Introducing Chad Brooks

We all know the owner and operator of the Magic Café, Steve Brooks.

But most of you probably aren’t familiar with his older brother, Chad Brooks.

Chad and Steve have a complicated relationship. Chad was banned from the Café for mentioning my site, and now the two aren’t speaking. It’s unfortunate.

Since Chad no longer has the Café as an outlet to share his thoughts on the magic world, I’ve offered him some space here on The Jerx to weigh in on recent discussions happening on the Café.

I don’t usually hand the reins over to anyone else, but in this case, I feel a bit responsible for the sibling rift and for Chad’s exile from the Café.

Besides, Chad and I actually see eye to eye on a surprising number of magic-related topics. So, with that... here’s Chad:

Hi guys. Good to be here, and big thanks to Andy for letting me guest post.

I miss Stevie. I really do. I hope we can put all this behind us. I’m sorry for mentioning The Jerx on the Café, Stevie! Can’t we just be brothers again?

Who’s been there for you your whole life? Who stuck by your side during the Fruit by the Foot incident at the mall, when you were chowing down on one end and the other end got sucked into the escalator and you refused to let go so the fire department had to be called to set you free? Who kept you calm while your legs were flailing and everyone was filming on their phones?

That was me. Your big brother.

Anyway, here are a few quick thoughts on some threads fromn the Latest and Greatest section over at Stevie’s site.

ONE CARD by Daniel Garcia

Danny Garcia is one of my all-time favorite creators and no one is as excited to see him back as I am.

And I think this new trick of his is strong and looks very clean.

However, the premise is ultimately just, “I predicted the card you would name.”

Perhaps Andy has poisoned me with his “Carefree” performance philosophy, but I can’t help but ask myself if I’m going to carry around an index and a special envelope just for the sake of performing that premise. I don’t see it happening.

I will likely still buy it to support Danny’s work, but I’m going to have to find another premise to explore with the props.

The more existential question to think about here is, “Is there any reason to create more tricks where you’ve predicted the card someone will name?”

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Life Lessons from the Magic Cafe

Just about any reasonable size object you can put up to your lips can become your harmonica.

So true.

I like to use that Invisible Harmonica trick when I go down on my wife. Heeeeee-HAWWWWNNNNN!

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The card in their hand, is the card they're THINKING of!?

It’s a good thing Greg Rostami put a question mark at the end of this thread title, because the answer is, “No. No it’s not.”

Instead, the card in their hand is a QR code, which leads to a picture of the card they’re thinking of.

I’ll be honest: I think any trick that uses a QR code is probably bad magic. No matter how you frame it, revealing a prediction via QR code just feels needlessly convoluted. And worse, it often points to the method.

“Well, he couldn’t just show me the actual prediction because he didn’t know what I’d say. So he must have some way of directing this QR code to what I said after the fact.” Which is precisely what’s going on.

And whatever you do, definitely don’t do what Greg does in the performance video linked in that thread. He tells the woman: “There’s a person in the photo you’re holding, and they’re holding your card.” She names the card. She turns the photo over. The person is holding… a QR code.

WHY WOULD YOU TELL PEOPLE YOU’RE GOING TO DO A BETTER TRICK THAN YOU’RE ACTUALLY GOING TO DO?

A QR code is always going to feel like a downgrade from a direct, visual prediction. So if you’re going to use one, the trick you describe needs to sound even less impressive than the QR code reveal. That way, the effect still builds.

Perhaps, “The person in this photo is holding a card that the’s exact same color as the card you’re thinking of. What card are you thinking of?”

The King of Clubs.

“So, a black card? Would you be shocked if the person in the photo was also holding a black card? Take a look. See? It’s a black QR code. But it’s even a little more accurate than that. Just scan that for me.”

OR

The Four of Hearts

“So, a red card? Would you be shocked if the person in the photo was also holding a red card? Take a look. Oh, yeah, it’s a QR code. But I swear it’s a QR code that goes to a picture of a red card. Just scan it and see.”

I’m not saying that’s great. I’m just saying: at least it doesn’t set up an impossible trick and then deliver a disappointing compromise.

Delay, Deflect, Distract—And Other Ways to Mishandle Suspicion

Imagine this. You think your significant other is cheating on you.

Why would I tell my AI girlfriend to cheat on me?

