The Merits of Failure

 

Mike Piazza had had an amazing rookie year for the LA Dodgers in 1993. He batted .318, had 35 home runs, and knocked in 112 RBIs. He easily won Rookie of the Year that year, and those 35 dingers were a record both for Dodgers rookies and rookie catchers in the entire league. An ESPN poll counted his first year in the league as one of the greatest performances ever for a newcomer.

So, yeah, wonderful performance, great player. Let’s look at the flip side of those numbers for a second. His on-base percentage (which includes walks drawn) was .370, and if you take into account moving runners even if he gets out (such as popping out or bunting), a generous approximation is that he did something positive at the plate 4 times out of 10. That means that 6 times out of 10… he didn’t do so great.

Magicians find the card every time, make the coin disappear and reappear every time, cut and restore the rope every time. If you’re a magician and you can’t pull off 100% (let alone a mere 40%) of your effects, chances are you’re a hack.

It might seem like a false comparison, but if you really abstract it, both people are performers who are put on the spot and are expected to pull off impressive feats when it counts. And yet, the inherent dynamic in a magic show is success after success after success, which can be somewhat monotonous unless some new dynamic is

introduced, but even if you throw in incredible challenge conditions or jeopardy of some sort, the expectation is that the magician will still find a way to pull it off.

Now, I don’t have any exact data on this, but I’d be willing to bet that most Americans (and probably Canadians as well) know who Mike Piazza is than they do the best magician in their city. Heck, if they could name any magician in their city, that’d be impressive.

Chan Canasta probably isn’t the first person to come up with the idea of failure being good for mystery performers, but he went a long way towards popularizing the idea amongst mentalists that failure, paradoxically, could boost the credibility of the performer.

If you think about it, it’s almost a “duh!” revelation. It only makes sense that if you had psychic powers that some people would be harder to read than others, or that some things in the future would be more difficult to see than other things. If it were any different, if psychics could do it 100% of the time, they’d win the lottery everytime. That they don’t speaks to one of two possibilities: (a) they’re frauds, or (b) their powers are imperfect. (a)’s not really all that fun to fantasize about (unless you’re a militant skeptic), which leads inevitably to explorations of (b).

Mentalism in general benefits from the plausibility of the subject matter. Even if we discount supernatural forces being in play, we’ve all had moments of deja-vu, or of a hunch that turned out correctly, or of feeling like we knew exactly what someone was thinking just by looking at them, or of having an extraordinary run of luck, or worrying that somebody else could see through us like we were transparent, or of remembering

something that should have been long-forgotten, or even having momentary feelings of greater strength than usual. When this stuff happens, it’s frequently mysterious to us. Yeah, there are scientific theories behind the concept of deja-vu, and various studies have shown that we can read people’s thought processes simply by following their eye patterns, but even still there’s a nebulous quality to the whole thing that’s hard to peg down. Mentalism shows generally offer a way to bottle and present these phenomena in entertaining packages.

Magic effects, on the other hand, have no real equivalent to this sort of thing. We’ve never experienced a random anomalous moment of flight or teleportation in the same way that we might have experienced a random anomalous moment of luck or foresight. As such, magic’s troublesome problem is that the very impossibility of it can cause outright dismissal amongst some people as being a trick, to the point that even if you can offer convincing and compelling proofs that nothing other than magic made the card jump into your wallet, you wouldn’t want to claim the power that you can make things jump from one place to another, as it’d be an unsustainable claim, especially if they try to start setting the conditions.

Which is where baseball comes back as an intriguing comparison. If somebody in the league starts batting ridiculous numbers all of a sudden, then suspicion is often aroused that cheating of some sort is going on. Heck, if you started getting hits %60 of the time, people would be convinced that something is going on that’s not kosher, and yet we’re still far short of the success rate that’s expected of a magician.

Which is where the potential value of failure comes in. You fail, and you remind everybody that for whatever strange stuff you can apparently do, you’re still like them sometimes.

There’s also the intriguing idea of using failure as a way to give further character to the mentalist’s power. Say you’ve got two people, one of whom whole-heartedly believes in psychic powers, and another who is an absolute skeptic. If each is given a number to think of, doesn’t it make more sense that somebody with psychic powers wouldn’t necessarily figure out both with equal ease? As such, why not use the skepticism and close-mindedness to your advantage? Get proper hits all the time on the compliant one, but miss every time on the other guy… but don’t miss by much. If they’re thinking of the number 35, you could say, “Something in the 30s.” and then apologize for not getting closer. If they’re thinking of the Jack of Hearts, narrow it down to a red Jack and then ask if you’re close. If they’re thinking of their friend “Julian”, then you could reveal “Julio” or “Julius” or “Julien”.

