Dumb Tricks: Numeric-Alpha

Here is a somewhat dumb trick, but with the potential to be a better trick.

I asked for my friend’s help with something. I had him think of anything in the world. Then I took a slip of paper and wrote something down on it. I folded the piece of paper and set it down on the table.

“What are you thinking of?” I asked.

“Orange Soda,” he said.

“Nice,” I said, smiling. “Was there a thought process that brought you to ‘orange soda’ or did it just pop in your head out of nowhere?”

He explained the chain of thoughts that brought him to orange soda.'

“Okay, one final question. This may seem insignificant, but it’s important. Did you think of ‘orange soda’ or ‘orange sodas’ plural?”

He said he thought of orange soda, singular.

“Great.” I picked up the paper on the table and unfolded it.

It didn’t say: Orange Soda.

It said: 12.

“I’m kind of impressed with myself,” I said. “I almost got tripped up on the whole ‘soda’ vs. ‘sodas’ thing.”

I then brought up this image, and showed to him that I had predicted the scrabble score of the word/phrase he thought of.

Okay, as I said, it’s a bit of a dumb trick. My reasoning behind the effect was that I was trying to strenghten my Scrabble game using some of my magic/mentalism skills. “Typically you get better at scrabble by having a broader vocabulary. It’s all an offensive game. Trying to come up with words that will score more points. But if I know what words people are thinking of—and thus know what word they’re thinking of playing—and the points those words will garner, I can play defensively and block that spot on the board.” The logic doesn’t make complete sense. But I feel I could defend it if I was called on it.

Obviously this is just a way of predicting a number using a thumb-writer. But I think it feels more impossible/impressive than if I had just said, “Think of a number between 5 and 25.” (Which is about where most words would score.) Doesn’t it seem like it’s more impossible? I haven’t played around with it enough to say so definitively, but I think there’s a chance some spectators will feel I must have known what word he would think of to know what the score would be. I suppose how the trick is interpreted will depend on how analytical your spectator is.

Now, to ramp the trick up, here is something you could do.

Let’s say you’re performing at a table. As soon as the person says their word, you write it on the back of a business card in your lap. Now, after you show you predicted the scrabble score you can say, “Of course, you might think there are a lot of words that have a scrabble score of 12, so I didn’t necessarily know you would think of Orange Soda, that’s why I put something in this envelope before we started.” And use a Card to Wallet type of load to put the word in a sealed envelope in your wallet.

You have quite a bit of time to do some dirty work when they’re calculating the score of their word.

Or, imagine doing a parlor version of this. The scrabble game is in its box, on a table back behind you. There is a hole in the short end of the box, that is near an off-stage area. After the word is named, and while you’re showing that you predicted the score, an offstage assistant sets some scrabble tiles on one of the tile racks to spell out the thought-of word, and then just slides it into the hole, so it’s now in the box. Now you can go back and grab the box and reveal you set the word up on one of the racks before the show began.

Of course, the question remains, how do you know what score to write down? Yes, you have to memorize the letter scores, but it’s easier than you’d imagine. (And if your memory really sucks, I’ll give you an even easier way to do it after I explain this way.)

You can memorize the letter values it in a few minutes.

All the letters you would think of as really common are 1s. (I’m just taking it for granted that you have an innate understanding of what letters are common.)

Here’s how I remember the rest:

Score - Letters - Mnemonic

Two points - G and D - GoD has two big balls (I’m guessing).

Three points - C, M, P, B - You’re going to have three drinks at the CuM PuB. Where they serve semen and you chug it down in pint glasses. Lapping the thick nectar up as the jizz drips down your chin. (They say a strange/dirty image helps you remember your mnemonics. That’s why I went into detail there.) You swallow those loads so fast you have a cute cum-stache under your nose. (That extra imagery wasn’t for memory sake, I just thought it was funny.)

Four Points - H, F, W, Y, V - I just remember the sounds in the word “halfway” and the I throw V in there because it’s half of a W. So it’s easy to group all them together. There are three point groupings above and below this. So 4 is the halfway point.

Five Points - K - You run a 5K. (Well, not you. But a person like you who’s not lazy might.)

Eight Points - J, X - The JerX ate (8) some buffalo-wings covered in red-hot jism at the old Cum Pub.

Ten Points - Z, Q - I don’t need a mnemonic for these.

When I got “orange soda,” i just went through it in my mind, adding up the values. It’s not too hard because most words are made up of the common letters which are 1s. Plus you have some time to do this while you ask about what caused the person to think of that word.

“Orange Soda” was a fairly long word to get. Which is good, because it made the number a little higher. Shorter words are easier to calculate, but less impressive.

The Easy Way

The easy way to do this (and perhaps better way in some respects). Is to pretend to write something down, ask for the word, then have them calculate the total of the word, and then unfold the paper and reveal what you wrote down. So that way you don’t have to calculate anything. You just write down whatever total they get, once it’s known to you.

Where I’m Thinking of Going With This

I’ll set a small bag on the table in front of them.

I’ll ask them to think of any word.

I’ll write something down (apparently), fold it up, and put it on the table.

They’ll name their word. “Chair.”

I’ll think: C is 3 (3 drinks at the Cum pub), H is 4 (Halfway), so 7, plus A, I, R (8, 9 , 10)

I’ll unfold the paper, thumb-write 10, and show it to them.

I’ll have them dump out the objects in the bag. They will be scrabble tiles and a small box.

I’ll have them find the letters that form CHAIR.

As they concentrate on finding the letters, I will have far more time than I need to write “Chair” on a business card in my lap, and fold it into quarters with my right hand. At the same time, I will be poking through the letters along with them using my left hand, so I still seem engaged.

We will determine that my prediction was accurate.

I will then open the box that they dumped out of the bag earlier and dump out my other prediction which matches what they said perfectly. (Using any type of effect where a folded card appears in a small box. I wouldn’t use one of the gimmicked boxes for this. But something like this should work well.)

The combination of methods used here would make this quite difficult to figure out for anyone unfamiliar with magic methods. And the process of having them find the letters to verify your initial prediction would give you all the time you need to write your other prediction.

It’s still missing something presentationally to tie it all together (hence the reason it’s in this Dumb Tricks post). But I actually think all the component pieces are there for something pretty strong.