Protection Spell *

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I really like the trick I have to present to you today. I find it fun to perform, and it’s kind of structurally interesting because it’s made up of a bunch of small elements.

It’s:

  • a small trick (a 50/50 effect)

  • with a small method (almost a “throwaway” idea from Paul Harris)

  • that I’ve made a small change to

  • and includes a small presentational concept (with outsized impact) from Jon Allen

  • that you can carry around in a small amount of space in your wallet.

The only non-small element is the tale I’ve attached to it.

Imagine

“Oh… here’s something weird,” I tell my friend Isabelle as we wait for our appetizer sampler.

I reach into my wallet and pull out three things. Two blank business cards and a single playing card. The Ace of Spades.

“I like to have someone here with me when I do this, it makes me feel less crazy. Back in November…well, 53 days ago, I know that exactly… I went with my friend to that doughnut place out near route 18. The one with the really good cookies & cream doughnuts I told you about. Anyway… in the storefront next door they were doing some sort of craft fair or something… like it was a bunch of people with folding tables selling stuff so we stopped in for a look.

“One of the tables was empty. There was just a guy with long gray hair in a thick braid sitting behind the table. He migh have been… I don’t know anywhere between 60 and 100… it’s hard to say. He was playing an old Nintendo GameBoy. He could have been Native American because we weren’t far from the reservation land. But maybe it just seems like he should have been, based on what happened.

“At first I thought he was just someone’s grandpa that they parked in the corner while they looked around. But he had a little cash box on the table so I asked him what he was selling. And he said, ‘Spells of Protection.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, really,’ because you know I’m fascinated by that kind of junk. And I was like, ‘How much?’ I thought maybe I’d buy myself one. Maybe he’d give me a little talisman or something. Or I’d at least get a good story from it. Plus I’d be able to throw this man a couple of bucks. He looked like he could use it.

“So I pull out my wallet and he’s like, ‘$500 for two months protection.’ And I just put my wallet back in my pants. Like, ooookay… you old kook, no thanks. But I kept making conversation with him. I asked him if he sold a lot of those at that price and he opened the cash box and it was overflowing with bills. It was easily a few thousand dollars.

“I had, like, a mix of admiration and revulsion for him. What I feel for a lot of scammers. But I kept talking to him because I wanted to find out the exact nature of the fraud. And he told me some story about learning this spell from his grandfather years ago. And how the spell protects the person it’s bestowed upon from all harm.

“And I was getting ready to say goodbye when he said, ‘I can give you a sample for $5.’ And I was like, ‘You’re going to protect me for $5?’ And he explained that it was more of a symbolic representation of his abilities. But most people, after experiencing it, come back to pay for the real thing.

“So I gave him my $5 and this is what he gave me.” I point to the items on the table. “First he took out the two little cards. And on one he drew a happy face. And on the other he drew a skull. Then he pulled out a deck of cards. But it was a weird deck. Every card was the Ace of Spades. I didn’t even know they made such things.”

“And he gave me one of the Aces to keep. And he told me to do this test every day. The tip of the Ace is going to be used as a pointer. Whatever it points to is what is selected. So I take the two cards and place them across from each other with the Ace in the middle of the two cards. I turn the Ace face down and spin it around so I have no idea of the orientation of the Ace. Then I can decide to turn it over from left to right or from right to left. He said if the Ace ends up pointing to the smiley face that means another day of happy, healthy living. But if it points to the skull, it means I will die in 24 hours. And I asked him, ‘This is symbolic though, right? So it doesn’t mean I’ll really die.’ And he just sort of shrugged his shoulders. And he said, ‘It doesn’t really matter. You’ll have the spell of protection on you. And he closed his eyes and did a brief little movement with his hand and then he told me to do this test every day for the next two months. He said I would then be convinced the spell worked. And it’s been 53 days now… and I’m pretty fucking convinced.”

I set the table up so the cards are to the left and right of Isabelle with the Ace face-down in the middle.

“He told me I could do it myself, but it’s best if I have someone else do it on my behalf. That way I can be sure it’s all truly random. And that I wasn’t unconsciously manipulating things.”

I told Isabelle to rotate the face-down Ace on the table, stopping wherever she wanted with either end of the Ace towards one of the two options.

“Are you sure you’re done or do you want to keep spinning?”