If we invoke the Superhero theory from before, then we can see how the nature of the failure could further be fleshed out by understanding your power. One thing I hate seeing is a perfectly successful CT routine, since the nature of the thing suggests to a skeptical mindset that you got a look at what was written down somehow, and the more the nature of what’s written down is out-of-the-ordinary, the more that suspicion can fester.

However, say that you’re having trouble divining somebody’s thought. Say that your character sees thoughts. At that point, you could reveal something that’s wrong but looks similar — eg:

they’re thinking of a turtle but you draw a car that’s got a strange turtle-like appearance. Say, on the other hand, that your character hears thoughts. At that point, you could reveal something that’s wrong but sounds similar — eg: they’re thinking “Albuquerque” and you’re stressing out trying to figure out what the heck “Albert curly” means. In other words, you get partial information via whatever power conduit you want, and then you do the best you can to make sense of it. Or perhaps what you do isn’t so much telepathy but clairvoyance. At this point, maybe you can guess the amount of change in their pocket, but allowing for being off by 5 cents or so — at this point, being only a penny off would be close enough to a hit that it essentially might as well be one.

One interesting bit about how this factors into trickery is the following subtextual argument that surrounds a failed feat. Say somebody writes down the number 45. If you’re a magician, and if you have access to tricky means of getting that number, then you can tell them the exact number. Since you don’t tell them 45, it follows that you must not have had access to any tricky means. After all, why would you intentionally fail if your job is to succeed? This logic is flawed, of course, but it can be very compelling. It changes the question from “How did he get my number?” to “How did he get close to my number?” The red herring implicit in that second question can help flesh out the power.

Furthermore, it makes the nature of success more satisfying. It’s not a foregone conclusion. Intentionally or not, one of the smartest things that David Blaine could have done for his initial record breath-holding attempt was not getting it,

for two reasons. First, it follows the faulty but seductive logic described previously, which is that if he access to tricky means to succeed, he would have succeeded, therefore, since he didn’t succeed, he must not have access to tricky means. Second, it added the straightforward notions of tension and suspense to his next attempted feat, or feats, and it gives added value to attaining those feats.

One more thing to consider is the following… if it’s possible to make failed attempts play well, then it follows that there’s room for greater risk-taking. Say you don’t have a method for determining an exact item from a group, but you do have a method for eliminating 75% of them. Well, you could make the elimination of items count as individual effects, take the appropriate credit for them, and then, when you’re whittled down to the last ones, just take a chance with it. No double-out envelopes, no swami, no invisible deck, just go for it, knowing that if you miss, well, you’ve already done a great job getting that far (assuming you can sell the showmanship properly), and if you hit, well, you’ve achieved an even bigger impossibility. Funnily enough, that sort of successful guess is almost a bizarre twist on cancelling methods, in that your tricky method to narrow it down can be used to cancel out the idea of getting lucky via guessing, and getting lucky via guessing at the end can be used to cancel out the idea of a tricky method to narrow it down.

And, of course, there’s nothing keeping you from following up the miss with something else that’s even more difficult but for which you have a surefire successful methodology. Say you’ve got ten items on the table, and they’re thinking of one,

and you narrow it down successfully to the watch and the candlestick, and they confirm that you’re right, and it’s one of those two. You name the candlestick and they say “watch”. Awwww… so close. Well, that was warm-up, and now the onus is on them to try to read your mind, and so you borrow a $20 bill and do some sort of danger monte routine with it, where the consequences of failure really are absolute. Now, you’ve got a situation whereby not only is it forgivable that the initial failure happened (since it was part of a larger routine (obviously)), but now that initial failure can be leveraged dramatically for tension.

It even offers specific benefits for certain specific routines. Max Maven’s Kurotsuke is an example of this. (I’ll try to keep this vague so as not to tip method, so bear with me.) If you look at the way it plays out on the Videomind series, you’ll know that’s one of the possible outcomes. In that situation, he gets a successful elimination, a second successful elimination, then a third, and then finally gets the last one. Depending upon how you do it, that’s actually four effects. If it goes the other way, instead you get a single revelatory moment, which has a different dynamic to it. Experienced mentalists using this routine have probably figured out ways to make them both work at a satisfying level, but I never could — if I got it the way it was done in the Videomind performance, I was happy, but if not, then I wasn’t.

However, if you’ve seen Derren Brown do the routine, you’ll notice how you’ve potentially got the best of both worlds, in that you get the extra revelatory moments, combined with increased fairness brought on by taking on a risk. I don’t know if Brown has an extra method in play, but I

don’t really care, because the strategy is sound — take the risk, knowing that if you succeed you’re the man, but even if you fail you’re always going to be following it up with another effect anyway and get your success that way.

