Seedling: Origami Card Wallet

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this before. It was just passed along to me recently by friend-of-the-site, JM Beckers, who found it on the French magic forum, Virtual Magie (run by Étienne Brooks).

It’s a way to fold a packet trick holder/wallet from a piece of paper. (Unless you describe your favorite genre of music as “Screeching Awfulness,” I would turn the sound off.)

There are actually six different pockets in this. Two on the inside, two on the side, and two on the outside.

I like it. And I think there’s probably something to be done with this beyond just a cheap way to carry your packet tricks around.

My initial idea is to carry around cards for Origami Poker by John Bannon. (I’ve always done it with 16 cards, not 12. Works the same.) But instead of forcing the royal flush, you force four or five random cards and then reveal you predicted them by unfolding the card holder and revealing the prediction

Now, in my opinion, that’s still sort of a “nothing” trick, but there is kind of a nice connection between the origami holder and the folding action of the cards in the trick. There’s a through-line there to pursue perhaps.

What I’ve done is fold a wallet from one of the prop Penthouse Forum magazine pages that came with The Jerx, Vol 1.

I tell the spectator I had two big interests as a child, (“Well, really three,” I say, “but the third isn’t important now.”) My first interest was origami, and my second was magic. (“The third interest was 8-bit soft-core computer porn. It was the pre-internet days. If you squinted you’d get the general outline of a booby. But honestly, that’s not what this is about.”)

Then I talk about ways I combined my interests and show an example of an origami card holder I would make as a kid.

“I came up with another way of combining origami and magic. It’s something I called the Origami Shuffle because it was a way of mixing cards that was like folding paper. I’ll show you.”

I then go into the Origami Poker procedure (this is taught by John Bannon in multiple places, and by myself (with John’s permission) in The JAMM #2). At the end they slide out the five face-down cards into a row in front of them. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if after all that shuffling and mixing you had found a royal flush?”

They turn over the cards and after the first one or two, it’s clear it’s not a royal flush.

“Huh…well…origami was really my primary interest. Magic was a distant second. Actually… probably third when you throw in the computer porn. So…,”

I then act like I’m just noticing the values of the cards that were turned over.

“Wait a second. This is incredible. I think I’ve found a way to combine all three of my youthful passions.” I start unfolding the card holder. “In 1986, there was a strip poker game for the Commodore 64 featuring Samantha Fox, an English musician and model.” I show them the ad, but don’t draw attention to the cards at the bottom yet.

“I made this holder from an old magazine advertisement for that game.” I hand the page to them. “After all that mixing you did, look what you found.” They either notice the cards in the ad or I point them out to them.

It’s a pretty fun trick that’s relatively strong as well. I have the holder with the cards inside a pocket of my messenger bag ready to go.

“But I don’t have that page, so how can I do the trick?” You can’t. This is more intended as a brainstorming post, not a “go out and do this” post. (Although if you absolutely have to do this trick for some reason, I do have a few remaining copies of that magazine page and I’ll sell you one for…hmmm… $12.34. “That’s a lot for one single sheet of magazine paper.” You’re right. It might be a lot if I was trying to sell these. But I’m trying not to sell these (I’d rather just hang onto them, as now I have two tricks I use them for), I’m just trying to make them available for someone who feels they “have” to have one.

Let’s think of some other ways the idea of a prediction within the card holder can be used. I think the most fruitful path to pursue is to get away from thinking of playing cards. That makes the most sense too because playing cards are usually in a deck, not separated out. So having a special holder for playing cards isn’t the most natural thing.

It may make sense to work backwards and think of what the document is that’s been folded to make the little wallet and then decide what type of cards might be inside. For example, if the wallet was made of a map (on the inside) then you could have blank cards with directions or coordinates on them or something, and your force 4 or 5 cards would indicate one location, then when you unfold the wallet they see a map with that location circled.

