Jerx Christmas - Liam Montier - 12:39 AM

I stepped outside to get some fresh air and ran into Liam Montier.

I asked him if he had anything he’d like to gift to the readers of this blog and he said:

“I’ve got a cool prediction of a joke in a Christmas cracker, that might be your kind of thing?  Spectator is given a prediction, hands you a cracker, you pull it, and then remove the joke… ‘what is yellow and dangerous?’  The spectator opens the prediction to find it says ’Shark Infested Custard’.  Or whatever.”

And I said, “What in the name of Satan’s fat balls are you talking about?”

And then we learned that apparently a Christmas cracker is a thing in England, but not in America. Is that what we were declaring independence from? Some shit called a Christmas cracker?

At any rate, Liam then offered an interesting OOTW handling that worked well with a trick of mine called Talisman.

Talisman was in my first book. It was a reframing and new handling for of Out of This World where you help your friend identify a lucky coin from all the coins in their house.

Here is the simplified version using Liam’s handling for the finale.

First, while you’re at your friend’s place, you borrow a deck of cards. Then you tell them to go around the house and collect all the coins they can find. While they do this, you separate the deck into reds on top of blacks. 

When they come back, you’re casually shuffling the deck. Either just shuffle the top half, or do a Red/Black shuffle, or a Red/Red shuffle. Either way, end with the reds on top.

Remove the Ace of Spades and the Ace of Hearts.

You explain the Ace of Hearts will signify good luck, and the Ace of Spades will signify bad luck. You mix the two aces and tell your friend to separate all their coins into two piles. You hand them the cards and tell them to put one card face-down in front of each pile.

Turn over both cards and indicate that the coins in front of the Ace of Hearts are still in play. The other coins can be pushed aside.

Repeat this with the remaining coins. You mix the cards. They split the remaining coins into two piles. They put a card in front of each pile. The coins next to the red card stay in play.

No matter how many coins they have, this process will get down to one coin in a matter of a minute or two. Even a million coins would only take a few minutes. 

Now you’re down to one coin that has always attracted “good luck.” 

“It’s likely this is a lucky coin. But we need to test it.”

From there you move into Liam’s OOTW handling that he describes here…