When she says she’s done, I say. “Okay, final choice. Turn the card over from left to right or from right to left.

She pauses then turns the card over from left to right. The Ace is pointing to the card to her left. “Here we go,” I say. “Show me what one you didn’t get.”

She turns over the card the Ace isn’t pointing to.

I exhale. “I don’t know why that gets me so nervous. After all these days I should have more faith.” I gesture for her to pick up the card the Ace is pointing to and turn it over.

“54. 54 times in a row it has protected me.” With the small pen on my keychain, I mark another tic on the Smiley Face card.

Method

Requirements

  • An ace of spades. Mark it on the back so you know which side is opposite the point of the spade on the face. I fill in the center of the two flowers on that end.

  • A happy face card with tic marks written on it

  • A skull card

This started with an email from Matt Baker who thought it might be interesting to combine Paul Harris’ Pointer Anomaly with Jon Allen’s All or Nothing principle. And he wondered if I thought the two would be strong enough to support each other.

After playing with it for a couple of weeks I think the answer is definitely yes.

Let’s break this down further.

Paul Harris Pointer Anomaly

What Paul discovered is, if you have a card with an arrow face-down on the table (or you use the Ace of Spades as an “arrow”) and you turn the card face-up, end for end, it doesn’t matter if you turn the card left to right or right to left, the arrow will point the same way. The direction you turn the card has no effect. Only the initial orientation of the arrow matters.

This is something where—if you focus your mind on it—you realize why it doesn’t make a difference. But intuitively, it seems obvious that it does make a difference. Sure, if a card has an arrow on it, then the direction you turn it over is going to affect where the arrow points. That would have to be the case… right?

This is a deception I’ve used 100s of times and never gotten caught. But the secret to not getting caught is never mention or try to “prove” that this is how arrows on cards work. People have suggested adding other steps to the procedure so you can show them how an arrow will point in different directions depending on how you turn over the card. This is unnecessary and counter-productive.

The way to use it, as I do in this routine, is simply to say something like, “It’s your choice. You can turn the card over from left to right, or right to left, and whichever [object] it’s pointing to is the one we’ll use.”

The PH Pointer Anomaly isn’t strong enough to use as a magic trick itself. You can’t just say, “Look, if I turn the card toward me the Ace is face up, and if I turn it away from me the Ace is also face up!” As soon as you do anything to suggest the way you turn the card DOES affect orientation or that you can magically make it so it DOESN’T affect orientation, then some people will “see” the reality of the situation. But if you just act like it goes without saying that it makes a difference—”you’ll turn it left or right, and wherever the arrow ends up pointing, that’s what we’ll use”—then people will naturally assume it does.

We’ll also add a couple of elements to the force to make the Pointer Anomaly even more deceptive. But before we do we have to talk about…

Jon Allen’s All or Nothing Principle

First, thanks to Jon for letting me explain the basic idea here [Jon also pointed out to me that David Williamson has used a similar idea].

The idea is one of a “perpetual prediction” where you’re supposedly keeping track of how many times this has “gone right” with the tic marks. It’s such a simple idea, but so powerful. If you’re interested in a deep dive on it, you should pick up Jon’s download on the concept. It’s a concept that can be applied to many tricks and Jon teaches a few, including a very fair and open-seeming 50/50 effect that can be done in person or remotely.

All or Nothing is such an interesting concept. It doesn’t change the method of a trick. And it doesn’t change the explicit improbability of this moment that they’re witnessing. And yet it gets really great reactions. Lot’s of tricks get great reactions, Andy. Yes… but this gets a great reaction from a one-phase 50/50 routine. A one phase 50/50 routine is the sort of trick most magicians wouldn’t even consider performing. What’s the point? Well, by using the All or Nothing Principle, you get to focus on the simplicity and clarity of this single binary choice while still generating a strong response.

As I mentioned, you can get Jon’s download to go deeper into this idea. I personally don’t recommen using this along with a “psychological influence” type of presentation. That might seem like a natural thing to do—and Matt Baker’s original email to me went down that route—but in my opinion it lessens the impact of this sort of thing. With a 50/50 choice, I’m already going to be right 50% of the time. If I already had a 1 in 2 shot and I was trying to influence you, then now we’re in the realm of “more likely than not” that you’d pick the one I want. 50/50 is already uninteresting odds for a prediction trick. “More likely than not” is even worse. At that point, the only thing making that interesting is the All of Nothing Principle.