So yeah, good for mentalism, but is there something that magicians can take away from this? After all, we don’t really know how to qualify a failed magic effect, except by having something not happen. How does one almost make a card change into another card? It either changes or it doesn’t, right?

Well, it’s certainly underexplored, but it is possible, and there are some pretty compelling effects that could come from thinking creatively. You do a convincing coins through table, but with your coins, and when they give you a quarter, you try to push it through but it gets lodged permanently halfway through the table, sticking out a bit at the top (invoking Paul Harris’s notions of a “Permanent Piece of Strange”). Maybe you can’t restore the cigarette or bill perfectly, and a third of the tears didn’t heal (while just enough tears did get healed so that mystery remains). Maybe you can’t find their card doing the blindfolded card stab, because you don’t know what it is and therefore lack the psychic connection, but when you blindfold them and they stab down, they find their selection. Maybe you successfully push the cigarette through the signed quarter, but you can’t heal the coin afterwards, leaving a hole and bits of their signature.It’s funny, though. We have so many methods for pulling off our effects perfectly, but some of the stuff above would be very difficult to do. Making it harder would be to figure out exactly where one of these failures would fit into a set. My gut says you

don’t want to open with one of these failures unless you had super-high prestige with your audience, and also that you probably wouldn’t want to close the show with this sort of failure either, since it would be awkward (and even if I’m right and there were long-term benefits of Blaine’s failure, that ending did feel weird when watching it). Even if I’m right and you don’t want to open or close with this, more than that, it’s hard to say. We can frequently measure successful tricks in terms of strength, but how do we compare effects that succeed to effects that fail? Dunno. But if magicians keep paying attention to what the better mentalists are doing, maybe we’ll get some great ideas from them.

An Offbeat View on Misdirection and Cover

 

Today’s essay is way out there. I’ve frequently felt the need to assure people that the olde blogge is just as much a place for me figuring out my own thoughts as it is to try to pass along useful info, but there will be very few entries this year that exemplify the self-indulgent former goal as much as this one. For this, I apologize. That said…

Eric Evans and Nowlin Craver put out an intriguing book called The Secret Art of Magic that sort of took a stab at offering a unified theory on deception as it pertains to magic. Specifically, they broadened the term misdirection so that it

applied to pretty much every attempt to conceal the method so as to lead the audience away from it and towards the effect.

Or something like that. Adding to the confusion somewhat is their use of Chinese terms to delineate the principal elements in magic, as well as an almost overly-devotional parallels drawn between magic performance and the principles in Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Plus a bunch of stuff on Street Magic. Let’s just say it’s one of the more creative efforts to tackle magic theory out there.

Before I get into their views on misdirection, I’m just going to lay down a very quick thought of my own. Many magicians lately have been vocal about their dislike for “misdirection” as a term, and think that it really ought to be “direction”, since “misdirection” suggests making sure they don’t see the bad stuff, whereas “direction” is constantly focused on giving them good stuff. In other words, if you get them to look up in your eyes and away from your hands when you do a pass, it’s “misdirection”. If, on the other hand, you lift the cup to show a surprise (“Look! There’s a ball here that shouldn’t be here!”) and use that as misdirection to do something else that’s sneaky, that’s “direction”. Or something along those lines, anyway.

Well, ok. Pat yourselves on the back for being able to make a distinction between the two, but let’s be honest, strategically, in both situations it’s damned important that they don’t see the method, and in both cases this is accomplished by manipulating their focus. Honestly, I’d argue that there are more than just those two approaches to focus-shift as well, so I’ve got no problem sticking with “misdirection” as it’s an industry term. I respect anybody’s right to disagree on that point,

but I won’t be entertaining rebuttals on it here, because we’ve got a bit deeper to go in order to look at Evans and Craver’s work.In their book, the question they posed was something like this… We normally associate ‘misdirection’ with tactics to shift focus from a momentary event (a sleight, a get-ready, a tell, etc.). Misdirection in that context can be very powerful. But what about something like the cross-cut force, or the use of the Elmsley Count, both of which are essentially burnable? Where’s the misdirection there? Shouldn’t we broaden the term “misdirection” towards the things that make other techniques work?

Now, there’s a bit of begging the question there since it assumes that “misdirection” must be the term we apply to a situation like that, but whatever. If we abandoned semantical conflicts altogether and replaced “strategy”, “effect” and “misdirection” with “X”, “Y”, and “Z”, there’s a very compelling idea there. There’s the strategy and method (X), which we’re forced to use. There’s the effect (Y), that we want them to see. And then there’s (Z), “misdirection” (EE-NC definition), which strives to move everything away from the strategy and towards the effect.