Or you could have cards that have a squiggly line drawn from one edge of the card to another edge. Four of these are forced in the Origami Poker style. These four “random” squiggle cards are pieced together in a way where they form one continuous line. When the wallet is unfolded, that exact abstract shape has been predicted. Or the “abstract” shape isn’t as abstract as first imagined. Maybe it looks abstract, then when you unfold the wallet you reveal a travel poster for Iceland and you point out that the shape the spectator made is the outline of Iceland.

Or this, you have 16 cards which can be put together to form a piece of artwork. From my understanding, magicians are aware of only one piece of art, the Mona Lisa, so let’s use that as an example. You have a packet of cards that form the Mona Lisa. The cards are shuffled by you and the spectator and “folded” into one pile. All the face down pieces are removed and the puzzle is put together with just the 11 random face-up pieces. So there are 5 missing blocks. Then when the card holder is unfolded it reveals the Mona Lisa with the identical five chunks missing.

You could also fold the wallet a little smaller and use it to hold a bunch of the small size Polaroid pictures. Your prediction could be a group photo of four or five people on normal printer paper which you make into the wallet. Then during a party you take individual shots of the people there and print them out on a Zip Printer. Then you do the trick with the photos. They “randomly” select a group of people and that exact group is in the group photo that wallet is made of. Then you refold everything, put the pictures back, and leave it all as a gift for the person you performed for.

Again, this is all just brainstorming. Even the Samantha Fox thing is something I’ve only performed twice. But the cleverness of the wallet and the “tidiness” of the wallet becoming the prediction are the sorts of things spectator’s seem to enjoy. So I think there are a lot of potential uses here. If you come up with something interesting, let me know.

Dustings of Woofle #5

After some deep soul searching, consultation with my pastor, as well as with my pastor’s pastor, I have decided to go back to publishing on a regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, with the occasional non-magic post thrown in on Tuesday/Thursday. Doing shorter posts on no schedule sounded like it would be the ideal way to fit the writing of this site in around the other stuff, including performing, working on the next book, and other magic and non-magic projects. But the posts never got shorter, so it never became the sort of thing where I could say, “Oh, I’ll just write up something quick when I have a spare 45 minutes.”

So I think going back to a regular schedule will actually be easier for me. But I’m free to change my mind at any point and mix it up because I can do whatever I want. I’m the straw that stirs the drink, baby!

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I have not read (or even heard of, until recently) the book, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic. So I can’t say for sure if it’s any good. But I will say the author does have a keen sense of beautiful writing. From page 224…

Okay, Andy, but “beautiful” doesn’t narrow down which post he’s talking about. Your beautiful writing is your calling card.

True, true. The specific post he was referencing was this one.

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Magical Transformations Pt. 2

The evolution of the back of the Squishers deck.

1. The initial drawing to show the general layout.

2. Stasia’s sketch based on that drawing and the original Squeezers back.

3. My adjustment to the initial image. I wanted the bottom cat to be more facing up, towards the sky, than out, towards the viewer. But I don'’t have the artistic skills to express that, so I took a toy army man and used him instead.

4. The final product.

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Here’s a free tool to create traditional style branching anagrams.

For example, let’s say you wanted to do a trick where someone could think of a word related to me, the author of this site. You would just input the most obvious words, separated by a comma:

Jerx, Andy, blog, magic, genius, beautiful, writing, well-endowed

And it would spit out this…

And then you’re able to test the anagram or save it.

I have found some benefit in just building out the anagram yourself, manually, and I would probably recommend that if you have something specific you want to do . But this is definitely much simpler and will give you the opportunity to iterate much faster and try out different word groupings.

There’s also probably an effect based in the fact that you can create an anagram at an instant. For example you could have someone text you a list of words, and almost immediately you could call them and read their mind over the phone. It’s not a great idea, but it might be the beginning of a decent one.

Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Watch

A couple months ago I was watching this outstanding cover of Rage Against the Machine’s, Bulls on Parade by Denzel Curry.

At around 2:25 in the video, right when he’s just about to drop a verse from his song Sirens over the guitar solo, it looked to me like he gave himself the sign of the cross. Looking at it now, I’m not sure that’s what he was doing. He really only touches his forehead and chest. But it doesn’t really matter either way. It just matters what I thought he was doing.