No, sorry, I wasn’t clear. For the sake of this thought experiment, imagine you’re in a relationship with a real live person of whatever sex you prefer. I’ll describe it from my hetero male perspective.

So: you think your girlfriend might be cheating. There have been signs—little things—over the past few months. You’re trying not to spiral, but it’s been eating at you.

Then one day, you get up from the couch to grab a drink. As you pass the hallway, you see her standing outside the bathroom door, staring at her phone. She has this soft, dopey smile on her face. She’s biting her lower lip. She looks captivated. She doesn’t know you’re watching.

You say, “What are you looking at?”

Startled, she jumps a little. “Oh,” she says, “it’s just a picture. It’s… my mom’s cat.”

You’re suspicious. “Let me see it,” you say.

She turns the phone to you to show you a picture of her mom’s cat. Your suspicion dissipates.

That’s one scenario.

Now, imagine any of these things happen.

1. She says, “Sure, just a second.” She taps her phone a few times, turns it to you, and shows you a picture of a cat.

2. She says, “Okay, I’m going to take a screenshot of what I’m looking at and then text it to you.”

3. She ducks into the bathroom for a couple of seconds, then steps back into the hallway and shows you her phone. “See? Just a picture of a cat.”

4. She puts the phone in her pocket and says, “Hey, do I have a bug bite on the back of my neck?” Then a couple of minutes later, she brings out her phone and shows you a picture, and says, “This is what I was looking at.”

Do you think you’d be satisfied with any of those four options? Would you be convinced and have your mind put at ease? Or would you be even more suspicious?

Calen Morelli has a trick out called Quantum Aperture. It’s an incredible illusion and I have no idea how it works.

Over on this Magic Cafe thread, they’re discussing ways to clean up at the end, with mostly awful results.

During the trick, all suspicion is focused on this incredible card with the moving hole.

If, when the trick is over, you do anything to break their focus on the card or hide it from them or put it in contact with a full deck of cards, you’re just creating additional suspicion.

If you do anything other than hand them the card at the end, they’re going to know you did “something.”

Stop pretending you don’t understand how suspicion works.

Think back to your girlfriend and her phone. When suspicion has already been triggered, any indirect actions just make it worse.

Magic works the same way.

Creating additional suspicion is fine if you’re just showing them a puzzle.

But if you’re trying to create a moment of genuine impossibility, you need to resolve their suspicion in a direct, natural way.

Anything other than that and you’re fooling yourself, not your spectator.

Progressive Anagram Tool

Here’s an excellent tool for generating Progressive Anagrams, created by supporter Glen S.

I call it the Glen S. Progressive Anagram Tool. Or G-SPAT.

The G-SPAT is not a myth. With proper technique, the G-SPAT can generate immense pleasure.

While I’ve used some other progressive anagram tools in the past, this one strikes the right balance of ease of use and customizability.

You start by entering the list of words you want to use for your anagram.

For instance, let’s say I’m developing some kid’s show material and have a fun little routine in mind where the birthday boy imagines being knifed to death by one of America’s most prolific serial killers. I have him focus deeply on the scene—ideally to the point of tears. I tell him to picture writing the killer’s name on the floor in the blood pouring from his stomach.

“That’s it. Now you’re dead. It’s my job, as the psychic detective, to step inside your mind and try to pick up on the letters you smeared in dried blood across the kitchen tile.”

A real crowd-pleaser.

So to create this trick, I grab the names of the top serial killers.

1. Samuel Little

2. Gary Ridgway

3. Ted Bundy

4. John Wayne Gacy

5. Jane Toppan

6. Jeffrey Dahmer

7. H.H. Holmes

8. William Bonin

9. Patrick Kearney

10. Earle Nelson

11. Ronald Dominique

12. Larry Eyler

13. Randy Kraft

14. Angel Resendiz

15. Donald Harvey

16. Joseph DeAngelo

17. Dean Corll

18. Juan Corona

19. Richard Ramirez

20. Edmund Kemper

And I put that list into the text box on that site.

Now we have a couple of options:

Hide letters that will increase the maximum number of guesses

If you check that box, then it will prioritize making the shortest anagrams (the Transgressive-style of anagram I’ve written about in the past).

If you don’t check that box, and instead check:

Sort letters by total number of matches (instead of alphabetical)

Then you can create an anagram and choose the letters you like to maximize the number of hits.

