Monday Mailbag #29

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Does Daniel Garcia's "Pressure" actually fool anyone?  I feel like the answer is no. 

This direct question leads me to a broader one: when is a trick deceptive enough that it passes your internal test and is allowed into your repertoire? As far as I know (and I don't know a lot), you're the foremost expert on "does it actually fool them" matters. I base this statement on your focus group testing and you're fearless "I'll go test it out" approach. Obviously, what I want is a trick that fools everyone 100% of the time. There are a zillion factors that lead to the success of the trick (like it's execution, convincers, and the knowledge/problem solving abilities of the spectator) but at some point we're all deciding whether we think a trick will or won't work, and that leads to whether we do it or not.  I'm sure even "Pressure" can be saved by removing the easy answers, but sometimes a trick is beyond saving or it's unreasonable to go the extra 10 miles to pump up the fooled 'em quotient. —CC

I can’t speak to Pressure too much. I do understand where your question is coming from because that’s the type of trick where a certain number of people are just going to be able to understand exactly what happened, regardless of how well you perform it.

In general, I try to avoid tricks that can be figured out with just one flash of insight. If a trick fools people 90% of the time, it’s not good enough for me. I perform in the types of situations where—if 1 in 10 people in a group figure it out—then eventually all 10 will know how it’s done. Or if I’m performing one-on-one, I don’t want a 10% chance of the trick failing completely.

Of course, you can’t really speak in exact percentages this way unless you were testing every trick you performed on 100 people or whatever.

So you just have to establish your standard for what it means to fool an audience. My definition of fooling an audience is that they have no answer that satisfies them. They may have things they find questionable or suspicious, that’s fine, it’s almost impossible to get rid of that altogether. But if they’re able to brush off a trick by saying, “Well, it must have been ______” then that’s no good. My tricks need to be un-brush-off-able.

So the first few times I perform a new trick, I will almost always talk about it with people afterwards to get their best guess at how it might be done. If they speak with confidence about any solution, right or wrong, then I re-work the trick (to eliminate that as being a potential solution). And if that doesn’t work I ditch the trick altogether.

Your idea for the sock routine is brilliant.

I always liked the mis-matched socks finale.

And this is a great use for it. Until now - I wasn't interested in this marketed effect - it felt too much like a dumb card trick. —JM

You hear that, Vanishing Inc.? I want my cut of this sale.

I heard from a number of people who liked the variation I presented last week, but I did get one person who wasn’t a fan.

I found your presentation for Socks to be amusing, but I disagree with the way you structured the effect. The prediction phase only involves two selected socks. The matching phase uses all of the cards. The ability to seemingly control and match up all of the cards is a more impossible effect than just being able to predict the two they selected. —DN

An audience’s enjoyment is not just based on the statistical impossibility of what happened. In fact that is often the least consequential factor in their reaction to an effect. The problem with the structure of the original effect is that the first phase was bigger than the second. Not more impossible, but the sphere in which the magic took place was bigger. It happened on the cards and on the magician’s feet. By having the second phase happen just on the cards, it feels like a step backwards. It feels like just a card trick.

By reversing the phases you have this thing that the spectator will assume is just a type of card trick, and then in the second phase you find that it has broader ramifications. I think that’s the way to play it.

A quick comment on [last week’s] mailbag.  I love the idea of using acupuncture, but I never would without training (and even then, probably not).  That said, I have been thinking about the practice of moxibustion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxibustion) which is close and much safer, provided you don't let the little burning piles actually burn down.  (The Wiki site also has an old painting of the practice, and because it uses the "principles" of acupuncture, you get to consult those cool acupuncture charts). —DG

Thanks. Moxibustion looks like just the sort of nonsense I like to occasionally include in my tricks.

Even more “Sort of Psychic” talk in tomorrow’s post, since my post on that has generated more feedback. I will give you another tweak you can use on it that eliminates any mathematical explanation. So you can pin the effect purely on moxibustion or whatever the hell you’re using the trick to demonstrate.