So, in my head, he was giving himself the sign of the cross before launching into that rapid-fire verse. Which made some sense. It’s not unusual to see someone do that before anything they might find challenging, like engaging in a UFC fight or walking the runway for Victoria’s Secret.

So I thought, “Hey, maybe I’ll start doing the sign of the cross before a magic trick.” (That’s not what I ended up doing, but it was my original thought.) I thought it might pique someone’s interest. Think of it, even with the most absurd trick. Like a plastic Tenyo effect. If you were a spectator and someone showed you that trick, you might enjoy it or not or whatever. But what if, before the magician showed it to you, you saw her casually give herself the sign of the cross in your peripheral vision. Wouldn’t that give you pause? Wouldn’t you at least think, “I wonder what that was all about?”

Now, imagine it’s done before some intense mind reading effect. You see the magician give himself the sign of the cross. Is he doing that because what he’s about to try is really hard? Is he doing that because it’s scary to him? Is he doing it because he’s calling on a higher power to help him out? Or is it just a meaningless habit?

Who knows, I just think it’s a potentially interesting moment that adds a small element to what’s about to occur. If your audience saw you do the sign of the cross before a Magic Square routine (especially if they felt like they “caught” you doing it, not that you were doing it for them to see), I think people would interpret that as a sign that you’re about to do something you’re not overly confident in. And toning down your confidence is a sure-fire way to increase tension and interest.

I couldn’t really start doing this though, because I’m not known among my friends to be a religious person. It wouldn’t make sense.

So I decided to try something similar. Before a trick I would turn away slightly and tap out an X on the back of my hand. And I did it consistently for about six weeks with almost all tricks (unless it was a trick where I was claiming to be in no way responsible for what was going to happen).

I didn’t draw any attention to it, but I would notice people noticing me do it. Only one person commented on it the first time they saw, but a handful of people who saw more than one trick over that time mentioned it to me.

“What were you doing with your hand?” they’d ask.

“Huh?”

“Did you tap something on your hand? I saw you do that another time as well.”

“Uhm, it’s just… nothing. Nervous tic.”

Now, going forward, when I perform for them, I try and hide this gesture from them. I mean, not really. But I try to make it seem like I’m hiding the gesture. A couple people have “caught” me doing it and called me out. What are they thinking? I’m not sure. This isn’t the sort of thing I can ask them about without breaking the fiction and ending the “game” we’re playing.

I assume they’re thinking, “Is he screwing with me? Probably… right?” But the fact that I’m not openly mentioning it to them will, I think, cause them to at least consider that there’s maybe something going on there. Not necessarily some genuinely “mystical” hand gesture, but maybe something that helps me focus or calms my nerves? Yes, that seems to make sense. Surely it’s not some actual ritualistic behavior that means anything, right?

It doesn’t have to be the tapping. Maybe it’s a necklace you pull out from under your shirt and rub a small medallion which hangs from it before a trick. Maybe it’s something you hum to yourself. Any type of ritualistic gesture or action could capture their attention.

What’s the point of all this? I’ve written in the past about the concept of Smearing (here and here, for example). These are techniques used to extend the presentation past the boundaries of the trick itself and to tie multiple tricks together over time. In my experience, they help keep your long-term audiences a little more engaged. These sorts of things give them something more to chew on than they get with a series of completely disconnected tricks.

April By the Numbers

In April I performed 92 tricks for 72 different audiences. (“Audience” = a person or group of people.)

• 60 audiences saw 1 trick.

• 8 audiences saw two tricks (6 audiences saw two tricks in one setting, the other 2 audiences saw two tricks on different occasions).

• 4 audiences saw four tricks (over the course of the month).

55 of the 72 audiences were friends, relatives, acquaintances. 17 of the audiences were strangers.

The average audience size was 1.7 people. 77% of my performances were for one person. The largest group of people I performed for was 12.

80 of the 92 tricks were planned. 12 were done impromptu.

52 performances were of a trick or presentation of my own devising. 19 were tricks I was trying out in order to potentially review for the X-Comm newsletter. 21 were other people’s effects that are in my regular repertoire.