Either way, when you enter your list, you’ll get a chart like this, which tells you how many options have each letter in it. Don’t get confused, it’s very simple. You click on whichever letter you want to start with and that will take you to the next step in your anagram.

It’s fast, intuitive, and really well-designed. It took me about 15 seconds to generate each of these anagrams.

Shortest (Transgressive-Style) No more than 5 guesses

Most Hits - No more than two misses

If you’re not familiar with this type of anagram chart (I may have invented it while building them in Excel—or maybe it’s just obvious), here’s how it works: You start with the letter in the left-most column. If the spectator says yes, you follow the green path to the next letter. If they say no, you follow the red path instead.

Thanks to Glen for creating it and letting me share it with you.

Mailbag #138

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with kind words for the 10-year anniversary of the site.

If I didn’t reply—or if my reply was especially short—it’s only because responding to purely complimentary messages makes me feel like a lunatic: “Why yes, good point. I am something special, aren’t I?”

Rather than respond to a bunch of similar emails in this post, here’s a representatively nice one…

Just wanted to send a quick note to thank you for ten years of consistently thoughtful and hilarious writing. In a world where so much feels uncertain or heavy, it’s meant more than you probably realize to have your voice show up with such regularity. That kind of creative consistency is rare and weirdly comforting. You've built something special, and I’m really grateful for it.—I.S.

Thank you. I get a lot of emails calling out specific tricks I’ve created or concepts I’ve written about, and that’s always great to hear. But I especially appreciate being recognized for the consistency, because that’s the part that actually feels like work. It’s not work to have a good idea—those just show up (or they don’t). So getting called out for that (while nice) is like being complimented on my gorgeous ass. Sure, it’s stunning. But I’m not out here doing squats. That’s just genetics.

The real work is in sitting down to put together daily posts, monthly newsletters, and a book every 18 months. Sticking to that rhythm—that’s the hard part.

This is only possible because of the people who support the site.

Not just in the sense that money coming in allows me to devote time to magic that would otherwise be spent doing other work/creative ventures. But also because I can look at the list of supporters and think, “Oh, here are some people willing to put a little of their money behind something they see as a good thing in their life. Let me keep showing up so that good thing stays there for them.” That’s a powerful motivator for me.

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[Congratulatory message then…] Do you have a plan for how much longer you’ll be doing the site? I hope it continues for many more years to come. It’s part of my morning ritual. —DH

I was looking at the site analytics for the first time in a few years and noticed that 82% of the traffic is direct—people typing in the URL or using a bookmark, not coming in from search or social. I didn’t know if that was good or bad, so I asked ChatGPT, which said:

🤖🤖🤖

📉 Average Direct Traffic for Blogs:

• Typical blogs:
  10% to 25% of total traffic is usually direct.

• Established brands or newsletters:
  May see 30–50% direct, especially if they have loyal repeat visitors.

Interpretation

Given your traffic volume, your 82% direct traffic is way above average, which strongly implies:

• You’re not easily discoverable by casual readers via search or social.

• Your audience is returning deliberately

• You're functioning more like a closed circle or personal newsletter than a growth-oriented blog.

🤖🤖🤖

Those last three bullet points are all things I wanted, but didn’t really think possible when I started the site. I figured if I wanted it to last, I’d need to worry about “optimizing for SEO,” “building content funnels,” “social amplification,” “engagement metrics,” and a bunch of other subjects that sound genuinely depressing to me. For that reason, I assumed the site would quietly fizzle out after a few months.

The only reason that didn’t happen is because you kept coming back—and more specifically because of those of you who choose to support the site without me having to beg you.

The moment this writing gig becomes a sales job, that’s when I’ll bail. I’m not a salesman.

But if the current relationship holds, I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.

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I was about to let my Genii subscription lapse, but there was a rumor going around at the Michigan Magic Day (and I also read it on facebook) that there’s going to be a cover story or at least a big article about your site for the 10th anniversary. Is that true. And if so, when?—N.N.

lol no, that’s not true. You can let it lapse.

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Congratulations on the hitting the 10-year-anniversary mark. I’ve really enjoyed following your work during this time. Do you have any plans for the next 10 years? Any changes coming to the site or the support structure?
[…]
I hope you continue to develop the Carefree model of performing, it’s totally changed the material I’m working on and I’ve been performing so much more. —DH

Yeah, I definitely have more to explore with the Carefree concept. It’s evolving in real time, and I think once it’s more fully formed, it’ll be genuinely valuable for anyone who connects with the idea.

