I’ve got the kind of magic trick here that everyone loves to learn: it’s simple, it’s easy for laymen to learn, it requires no special props (just a cigarette), and it’s PERFECT to whip out in front of friends in a bar or such.
My friend showed me this and I thought it’d be great to put up here as a how-to, and luckily it’s a fairly popular trick so I managed to find a video of a guy doing it exactly as I learned it. He’s a bit…overly dramatic, but does a good job demoing it:
Additional Resources
By far the best site on the web for free magic tricks and tutorials, gimmick/equipment reviews, etc. is Ellusionist (home page), plus they’ve got a very active forum with over 75,000 members.
If you’re interested in a book on the subject, one that I recommend is Mark Wilson’s book, primarily aimed at beginners/lay people. It’s mostly illustrations with only as much text as is needed to explain things, so it’s really the perfect beginner’s magic book.
CyberMagicTricks.com is really cool, it’s a video site like YouTube where people upload videos showing you how to do various magic tricks that they know.
LearnMagicTricks.org also has lots of free content teaching you how to do various tricks and such, most of them pretty simple, lots of videos.