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One of the most time-consuming parts of doing this site the way I want to is finding people to perform tricks for without burning those people out on tricks. If I’m dating someone or working on a short-term project with people, they may end up seeing tricks more frequently. But generally I try to not show people more than one trick a month, on average. That’s still 12 tricks a year. That’s still a lot, I think. And—while I don’t track this closely—I try to make sure that at least a third of the time we hang out there is no magic involved (unless they specifically request it).

So, imagine that, you’re in a position where you want to perform a trick, on average about three times a day. But you don’t want to perform for the same person more than once a month. And you don’t have regular co-workers you can perform for. It’s forced me to become a little social-butterfly. My social circle has probably grown by a factor of ten since starting the site. It takes a lot to be a professional amateur magician.

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My most performed trick last month was performed nine times. It’s called The Wuzzles and it will appear in the next book (although probably under a different name). It’s a strange one. I had the original idea about two years ago and was just going to throw it on this site as kind of a jokey method for a 50/50 prediction trick. But it got a much stronger reaction than I anticipated. The presentation grew since then. It takes about 5-10 minutes to perform, depending on how you go about it, and it evolved into something I thought was impossible: a truly engrossing and baffling single 50/50 prediction. One that sticks with people. There are certainly a number of tricks in the next book that are much more overwhelmingly powerful than this one; but this one really seems to eat away at people for a long time. And it’s got an interesting method. It essentially uses exposure in order to fool people.

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I visited 18 different cafes (42 visits total) and spent $320 on coffees for myself and others in April. That’s almost $4000 a year in coffee costs. And I don’t even really like coffee. But a cafe is an ideal place to perform (for my purposes). Obviously it’s a great place to meet people you know for a quick hang-out. But it’s also one of the most ideal places to show something to strangers. People are seated, there are tables, it’s not super loud, and many people are there alone. Contrast that to a bar where people are often standing around with a group and music may be blaring. I’ve certainly shown magic to people in bars on occasion, but very rarely anything long-form they can get truly engrossed in.

At a cafe it feels completely socially acceptable—at least in the US—to turn to the person next to you (assuming they’re not absorbed in something else) and start up a conversation with them. It’s relatively normal. At least more so than bothering someone at the library or trying to flag someone down in a mall. And, of course, in a coffee shop it’s perfectly natural to have books, food/drink, silverware, napkins, sugar packets, money, loyalty cards, computers, games, playing cards, etc.

So the $4000 annual coffee shop budget may seem exorbitant, but it’s also kind of a necessity for what I’m trying to do. I think of it as renting office space.

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You might think, “Can’t you just sit at home and come up with ideas? Can’t you just imagine how these things will play out?” No. I can’t. Maybe someone can, at least with a different style of magic. But with the social style of tricks, I just see no way of getting an accurate read on this sort of thing without actually performing them. I don’t really believe in magic theory. I believe in testing things out and getting results and talking to the audience and getting feedback. That doesn’t seem like “theory” to me, that seems like “magic science.”

The need for testing is magnified when it comes to “trick-adjacent” ideas. I’ll have an idea for a little “extra presentational” bit and I’ll have no clue how people might react. I may think it’s going to be very clever and then use it in five performances and not a single person will notice or comment on it. Or it may be something that they end up latching onto more than the trick itself. It’s impossible to know.

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about one of these ideas that I included in many of my April performances. It’s a nearly imperceptible bit of theater you can add to many tricks that seemed to intrigue a number of the people who saw it last month.

The Non-Binary Binary Prediction Principle

This is a variation on a Karl Fulves prediction idea that came to me from reader, Leo Reed. It’s not the sort of thing that you can base a whole trick around, at least not in my opinion, but it’s something that can be an interesting added element to a routine in a few different ways.

Gender Is Fluid

Here is the principle in its most basic incarnation. You would never do this as a trick by itself, but just to understand the concept, here’s what it might look like.

There is an envelope on the table. You tell the person it’s a drawing of a sign on a public restroom door.