I don’t have any major changes planned for the site or the support structure. That’s not to say things won’t change—just that nothing’s in the works at the moment.

Going forward, I’ll probably be more open to sharing ideas from others. When I first started the site, people would regularly ask to write guest posts, and I always turned them down for two reasons. First, I didn’t want to become dependent on looking to other people for content, which is likely what would have happened if I began farming out the writing to other people in the early days. Second, I didn’t want the site to just be a bland hodgepodge of multiple viewpoints. I thought (and I was right) that it would be more engaging to people to follow a site with a strong, consistent perspective—even if they don’t always agree with it.

Now, a decade in, I think readers have a better sense of what this site is about. This is never going to be the type of site where I just post someone else’s chop cup handling or something like that. And I doubt I’ll ever have traditional “guest posts” either. But if someone has a trick, or an idea, or a non-traditional performance approach they want to send me, I’m happy to share it if I think it makes sense with the ethos of this site.

The World Wants To Be Charmed

Here we are.

As Josh and Andi once told me at Magifest when I asked how they liked their prostates stimulated: We’re into double digits.

Happy 10-Year Anniversary, my dears.

A few weeks ago, I asked if there were any quotes people had saved from the past decade. I got way too many to post here, so here’s as many as I worked my way through before I got bored with the process. Each links back to the post that spawned it. Thanks to everyone who submitted quotes. And thanks to everyone who has supported the site these past ten years.

See you in June.

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Art decorates space. Music decorates time. Magic decorates reality.

A side-effect of our relationship with screen-based entertainment is that the value of in-person experience begins to rise.

A 15 minute trick should be 14:55 of interesting concepts, intrigue, mystery, new experiences, anticipation, unsettling questions, excursions, mini-adventures, absorbing rituals... and then an impossible climax which either amplifies everything that came before or puts some kind of twist on it.

Anthropomorphizing things is what we do to explain to children. And it's a big part of the reason why magic often comes off as being for children and magicians come off as being condescending.

Don’t snuff the afterglow.

Everyone knows this is fantasy. But that's the power of it. You create some outlandish, weird, chimerical scenario and then do something so strong - not to fool them - but to briefly put them in a situation where this fantastic scenario is the only explanation they have for what just happened.

For me, magic is not about telling people stories. It's about giving them stories to tell.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine you went to a friend's house and sat around a table and one of them said, "Hey, I have a fun idea. Let's engage in an activity that's predicated on all of us playing along with the notion that I'm the most handsomest boy in the whole-wide world!" What would your enthusiasm for that activity be? Well, I hate to break it to you, BUT THAT'S BARELY FUCKING DIFFERENT ENOUGH FROM WHAT MAGICIANS DO TO QUALIFY AS AN ANALOGY!

I believe that anticipation keeps you happy and your mind and heart young. The happiest people I know have things on the horizon they're looking forward to.

I find this to be a very satisfying way to think of amateur magic. This is the hobby of magic as world-building. You're building an alternate reality that seems like ours in most respects but where strange and mysterious things regularly take place.

I frame self-discipline as an expression of free will.

I really like thinking in terms of "thrill" "enthrall" and "excite" as opposed to "fool" when thinking about the experience I want to deliver. It gets me in the right mindset in regards to thinking presentationally rather than methodologically. For the people who write me and ask how to go about coming up with more engaging presentations I think it's helpful to have those words as the target you're shooting for. That's going to have a greater impact on what you present to people than if your goal is just their basic ignorance of your methodology.

I'm not even doing it strictly to "entertain" people. I'm doing it to give people an interesting, novel experience. It's about creating memories. Memories are just new experiences in the past.

If someone watches you do something for 5 minutes do you want them to leave having an experience that made you look incredible or having an experience that made their world seem more incredible?

If you want people to think what you're doing is real, you're a sociopath. Seriously, I think that's a pathetic mental disorder and I feel bad for you and worse for the people you perform for. And it's a poisonous attitude that has held back magic for centuries. If coming off as "real" is a priority for you, then what you're saying is, "I want to dupe dumb people and look ridiculous to smart people."