I personally wish they hadn’t used the term “misdirection” to describe Z, since in my mind “cover” is a more-than-adequate description for what they’re talking about, and allows us to continue to use the traditional meaning of misdirection as a subset of “cover”. “Misdirectional cover” is a term I’ve seen bandied about and in my mind it’s more than adequate to describe that kind of cover — as opposed to physical cover (eg: what the top card provides on a cover pass) or motion cover (eg: the big action covering the small action in the paddle move).

Still, if memory serves, even Ascanio seemed to think of “cover” and “misdirection” as being two distinct principles, so maybe I’m off-base with this one. But whatever, it’s still interesting to ponder.

However, in their defense, misdirection had already been used in slightly different contexts as a term — the most famous is probably “time misdirection”, which describes the use of time to obfuscate the events existing in memory (cf: the cross cut force). I’ve also seen the term “psychological misdirection” used in various nebulous ways, and I’ve probably even used the term myself once or twice in various places on the olde blogge.

But there’s one other thing that’s interesting about broadening the concept of misdirection in the way that they have. Compare the attention control in something like the Cups and Balls to the way focus works in a self-working card trick like “Gemini Twins”. There’s a different “feel” to both routines, and I think there’s something to take away from that. Let’s assume we’re aiming high and we want our sleight-of-hand to feel less sleight-of-handy, then we can use different techniques (efficient choreography, pauses, punctuation, a gimmicked cup, etc.) to do so. But what about a trick like Gemini Twins, which won’t have a sleight-of-handy feel to it, almost by definition? Is it the ideal? Interestingly, no, because the suspicion there will be more on something like self-workingness, which at worst will make the magician seem like somebody using material in a kid’s book, but even at best still gives the audience a “non-magic” explanation for what’s happened, a feeling of self-workingness to it that is almost endemic to the way the trick unfolds. What’s the solution for that sort of self-working

trick, though? Adding a sleight-of-handy feeling to it?

This is where I appreciate Evans and Craver’s thesis, because it sort of suggests an all-encompassing approach to misdirection. I think that one thing that’d be beneficial for us to do would be to make our magic seem as consistent as possible on that front, while still taking advantages of the benefits of cancelling methods on the larger scale.

If you look at the style of older magicians who’ve settled into a comfortable character, you can see a lot of this. Really good mentalists are the obvious examples because they put so much emphasis on presentational consistency and (usually) eschew all demonstrations of dextrous skill or effects that put heat on apparatus. However, guys like Michael Ammar and Don Alan have proven pretty good at this as well. Ammar, for instance, does a lot of sleight-of-hand, but it’s generally (a) got a soft touch to it so it doesn’t feel as sleight-of-handy as magic done by other magicians, and (b) frequently incorporates gimmickry that takes the magic a bit beyond sleight-of-hand (eg: coin in bottle). Don Alan also showed a pretty good ability to choose direct, brisk effects that promise lots of surprises, to the extent that his gimmicked effects have a similar feeling to his ungimmicked ones.

Eugene Burger might be an even better example, since his effects run the gamut from minimal sleight-of-hand to gimmicked effects to self-working effects, but they all still have a consistent feel to them. Keep in mind that I’m talking about how the magic unfolds more than consistency of character — the latter helps, of course, but while we could probably envision a way for Eugene Burger to rationalize doing the

Cups and Balls or a Multiple-Selection Routine, there’s a dynamic to it that’d undermine a lot of his other, more moveless-feeling magic.

This is another reason why I dislike the sloppy merging of magic and mentalism, because so often it’s as if the performer is shifting modes too indiscriminately. It should seem that, done well, you’d get a wonderful merging of genres, but more than not you can get something like the incoherence in “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”. Maybe it’s just the magician in me that makes it seem obvious, but I think that what we can tell specifically, audiences can still sense ambiguously. I’ve tried merging sleight-of-hand displays with mental magic, for instance, and the result was just… off. Efforts to hypothesize why have failed me so far today (you don’t know how many paragraphs’ worth of speculation I’ve typed up today and then deleted), and the best I can describe it is that there just seemed to be an imbalance inherent in that specific juxtaposition of routines, as there might be even in the case of superior showmen, such as if Derren Brown started doing the Shell Game, or if Whit Haydn were performing a Question and Answer act, or if Ricky Jay started doing the Zombie Ball. If you have a core set of routines that effectively establishes the bounds within which the audience sees you operate, going outside those bounds is perilous. If you fail, you’ve betrayed yourself as somebody who cherry-picks their agents of trickery. But even if you succeed, now you’re moving back into that territory described by Derren Brown (from Teller?) where the magician becomes a whimsical god-figure who can just do anything.