“Do you think it’s a men’s room or a women’s room?”

They answer. You cut open the envelope and remove the paper from the envelope and they were correct.

Method

This is the prediction inside the envelope.

The prediction should be in an envelope of approximately the same size. Depending on their response, you will cut open the envelope to reveal the prediction and, in the process, cut off the incorrect part of the prediction.

So depending on where you cut you will have one of these options.

You don’t want to use a 3X5 card or something like that for the prediction. If you do, it will seem incomplete when they see it afterwards, because it’s not the dimensions they’re used to. Instead you want something that feels longer than you’d expect. So once you cut off the incorrect part, the remaining piece seems to be of normal dimensions.

Simple, and as I said, probably not that great in isolation.

Here are some uses of the principle that might be a little more interesting.

Gender Reveal

You could predict the gender of someone’s unborn baby. Have the prediction set up so it says, “It’s a boy!” at the top and “It’s a girl!” at the bottom. Same stick figure drawing.

The “when” and “where” of introducing the envelope and then opening it are going to depend on your relationship with the parents and when they end up learning the sex of the baby themselves.

Ideally you’d want them to have the envelope in their possession before even they know the gender of the baby. They don’t know what it is. It’s just some mysterious envelope you had them sign and told them not to open. Then after they learn what it is you come over again and open the envelope to reveal you knew all along.

It may be hard to orchestrate that all in reality. But it’s an interesting idea.

Pendulum Proof

I’ve seen pendulum routines where a pendulum will go back and forth over a male’s image and in a circle over a female’s image.

“Skeptics will say you’re moving it yourself somehow without even knowing it. That’s nonsense, of course. Ideomotor effect? More like, idiot motor effect! Take that James Randi! Anyway, I can prove it’s real. I have a simple stick figure drawing of a man or woman inside this envelope. I don’t even know what it is myself. I sealed one man drawing and one woman drawing in an envelope before I left home, mixed them up randomly, and took just one with me. So I don’t know what it is and you don’t know what it is. I don’t want you to try and guess what it is. Just hold the pendulum and let it tell us what it is.”

Celebrity Paraphilic Infantilism Gag

I have a friend who does magic professionally who is using this in the following way. He tells people he has been learning to draw caricatures of celebrities. It’s his true passion and he hopes to one day drop magic altogether, but until then he has an effect that combines the two. He brings out a notepad and a sealed envelope. The first half of the notebook has different male celebrity names on each page, the second half has different female celebrity names on each page. He has one person open the notebook to a male name and another person open the notebook to a female name.“Inside that envelope is only one sketch of a celebrity. There are 100 celebrities in that notebook. You are each thinking of one random celebrity. We’ve narrowed 100 down to two. Now we need to select one winner from those two. How should we do it?”

This is the fun part. He lets them decided how to pick the winning celebrity (or winning spectator depending on how you want to frame it). Maybe they flip a coin. Maybe they play rock paper scissors. Maybe they arm wrestle. Maybe they have a 30 second verbal debate and a third-party at the table is the judge. Maybe they see who can throw an olive the furthest. It can be anything. And it’s not like you could have made an educated guess as far as which person would win because you let them decide the nature of the competition.

So now you know who won, and you also know if that means you need to remove the male or female version of the image.

Your prediction is set up like this.

If you need to reveal the guy drawing, you cut off the bottom of envelope/prediction and pull the sketch down and most of the way out of the envelope to reveal the stick-man, but not the name yet.

“There he is,” you say. “It’s a pretty good likeness, I think. I’m proud of it.” This is like the “baby gag” in magic, and was in Leo Reed’s original write up of the principle to me. You milk that for what it’s worth, then you say, “You don’t think it’s accurate? Did I not get it right? Who did you pick?” They name their celebrity and you pull the picture out the rest of the way and show the name. “That’s exactly who I thought. How could you not see that? Maybe the chin isn’t completely right, but it’s pretty close.”