If you're playing the part of the traditional magician, then feel free to play it cool after the effect. But if you're rejecting that role and instead you're showing them some strange object you found, or trying some experiment you read about, or doing something where they are manifesting the power, then you NEED to react, or the whole experience falls apart. Not reacting is just another way of saying, "That was me. I did that. I'm special.”

Immersive presentations allow you to wring multiple different performances and experiences out of similar effects, which is important when your audience pool is small.

Instead of having a trick that is easily dismissed as being separate from reality, give them an experience that bleeds into reality and doesn't offer any clean lines or easy answers. Create dissonance and make them live in uncertainty for a little bit.

It is always wise to emphasize the interactivity and the mystery because people are craving these things.

It's only when you smear that presentation into their world that you change the nature of the trick into something formless and less definable. The blurred edges prevent them from knowing exactly when the trick started and ended. What they can dismiss as "just a trick" gets muddled. And when a trick gets enmeshed with someone's real life, that's when it becomes their experience as opposed to just your trick.

It’s pretty funny. Like, real person funny, not magician funny (i.e. not funny)

"Magic brings you back to a childhood state of astonishment," is too easily turned into this in a spectator's mind: "Magic will make your feel dumb. You know, like a dumbass baby who doesn't understand shit. Here, let me take you back to the time when you were the dumbest and most vulnerable as my gift to you." And on top of that, is it even true? Are babies constantly in amazement? If so they seem pretty chill about it for the most part. So I would have a hard time saying that to someone.

Magic doesn't exist. So when you learn magic you're not really learning magic. Instead, you are learning dozens of other arts and crafts that allow you to present the illusion of magic. Whenever I talk to friends with kids and we talk about hobbies for the kids, I encourage them to get into magic. Magic is a great gateway to the world around you, and it helps you identify your passions. Outsiders just think of it as sleight-of-hand. But I can't even begin to list all the areas I've had to explore in order to learn and present a particular trick, or magic in general. Writing, acting, comedy, electronics, memory and mnemonics, psychology, gambling, topology, cons, filmmaking, cold reading, juggling, crafting, dance, mime, mathematics, science, history, carpentry, theater, origami, sewing, forgery, animal training, drawing, optics, physical fitness, puzzle solving, and so on and so on. I love that "doing magic" might involve rubber cementing a bunch of shit together, or memorizing the most popular female names of the 20th century, or determining the sight-lines and angles of every seat in a theater so you can build a stage to vanish an elephant on. Other hobbies don't have that range.

Magic is strongest when it feels like a shared moment of fascination, not just a sequence of moves and punchlines

Make the unbelievable feel real and the real feel unbelievable.

Making someone think they saw an unusual moment is fine. But making someone feel like they got a glimpse of a longer string of unusual events is much more interesting and a better story for them to hold onto.

Most often, the professional wants their show to feel polished and structured, but the best amateur performances will feel raw and spontaneous. They will feel like what's about to happen is happening for the first time.

My goal is never to have them believe. My goal is to have them intrigued and enraptured and swept up in the moment, despite knowing it's not real.

People don't use the phrase "that was magical" to mean "I was fooled."

Self-discipline, for me, has been about training myself that not doing what I've set out to do isn't an option.

Social magic is about coming off not as someone performing a bunch of pre-planned routines, but just as someone with a good sense of wonder.

Stop Humanizing the Props and start humanizing yourself

Story makes everything palatable. Most humans don’t like being scared. Pop out screaming at your roommate from behind the curtains enough times and he’ll eventually punch you in the face. Being scared is another thing our ancestors tried to avoid. And yet, we will pay for horror movies, books, and tv shows. Put fear in context and many people are all for it.

Surprise is the seed. Mystery is the flower.

Suspicion is brought on by an unnecessary expenditure of energy on the part of the magician.

That’s literally the defining aspect of magic: its ability to defy the questioning of the spectators.

The duality (and dichotomy) of advanced preparation is that—when performing for strangers—it minimizes their role in what’s going on (i.e. “well, he was set to show this to anyone he happened to meet tonight”). But—when performing for friends and family—it can emphasize their role in the effect and their importance to the experience.

The experience of MAGIC is created by the gap between what the spectator knows to be true and what feels real to them in the moment.

The first thing to understand is this: for something to be emotionally engaging, it does not have to be *about* their emotions. It just has to be relatable.

The Jerx Describe or Die Maxim: If it's not interesting enough to describe, it's not interesting enough to perform.