Essentially, what I’m describing is an over-

arching, focused and consistent cover strategy, one that’s flexible enough to allow you to use multiple (and perhaps even cancelling) methodologies, but not so broad as to betray that you must be using multiple methodologies. That’s the best I can describe it. I don’t know if Evans and Craver intended these interpretations on their idea, or would want my messy mish-mash of thought that’s resulted from it. It sucks, because somewhere in here I think there’s actually the seeds of a definitive theory about the nature of mixing subgenres of magic, but words are failing me today. And I’m not hungover. Maybe I’ll be able to revisit this in the future and make more sense of it…EDIT: Back in the days of yomb, Lance Pierce offered this nice comment: Just judging from the terminology, gamblers may have a better sense of what it’s all about than magicians. To see why, start with the question: why do you think they call it “shade?”

The Frame of Action and MisdirectionApril 3, 2013 · by the burnaby kid · in Editorials

This was originally published as part of “Theory Month” on September 17, 2011.

 External and Internal Realities

 

Along time ago, I was a huge fan of the argument that every move in magic needs to be misdirected away from… or else, should have something compelling to misdirect towards, or whatever. Point is, I didn’t want audiences to see a move.And then, as an experiment, I tried applying that principle to monte.

The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t apply the misdirection. Ironically, the problem was that I could. It was easy to incorporate eye-contact techniques taught by John Carney, John Ramsay, Tyler Erickson and others.

The result? They’re looking at my hands. I make them look up. They look up. I begin tossing the cards. They look back down and see the row of three cards. I ask them where the winning card was, and they say that they have no idea. And why should they? They missed everything.

Is there a lesson in that idiotic and quickly-abandoned strategy of mine? Basically, the idea is

that misdirection, like any tool, needs to be done in the right context. Tommy Wonder liked to talk about applying the lightest possible touch of misdirection, but in the case of monte, even just that little bit would be too much. I found that in order for the routine to work, they had to feel like they saw everything. It puts a great deal of heat on the hands, but that’s something that the performer has to learn to live with, or else find another routine.

Thankfully, misdirection need not be our only technique-disguising tool, as we also have cover. In monte, the actions supply plenty of motion cover once you get the move down, and even that can be trumped by something like the cover pass with cards, where when it’s expertly done you could be staring straight at the deck and damned if it doesn’t look like nothing at all happened. In fact, if magicians weren’t so fond of the term “misdirection” and its implied mysteriousness, we’d realize that “cover” is actually the better term for what we’re constantly using, with misdirection being a substrategy of cover (rather than the other way around, in terms of the definitions offered by Craven and Evans in The Secret Art of Magic).

But that’s a discussion for another time. The pertinent topic is why misdirection is almost guaranteed to undermine things like tossed monte. The answer brings in an important concept, that of the frame of action.

It may be better-described elsewhere in the canon of magic theory out there, but I’m going to offer my own and hope it suffices. The frame of action is a defined area where things are apparently happening. Consider their attention as being like a video camera. It can focus in on

things, it can zoom in and out, it can pan, and it has boundaries that define what’s in the shot, and what’s outside of the shot. If something happens within the frame of action, that’s good for the spectator who’s trying to perceive the effect. If, however, they suspect something apparently happens outside the frame of action, you’re in a lot of trouble, because now their imagination can come in and supply possible explanations for what could have happened to make the magic happen. You could have stolen something, ditched something, switched something… heck, from their point of view, it’s perfectly reasonable to suspect that you could have done anything.

For the most part, our magic techniques generally do happen in-frame. Aside from very bold maneuvers like handling the final loads for Cups and Balls, or perhaps things like open loads on the table or steals from the jacket or what-have-you, most of the classic techniques we’ve developed can survive some scrutiny, so long as we don’t overuse them or plug them into a context that betrays their true nature — for instance, if we openly false-transfer an object and then immediately open the hand to show it’s empty, even expect execution suggests that the state of affairs is such that the object is in the other hand. Some techniques, such as the Retention of Vision vanish, actually rely upon more-than-average focus to fully exploit their effectiveness, and for things like monte, if their eyes come off the hands at all at the moment of sneakiness, well, the routine itself is compromised.