If you need to reveal the girl image, you cut off the top of the envelope/prediction and pull the sketch up and out of the envelope to the “waist” of the image. “What do you think, does that look like your celebrity?” You go back and forth on this for a bit. You ask them to name the celebrity for the first time “for the people who live under a rock and can’t recognize my drawing.” They say, Natalie Portman. You then pull up more and reveal the stick figure is in a dress, “proving 100% I knew exactly who would be chosen. Famous dress-wearer, Natalie Portman.” They’re of course thinking this is just more of a gag because you had a 50/50 chance of it being a woman. You then pull the prediction out all the way to reveal the name.

This, I think, with the gags and stuff, is not the sort of thing I would do for friends. But I do like that part where they decide how winner will be decided between the two celebrities. That feels like it could lead to some genuinely spontaneous moments.

The method is, of course, one Svenpad®️ (or similar) with men’s names in the top half and women’s in the bottom, or you may prefer to use two separate pads.

Picklepants

“Whenever my niece stays with me, she tells me a bedtime story. I said that right. I don’t tell her one. She tells me one. Each one is about some royal family living in some mystical land somewhere, but they’re totally fucking insane. They all have these crazy names and get involved in totally messed up shit. Last week it was something like King Queefingham is building giant robot dogs to devour the moon or something. She has a crazy imagination. I keep a list of the characters she’s created in my phone. They’re strangely evocative and I’ve found out something weird that seems to work much more often than it should.”

You ask your spectator to name a number between 1 and 100.

You open your phone and go to your list of character names and have them read off some of the names they see there. King Sparkles. Shadow Charm. The Caramel Star Twins.

Next to the chosen number 78 is Picklepants.

“Picklepants. That was a good story if I remember correctly.”

You draw their attention to an envelope that’s been on the table the whole time. “I asked my niece to draw one of her favorite characters for me to show you guys tonight. One that she thought you’d be drawn to in some way. I have no idea what she drew yet. Let’s check…, oh wait. In the Picklepants story there was a king and his daughter, the princess. Do you think it’s the king or the princess?”

They say the princess.

You open the envelope and slide out the picture. It’s a crayon drawing of a stick figure in a dress with a crown.

“Yup, that’s her. Princess Picklepants. That’s crazy.”

They’re not convinced so you turn over the paper and there it says, “Princess Picklepants.”

The basic idea for this came out of Leo Reed’s email to me. I’ve expanded the story and tweaked the methodology and the nature of the prediction.

This uses the Digital Force Bag app, of course any other way to force “Picklepants” would work just as well. Cards with names on them, a forcing notepad, an actual force bag. In my opinion the phone makes the most sense.

The prediction paper is set up like this. This is on the front side.

Then turn over the paper end for end so the head is at the bottom of the page and write this.

If your spectator says it’s the princess you’ll refer to the character as Princess Picklepants. You’re not cutting off any of the image, just the words “the king” on the back.

if she says it’s the king you say, “Ah yes, Picklepants the King. An unforgettable character.” And when you cut open the envelope you’ll be removing the word “princess” as well as the bottom of the dress and legs from the image.

Combining a small, obviously free choice with a force is something I wrote about in Magic For Young Lovers. It’s very powerful. They can’t just say “the phone (or the notepad or whatever) was gimmicked” because that free choice somewhat lessens the importance of the force procedure. And the fact that the name of the character is written so large in a way that is apparently unalterable makes this a nice combination of methods.

There you have it. Thanks to Leo Reed for sharing the idea of turning a skirt into legs, and to Karl Fulves for starting us along this path with his trick, “How to Predict the Super Bowl” in his Big Book of Magic Tricks. If you’re interested in that you can find out more in a post I wrote three years ago about some modifications to his prediction system.

Mailbag #4

I loved your experiment on the classic force [See the posts The Force Awakens and The Force Unleashed], and found the results fascinating, however I think you may be slightly off with your conclusions.

 Your participants were rating the various forces not in the context of a routine, but in a vacuum. It's true that the classic force doesn't cope too well with too much heat or scrutiny put on it, mostly as you mention in the article because it's over quickly, they can't change their minds, and also because it doesn't really stick in the memory. 

