with his photographs. Alright, so what do I think? What do I think about this book? Whether you're a skilled professional and you're looking to increase your study and your knowledge about this book or you're a beginner in card magic, this is the copy of The Expert at the Card Table you want to purchase. Now, I know you can get the cheap Expert at the Card Table paperback from Amazon or Penguin for like a couple of bucks, right? It's like five, eight bucks, something like that. You can even find the PDF online for free. That book is not going to help you like this one is. If you really want the book, if you really want to study it, if you really want to read it and extract from it everything and get the insights that people always say about this book, then you want this copy and not the other one because the other one is going to read like the King James Bible to you. It's going to, it's going to feel like Shakespeare. You're going to read it. You're going to go, I can't get through it, okay? Unless you can, unless you're really good at reading old English, right? And then, and then also master what he's teaching you side by side. It's going to, it's going to feel like really hard homework. Thank Darwin Ortiz that he has compiled this book where he sits next to you and walks through the book with you. It's like having a teacher teach you the book while you read it. And that's awesome. Like that is worth the 45 dollars. Yes, it's a hardback book. That's another reason why it's more expensive. And I've made my argument for hardback books and other videos. I think you should have hardback books. I think you should have a magic library. It should be on your shelf. So definitely check this out. If you, even if you've already purchased Expert at the card table and it's, now it's just sitting there and you're like, yeah, I'm never gonna read it. But I have it, then it's worthless, okay? It's worthless if you don't read it. So this is the copy you want to get. Save your pennies. I got my copy from PenguinMagic.com. If you head there, it's probably for sale there right now. I would head there as well. Thank you so much for watching this book review. I will do more book reviews in the future. I'll see you guys next time. Thanks. Bye.