Now, while most of our broader strategies can survive some scrutiny (either as is or with a bit of finesse), many moves still benefit from misdirection at the appropriate time. While the

cover pass can take a good burning if expertly executed, the straightforward classic pass is a lot more vulnerable. Some people have tried to get around this by adding actions that help cover the move. This is advantageous if you want to keep the entire action in frame, but unfortunately, many of these covering actions have their own tells, and if the heat is on then those tells become problematic. Even if expertly executed, then at best, they make the strategy riskier if repeated, and at worst, they betray the exact moment that a move took place that they can rewind to (ie: “I know he did something there before showing the card on top.”).

As such, sometimes it really does help to get their attention out of frame for the moment of a move. However, we don’t want them to remember that their attention was taken off the hands (or key area, or whatever) and so it helps to examine strategies or finesses that help alleviate this problem.

A fast and efficient classic pass benefits from being executable in such a way that tells don’t register in the periphery. You might need a good classic pass to try this experiment, but it works… Look yourself in the eye in the mirror, and shuffle the cards in your hands. In the reflection, activity down below will register in the periphery even though you’re locked onto your own eyes. However, if your classic pass is good enough, doing it will betray little-to-no action down below, even if directly burning it would betray evidence of packet transposition. If you want to see it executed expertly, again, go make nice with Tyler Erickson and sign up for lessons. Personally, I still require a teensy bit of motion cover in order to accomplish this, but it’s nowhere near as bad as

some of the “going fishing” actions you’ll see in many videos — imagine instead a gesture where your hands come apart for a moment, separated by a few inches, as if to emphasize a point, and then come together as you relax. I’m serious, do this exercise, and you’ll not only be surprised at how little covering motion you’ll need, but you’ll also be appalled at how much something like a dip or a riffle will betray itself in the periphery.

One other benefit involving the classic pass’s speed is that it’s possible to get their attention off the deck for the split-second necessary, and then immediately bring their attention back down to the hands, as if you noticed that their attention came off the hands momentarily and, being the considerate soul that you are, you want them to make sure that they don’t miss anything (again, Tyler Erickson has some great touches on how to acquire the timing for this).

Of course, effect/method context is paramount. Do your classic pass expertly and then immediately show that the card’s on top, then it stands to reason that something must have happened when they weren’t looking. But if you look at something like the shuttle pass, now you’ve got some real power. The utility transfer to pass off five objects as four, for instance, is almost ridiculously unfair, to the extent that Dai Vernon called it one of the best principles in magic. Think about how it can apply here: you openly show the right hand has four objects, and insinuate the left is empty, you meet their gaze momentarily as you execute the action (in the periphery, your hands will appear to be dumping the objects), and then when you bring the attention back down, you’re openly showing four in the left hand as the right hand is insinuated empty, at which point you head

into your effect. Insert appropriate motivation for the action and you’ve got a very deceptive moment there. Even doing it as a switch for two like items (say, examined dice for matching loaded dice) would be deadly — I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that sort of transfer to cheat in a proper game, but for a magic show audience that has no idea what to expect, now you’re in a great position.

Improving things further, though, involves a concept elegantly phrased by Ben Train over at the Magic Cafe, that of the idea of things happening “In frame, but out of focus”. This is potentially a very powerful approach, because now you have a chance to get the best of both worlds — it’s in-frame, so they can’t suspect that something sneaky happened when they weren’t looking, but it’s out-of-focus, so their attention isn’t too tight on it and in a position to pick up false tells or whatnot. You can easily see this for yourself. Assuming you’re in front of your computer, stare at the screen and have your right hand hover over the mouse to the right side by about an inch, doing small circles. You should notice what your hand is doing in the periphery, but if you stop rotating, you might not notice if your middle finger is directly above the right mouse-button or the left one, until you actually look at it and focus in on it.

This sort of thing can be exploited similarly by a magician — you’re holding a ball in the right hand, they’re holding the wand in their left hand (directly opposite your right). Through eye contact techniques described by Carney and Ramsay, you get them to look directly at the ball you’re holding, then up to your eyes, and then back at the ball. You then say you’re going to need the wand in

their hand, bringing the attention there, and at that moment transfer[?] the ball to the left hand, freeing up the right hand to take the wand from their left hand. At this point, pause, throw a Ramsay Subtlety and then vanish the ball, and show the ball has reappeared under the cup they believed was empty before.

And that’s for a vanish, which is pretty blatant and can raise suspicions that are uncomfortably close to the method. Imagine doing something similar for cigarette-through-quarter, where you can offer time delays and convincers between the moment of deception and the actual moment of magic. As with all things, the strength of any strategy on the macro level is going to require the component parts to similarly be strong, but these sorts of touches really help.