But to me these are also its greatest strengths. Let me explain:

There are lots of very different contexts where we might need to force a card. For some, the selection procedure is pivotal to the overall strength of the effect. […]

But let's say you're forcing an odd-backed card which will be signed by the spectator. When their signed card changes colour, the question of "how the fuck did my card turn red" doesn't lead them directly to the real secret. In this instance the more forgettable the selection process the better. Imagine that same trick with an elaborate, 5-minute selection procedure involving card eliminations, dice rolling etc. It would only help point the spectator in the direction of a force.

The classic force is also brilliant for not getting in the way of the story of the trick. As you're talking, casually telling someone "grab one of these cards" allows you to keep the spectator in the fiction of the effect, since it requires the absolute minimum of effort and concentration from the spectator. A cross-cut force, on the other hand, forces you to pause the action while the spectator is sent crashing back to reality for a moment before you can pick up where you left off.

I still think it's a brilliant piece of research, and am looking forward to seeing more of these experiments in the future, but I just wanted to say that the results don't tell the whole story, and that the classic force has more going for it than the naked numbers suggest. —BD

First, just to be clear, I’m not trying to talk anyone out of the classic force.

That being said, I’m not sure I agree with your logic. Your email presupposes that there are a good number of tricks in magic that involve a selection, where the selection itself isn’t that important. I don’t think there are many tricks that fall into that category. The example you used, forcing an odd-backed playing card, doesn’t really track in that context. It’s one of the few things you definitely can’t do with a classic force. Unless you do it face-up, in which case it becomes an even more rushed procedure and feels even less like a choice because you’re showing them the faces of the cards but not enough to let them pick a particular one they like.

One other thing to think of is that even if a selection isn’t pivotal to the strength of a trick, the spectator probably doesn’t know that. To them it’s almost always important in that moment.

I agree there are some tricks where the selection isn’t important, in which case, maybe it’s best to just drop the selection altogether and just pluck a card off the top of the deck and say, “Here, sign this.” That seems perfectly reasonable for a torn and restored card, for example. David Copperfield didn’t have to a say, “Here, Gretzky, choose any one of these 52 Honus Wagner cards for me to tear and restore.”

Another thing about the classic force is—even with perfect execution—it can fail, or at least become obvious, if the spectator has an agenda. If they’re thinking, “I think I’ll pick a card near the top,” or, “I’m going to make him wait until he’s almost out of cards,” or, “I’m going to pick a card I’m really drawn to,” then the classic force feels exactly like what it is. (Yes, I know there are techniques to deal with those situations. But I wouldn’t say they’re great.)

To your point, BD, I’m sure there are some circumstances where the classic force is best. For example, when you want to keep your table-hopping set moving, or when you want to demonstrate how good you are at forcing a card. I’ve seen people delighted to have the same card classic forced on them over and over again. It’s impressive.

But generally I think it’s less useful than I had always assumed for the first three decades in my magic life. The impression I always had from the magic literature was, “If you can do a classic force, do that, of course. If not, use some other, lesser, force.” It wasn’t until testing the forces that I really understood some of the inherent flaws of the technique from the spectator’s perspective.

We’ve done some further testing on forces since those original posts were written. In this round of testing we did use them in the context of a trick. We also included, what I consider to be, a genuinely awful force for comparison, which was interesting. More details on that in the Testing Results Annual (or something more cleverly named) that will go out to supporters later this season.

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At the beginning of this year you mentioned having shorter posts. I’m not complaining, but I don’t think they’ve gotten any shorter. —AL

Yeah, I know. I need to figure that out, because ultimately it’s probably not sustainable. Between the site, the newsletter and the next book (which looks like it will be 80%+ brand new material), that’s like 1200 pages of magic content this year. And I’m not someone who can sit with a deck of cards and come up with ideas. I really only get ideas in the process of coming up with something to actually show someone. Most of the content for this site and the books and newsletter come directly from performing for people and getting their feedback. So it’s not only the hours involved in the writing, but even more hours involved in trying out different tricks or ideas.