That’s why I chose to go with a premise that, yes, there’s some power at play here. But it’s not me. And it’s not anything that could seemingly make this something other than a 50/50 random choice.

Handling

You take out the cards but you don’t display the faces of the blank cards. The two objects don’t have to be blank business-style cards. They could be regular business cards or folded/crumpled up pieces of paper. Or whatever.

Separate the two business cards. Show the Ace of Spades. Explain how the selection process goes and turn the Ace around between the business cards. Allow the spectator to take over the turning stopping wherever they want with the card in line between the other objects.

One of two things will happen now.

The marked end of the Ace will be towards the Happy-Face Card.

If that’s the case, there’s nothing to do. They spun the Ace, they stopped wherever they wanted and they will turn the Ace over in either direction. It’s all fully free and it happens that way 50% of the time.

The marked end of the Ace will be towards the Skull Card.

Then you pick up the Smiley and Skull cards and mix them between your hands while saying, “And we’ll mix these up to be sure it’s completely random.” And swap the two between your hands an odd number of times (five is good), and now put them down and they’ll be in the opposite positions they were before and you’re good to go.

This step is perfectly logical and with the combined deceptions of a marked card and the Pointer Anomaly, it doesn’t seem like this should make any difference.

Jerxian Concepts

— The Smear Technique - For years now, I’ve been talking about how blurring the boundaries of a performance creates stronger material that feels more a part of the world that we’re living in, rather than this 60 second moment of strangeness disconnected from anything else. The All or Nothing Principle is probably the most simple and straightforward demonstration of this. All we’re doing is saying, “This happened a bunch of times before” and that alone is enough to greatly amplify the impact the effect would otherwise have.

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.

— 3rd Party Magic - Removing yourself from the equation frequently creates a stronger storyline. “I’m making you pick one of these two items,” is a far less interesting fiction than the idea of an unusual individual selling protection spells.

It also helps methodologically. People may not really believe in protection spells and all of that. But they may believe I really don’t know exactly how this is working. And if that’s the case, they’re not going to think, “Oh the Ace is probably marked. He probably already knows which way it’s pointing,” or, “He’s probably keeping track of how he’s mixing those cards.”

— The Story - You might look at a 5-minute story to go along with a 15 second 50/50 trick as a lot of porch for such a little house. But I feel some sort of interesting premise is mandatory here. Because it’s such a small moment, you sort of have to justify why you’re showing it to them, and this story does that.

For me, it’s a perfect, unplanned, time-to-kill, little story-telling moment to keep in my wallet.

Thanks to Matt, Paul, and Jon for the ideas that went into this.

* Update 1/22

A number of people have written in asking me why I would mix the cards in the second scenario (the scenario where the marked end of the Ace is towards the skull card. They note that if you just turn the Ace over from top to bottom, then it will be pointing towards the card we want it to. So why not just direct them to turn the Ace over from top to bottom?

Here’s why I do it the way I do, and a clarification about the procedure that might not be obvious.

First, here’s why I mix up the cards rather than tell them how to turn over the arrow:

1. I can explain how it will work up-front: "We're going to turn the arrow around to randomize its orientation and then you’ll choose one of the options by turning it over right to left or left to right." 

2. It maintains that moment of choice at the end--a choice that seemingly make a difference. 

3. When you direct someone to turn a horizontal arrow left to right, or right to left, it seems like you're emphasizing their choice. But why would I ever direct you to turn over the arrow top to bottom if this is supposed to be a random selection process? If you get any sense that I want you to turn the card over top to bottom, you might notice that if you turned it over side to side, it would point the other way. In which case, you’d know two things: A) I told you how to turn the card over. And B) I could control how I wanted the arrow to point by how I told you to turn over the card. If they pick up on that, the randomness (and their feeling of choice) falls apart.

Someone asked if me mixing up the slips after they spun the arrow around wasn’t suspicious. So I want to clarify something. The spinning of the arrow is not the selection process. The spinning is to randomize the orientation of the arrow. Then we “randomize” the cards on the table by mixing them up. When I notice the card is pointed the "wrong" way, I just say, "And we'll give these a mix so everything is random." 

Then the selection process (seemingly) happens when they decide which direction to turn over the arrow card.

That’s my thinking on the way I handle it.