But getting back to the frame of action itself, it’s possible to do deceptive magic without taking their eyes off the frame at all. Self-working tricks, discrepant moves, gimmicked props, hidden extra items, and even sleights like the DL do this all the time. There are different weaknesses, of course — gimmicks and hidden extras, for instance, can leave evidence of the deception behind, discrepant moves risk being seen through by those who are uncannily perceptive, and the DL is eminently recognizable… but these are issues that can be worked through, and there’s a greater advantage with them. With the misdirection strategy offered above for the classic pass, for instance, they might not feel that the wiley magician was using misdirection upon them because it was supplied so lightly, but with a gimmicked coin or a discrepant move, on the other hand, you can give them pure proof that they definitely didn’t miss anything, because they didn’t. Well, they did, but not what

they might expect.Consider a straightforward FT-based vanish of

an item. If you were capable of real magic, you wouldn’t have needed a transfer of the item at all. You can motivate that sort of thing initially via choreography, wand-placement, motivation, etc., but if you’re repeating the effect and trying to make it seem like you’re not sneaking something by them, at some point the effect benefits from having a solidly-fixed frame of action. In other words, the coin is shown to have vanished from the last spot they saw it. There’s a reason why Fickle Nickel is a powerful approach, in that the coin is shown to vanish (and then reappear!) from the same hand. No fancy sleight-of-hand concealments, no transfers, no sleeves, nothing. It’s not the most practical method, but few of the hardest-hitting ones are.

Still, for one that is, take a look at Juan Tamariz’s approach to framing the DL turndown and change, described in a Genii article. You’ll have to hunt it down somehow (some things are too good to share openly on teh intertubez, although suffice to say it involves fixing the frame of action) but do it that way for yourself in the mirror, and even though your logic and knowledge of the mechanics will tell you exactly what happened, your senses will be jarred at how impossible it looks. It won’t be enough to fool you completely, but imagine that heightened effect on somebody who’s not expecting anything?

It’s easy to get this stuff wrong and apply it too broadly. There’s an Aaron Fisher video out there that describes the “correct” way of doing the DL, and it’s tailored towards making sure you don’t get busted on the move. There are some merits to what he’s talking about, and the choreography he

suggests certainly can help camouflage the tells for the DL… except that it throws so much misdirection into the proceedings, and widens and shifts the frame of action so damn much, that you might as well have done a top change using those actions. In other words, they might not think that you’re turning over two cards, but all that action absolutely can raise the generalized suspicion of a switch, since there’s more than enough opportunity for it in the way that their attention gets knocked around like pinball. As with the Monte situation described earlier, sometimes you just have to raise your game and get the technique perfect.

Finally, this whole topic leads to one of the reasons why opening with something that suggests sleight-of-hand and then moving into something non-sleight-based can be so powerful, since you can basically condition them to want to look more and more closely at what’s going on, instilling the idea that this is what will help them find the secret, since you’ve already established that you don’t cheat when it comes to the nature of the prop… at which point you cheat when it comes to the nature of the prop. At that point they’ll have nothing.

In theory, anyways. Tyler likes to point out that magic is frequently a game of percentages. We can’t know with 100% certainty that if we’re giving them the Kaps/Malini subtlety in-frame-but-out-of-focus that their eyes won’t shift to that hand and immediately recognize that there’s a tad more tension than normal and want to make sure you’re not classic-palming something. Or, paraphrasing a Tyler Wilson joke, “Don’t you hate it when they guess the correct method? ‘You’re holding two cards! And that was totally two out-faros

combined with the Gilbreath Principle!’”Still, as Erickson likes to point out, magic is a game of not playing fair, and taking advantage of every extra thing you can get going in your favour is a big part of that.

External and Internal RealitiesMarch 19, 2013 · by the burnaby kid · in Editorials

This was originally published as part of “Theory Month” on September 14, 2011.

 External and Internal Realities

 

First, just a quick introduction of the terms. Credit goes to Darwin Ortiz for making this fine distinction in Designing Miracles and giving us the language to talk about it.

The External Reality: What the spectator sees.The Internal Reality: What’s actually going on.A quick allusion to a frequent argument that

comes up: Why bother learning the pass when a

simple shuffle control will do? The answer is basically that the question isn’t considering enough factors.

If you put a card into the middle of the deck, and do a convincing shuffle, and then show it’s arrived on top, you’ve got a clear display of skill. The shuffle gets credit.

If you put a card into the middle of the deck, and do a pass that doesn’t get detected, and then show it’s arrived on top, you’ve done a magic trick. The spectator doesn’t know what’s supposed to get credit.

Neither of those are necessarily satisfying tricks on their own, but the point is (a) some sleights have an external reality, whereas other sleights don’t (assuming they’re done well), and (b) it is that very external reality (or lack thereof) which is frequently going to determine whether or not that sleight is a good fit for a given context.