The mistake we make is imagining a "perfect" life as a life without difficulties. The perfect life is not a life without these things. The perfect life is one where you skillfully navigate through these things.

The most profound magic directs 100% of our attention to moments that are manifestations of compelling ideas that exist outside of that moment.

The tricks that stayed with people were the ones with an interactive, present-tense narrative that engaged them emotionally.

The world wants to be charmed.

There’s no sleight so easy that some magician isn’t out there fucking it up somewhere

Think of a magic trick like a campfire. When building a fire, you clear out a little space; you go and gather tinder, kindling, and some larger pieces of firewood; you pile up the tinder; you build up the kindling; you light the tinder; you blow on it; you add the firewood; and now you have a fire. And that fire can burn for a long time, if you’ve set things up correctly.

This is the locus of audience-centric magic. Bring them an experience that happens *to* them, in real time, and would not be the same without them there. "Magic is the only art form that doesn't exist without an audience," magicians are fond of saying. And then they perform for people the same way they would for a tree stump.

To increase the power of your magic, remove yourself from the magic.

We can’t just ask if the method is structurally sound and does it fly past people in the moment, we have to ask, “Is this a technique that can be undermined with an ‘easy answer’?

When I say "remove confidence" I don't mean you should be an awkward, mumbling, sweaty mess. It's not your personal confidence that I think you should eliminate. It's your confidence in what's about to take place. Eliminate certainty. Certainty doesn't make for compelling experiences. This is why overly-scripted patter tends to be a turn-off to people in a casual performance. "He's so certain of what's going to happen he made up a dumb little story about it!" This doesn't feel organic or personal to them. It feels like you might as well be replaying a video of the trick as you did it for someone else.

What makes a trompe-l'œil painting engaging is that it seems so real, even though we know it's not. I strive to perform trompe-l'œil of the fantastic.

When something is out of place it's not a normal thing even if it's a normal thing.

When you perform tricks that happen in the flow of people's lives, rather than as a separate moment where it is a "performance," you can get away with a lot of things.

When you’re a professional, you bring your props to the show. When you’re an amateur, you bring your show to the props.

You can’t give your magic meaning. Meaning isn’t given, it’s taken.

You only raise the level of effect as you go on. But also, once you reach that very high “potency” (a 9 or 10-level reaction) you’re done for the day. Let them stew in that for the rest of the night.

Your mindset should be, "I'm going to perform this trick the best I can because I'm curious to see how this person will react to it."

Lucky You

This is a trick I shared a couple of years ago in my newsletter. I was reminded of it recently by a few people after all the ACAAN talk the past couple of months. It’s not Any Card. And it’s not Any Number. But it’s got a similar feeling to it. It’s based on a trick by Michael Kociolek that I shared here a number of years ago.

Imagine

My friend Aubrey comes over and notices a small pile of items on my coffee table. There are some coins with numbers written on them, a folded card, a little turtle made of seashells and a small polished stone.

“What’s this for?” she asks.

“Oh, I grabbed that from my old bedroom when I visited my mom the other week. It’s my collection of good luck charms I had as kid. The stone is tiger’s eye. The turtle is something my mom brought back from a trip to North Carolina. The card is the Jack of Diamonds, which is my lucky card. And each of these coins I had in my pocket at some point when something good happened to me, so I decided they must be lucky coins.

“I didn’t necessarily believe in lucky objects as a kid. I kind of did, but kind of didn’t. My theory was that if they did exist, then their effect was probably pretty small. But I thought perhaps you could combine them in order to magnify their impact. So I started writing my lucky numbers on my lucky coins.”

“My first lucky number was 14.” I show her a penny with a 1 on one side, and a 4 on the other. “That’s the age I planned to lose my virginity. Later, I changed my lucky number to 25, because that’s the age the rest of the world thought I should lose my virginity.” I show her the coin with a 2 on one side and a 5 on the other. “Then I cycled through other lucky numbers. 36, 52, 69—of course —47.” I point out the other coins and numbers as I go.

“If I had a test, or I wanted to ask a girl out or something, I would load up my pockets with all these ‘lucky’ tokens because I thought it might have some effect. I know it’s crazy, but I really think on some level it worked. I would sometimes test it, and it seems like I’d actually get lucky more often than I should. Here, try this....”

I tell Aubrey to put the turtle and the stone in one hand, and with the other hand to shake up the coins and let them fall on the table. She does.