“Oh, poor Andy, he has to find time to perform magic for people and write about it for money. Boo hoo. So sad. Well, I’m off to my job: tarring a roof in 95 degree heat for $12 an hour. Take care, Andy. You’ll be in my thoughts. Try not to get injured at work. Like, maybe you’re having too much fun with your friends while showing them a trick and you laugh too hard and throw your back out. That would be terrible.”

Okay, I get it. I know I’m lucky. I’m just saying it’s more time consuming than you’d imagine, and I need to get better at managing that time. Shorter posts are still coming. I think.

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Sometimes people write with non-magic issues. I’m including this one here because it’s pretty much the standard advice I give everyone dealing with any issue: Get on with it, and find a way to turn it into a positive.

Yesterday was one of the worst days of my life. My girlfriend that I’d email you about broke up with me. Turns out she didn’t want to talk to me about anything after 5 years and then told me she had already been seeing another guy. So I’m fucking destroyed. -GC

Give yourself five more minutes to be sad about it then move on. 

Then, going forward, every time you think of it and it's affecting you negatively, you take that as a cue to do something positive to make yourself a better person (whatever that may be--take a walk, read a chapter of a self-help book, go to the gym, do some work on a business you want to start or whatever). Now you're using the thing that "destroyed" your life as the stimulus to build a better version of yourself.

Use this same technique anytime anything "bad" happens to you and you will soon realize that nothing bad can happen to you. The more difficult the situation, the more it inspires you to work on yourself, the more profound your positive growth, and the better off you'll be. Problem solved. 

An Exposure Koan

Imagine I give you a deck of cards, you shuffle it, select a card, return it to the deck, shuffle it, then you hand me the deck and I find the card. Assume I achieved this by the use of a marked deck.

You might say that’s not that interesting a trick. You’re probably right. In its most basic form, it’s not very interesting.

Okay, now let’s say I give you a deck of cards, you shuffle it, then I spread it on the table face-up and take a picture. Then you select a card, replace it, shuffle the deck and hand it to me. I spread it again on the table and take a picture of it.

“It’s a pretty complicated algorithm,” I say. “The program compares the order of the deck in the first picture to the order of the deck in the second picture, calculates in the shuffles, looks for the card that is out of sequence, and voila, it identifies the card you chose. How else?”

It’s a goof, of course. The truth is I just used a marked deck and all the picture taking and talk of algorithms was just presentation. A presentation that many would think is more interesting than just saying “pick a card and shuffle and I’ll find it.”

But, here’s where it gets complicated.

The fact is, there is an app—well, a combination of apps—that can do exactly what the “goof” presentation suggests. That is, you can have a deck shuffled, take a picture of it, have a card selected, returned to the deck, and have the deck shuffled again (multiple times), then you can take a picture and the app compares the first picture to the second and identifies which card was selected.

You need Vision: The Card Spread Analyzer by Martin Eisele

And CardTrack by Marc Kerstein

What is the point I’m making? I’m not sure, really. That’s why I called this a “koan” not “a well considered point on exposure.”

I guess what I find odd is this: if you do this trick with a marked deck, you’re a thoughtful magician putting some effort into presentation. If you do it with the app, you’re exposing the trick and breaking a cardinal rule of magic. But the experience for the spectator would be (essentially) identical regardless of which version you performed. In fact, even a knowledgable magician might have no idea which version you did if they were just watching. The president of the IBM might say, “If that trick doesn’t use an app, I’d like to write up your presentation in the Linking Ring. If that does use an app, then you’re kicked out of the IBM for exposure.”

I just find that interesting.

We’re probably due for a complete overhaul of what exposure means in an era where laymen can discover the secret to nearly any trick with a couple minutes of searching online. We can’t think of it the way we did in the 1950’s. “Call the ethics committee! Blackstone revealed the rubber pencil illusion on the back of a Sugar Rice Krinkles box!”

I don’t know what the answers are, but I have done pretty much the best writing on the subject. Specifically about how we can utilize exposure for stronger magic. See this post, Four Uses of Exposure, and the beginning of this post. That’s a starting point.