“Okay, so we have this random set of numbers here. That was just the way the coins happened to fall. Now I want you to make a conscious choice and turn over any two coins. Whichever ones you want.”

She turns over two coins. “So you randomly mixed the coins and dropped them. Then you consciously chose which two to turn over. Obviously, if they had fallen a different way, or you had turned over different coins, then we’d have different numbers facing up. But let’s add these up and see what we get.”

We add up the numbers facing up on the coins and they total 24.

“See! 24... that’s another lucky number of mine. Seriously.” She’s not buying it.

“Here,” I say, “Put these coins in your other hand.” She now has the stone and the turtle in one hand and the coins in her other hand. “Also, put my hat on. This is my lucky hat.” I put my hat on her head. “Take that deck,” I point to a cased deck that is also on the table. “Slide it out and count down to the 24th card.” With the items in her hands, this isn’t easy, but eventually she does. When the card is turned over, it’s revealed to be the Jack of Diamonds, matching my “Lucky Card.”

Method

Set-Up

Get yourself six coins of any denomination. It’s more interesting if you have at least a few different denominations, in my opinion.

Put them on the table so they’re all heads-side up and write these numbers, one per coin:

1-2-2-3-4-6

Then turn the coins over in their place so the tails side is showing and write these numbers across the other side:

4-5-5-6-7-9

In a deck of 53 cards (a full deck plus joker), put your force card 24 cards down in the pack.

That’s the set-up.

To force the position in the deck, this is what you need to do. You need to have the coins end up with either 2 heads and 4 tails up, or 4 tails and 2 heads up. You’re just looking for any 2-4 combination.

If after the spectator drops them on the table they’re in a 2-4 combination, you’re done.

If they’re in a 6-0 (6 of heads or tails and none of the other) say, “Okay, that part was random chance. Now make a conscious choice of any two coins to turn over.)

If they’re in a 5-1 configuration, tell them to make a conscious choice of any three to turn over.

If they’re in a 3-3 configuration, tell them to make a conscious choice of any one coin to turn over.

That’s it. The total on the top of the coins will either be 24 or 30. If it’s 30 you’ll have them count from the face of the pack. You never have to touch anything yourself. It’s a trick so self-working, Rene Lavand could do it while masturbating.

Obviously, the fun part is the little pile of lucky objects and making the person interact with all of them as they go through the trick. You can add more. You can make sure your “lucky song” is playing in the background, and that they wear your “lucky sunglasses,” and they’re chewing a piece of your “lucky gum.”

Michal originally shared the pdf of his version of the trick on my site and you can read it here. That pdf includes all the credits for the effect. Michal’s work is always worth checking out. If you don’t have Plots and Methods, the book from which his version comes from, you can pick it up from Vanishing Inc. for $25.

Book #8 Cover Evolution

The eighth Jerx bonus book is shipping to supporters this month. Here’s how the cover evolved from idea to the final version by my friend, Stasia.

It started with my love of the artwork of Mort Künstler who passed away earlier this year.

As a nod to his work in men’s adventure magazines, I wanted the cover to be something with similar thematic elements.

I’ve always enjoyed the perspective of this image of his, with the woman dangling and the “camera’s eye” positioned above them.

I had the idea of putting a magician’s assistant dangling off a cliff, with a shirtless magician who had somehow managed to save her from plummeting to certain death with a fortuitously dispatched length of mouth coils.

As I normally do, I sent Stasia a mockup of the idea as it existed in my head, using all of my artistic talent.

And, as always, I thought to myself, “Damn, Andy. Do you even need to commission artwork when you are already such a master of the visual medium?”

But, to be kind, I thought I’d let Stasia take a crack at it as well. Her initial sketch captured just what I had asked for.

But I realized something was missing.

The beauty of Mort Künstler’s work, as you can see in the link at the top, is that his images seem to tell a full story with just a single picture.

What this image was missing was the story element. It captured this precarious position, but there was no hint at how we got there.

(I go into more detail in the book about how this situation relates to performing magic generally.)

So I asked Staisa to add some more elements—a hint of an overturned circus wagon, magic props spread over the cliffside. I wanted the picture to tell the story of a travelling circus caravan accident that sent everything flying out of the magician’s wagon, including his assistant.

The next sketch added those elements…

And that, in turn, became the cover many of you will be holding soon.