That pass/shuffle example just now shows how, if the effect is to be an Ambitious Card phase, the pass would make more sense. However, let’s say you’re doing a clever routine Vernon shared where you bring the selected-and-returned card to the top (somehow) and then thumb it over, asking if they want that card. If no, you second deal, and if yes, you fairly take it off. It’s essentially like a slow-motion “Stop!” trick, if that makes sense.

Anyhow, say you’re doing this trick. The effect should be that the spectator correctly guesses where the card is. However, if you put that card into the middle of the deck, and they said “Stop!” at the fifth or sixth card, now the puzzle becomes how the card got from the middle to the spot up near the top. Clairvoyance goes out the window. Here, a shuffle makes more sense.

Now, where things get interesting is where

you’ve got moves that (i) exist totally in the external reality (something like a Bill Simon Prophecy Move-like discrepancy), (ii) methods that are camouflaged by an acceptable external reality (a shuffle control), (iii) methods that have no significant external reality (a top change, if done well), and (iv) methods that have absolutely no external reality (something with a deceptive system of outs, for instance). All of these can have their pros and cons.

For (i), you’re taking a bit of a risk when you do something like Bill Simon’s Prophecy Move, but frequently all it takes is one little detail (turning the inserted card over to show what’s on the other side) and it can disappear psychologically. Something like the cross cut force has the same issue, but a little time misdirection is usually enough to get past it.

For (iv), if you use a system of outs, you’ve got some pretty powerful stuff at your disposal, although the problem is usually that the routine can’t be repeated. Not an issue for stage or parlour, but problematic for walkaround or repeat audiences such as a restaurant worker might face. There’s a lot of good magic or mentalism to be had when you take your sleight-of-hand skills and stop using them to do the usual obvious things and start doing them to switch gimmicks in and out.

(ii) and (iii) might sound similar enough to be identical — semantically, what’s the difference between “acceptable external reality” and “no significant external reality”? Well, look at the jog shuffle. Something is happening to the cards, and you’re never going to be able to misdirect away from that. Something like the pass, though, might not be completely burnable (certainly not to the same extent as (iv) earlier) but with just a touch of

misdirection added to your expert execution, the tells that give the game away ought to go by unnoticed. There’s also something like culling a selection that’s returned to the deck, where you don’t quite close-up exactly the same way as you would if the card was being fairly inserted and immediately squared up. There, a bit of cover is fine — “That was fair, right? You could have taken any of these cards?” and spreading over as if to illustrate all the cards that were available for the picking — but now you might need to be careful again with repeat audiences.

What this leads to is the idea of bending the external reality just a wee bit to account for the secret machinations. Sometimes this works (that cull example has personally served me well), but every now and then you’ll see some god-awful moves being put out by half-wits, where the deck is being spun or rotated for no reason or flipped over or what-have-you, and they tend to think that just because you can get away with a top-change or a shuffle control that it’ll “fly by laymen”.

The idea of accepted external realities involves things that generally have a natural motivation. Cards are meant to be shuffled, and squared up after a shuffle. Cards can be dealt. If it’s a pick-a-card trick, it’s ok for cards to be spread out, and then squared up after being spread. It’s ok to cut cards. We’ve got a ton of moves that can be camouflaged within these normal, accepted proceedings. Every now and then you can get clever — we here at the olde blogge have long thought that having a casino-style wash shuffle done by the spectator is something that’s sorely underutilized — but we have to be careful that in trying to be clever we’re not getting unnatural in a way that hurts the magic (Lennart Green dances a

very fine line here sometimes).For something like the top change or the pass,

however, in order to leverage the idea that nothing happens, then the tells have to be completely eliminated, and this is problematic. You can motivate tells (such as with the cull example), but for something like the pass, it’s not so easy. If you’re aiming high and going for the absolute appearance of nothing happening, then that means no tells at all, which is technically very demanding. If you’re making a concession and saying riffling or “going fishing” is ok, then you might be covering the technique in the sense that the internal mechanics of the move don’t get out, but at that moment, you’re giving an awful tell that’s letting people know that if there’s an internal reality to be perceived, it’s happening at exactly that moment. The key thing about these moves and these concepts of internal and external realities is that we’re trying to mess with what people perceive. A riffling action or a dipping action is perceptible — in order to make it imperceptible, you’d have to throw so much cover and misdirection upon it that you might as well just be openly covering the deck. A noiseless classic pass, on the other hand, can be camouflaged within innocuous gestures, and if you can get away with that, then now you’re in a situation where the internal reality can’t be discerned, and in sleight-of-hand, this is sublime.

We also have to realize that the external reality isn’t limited to a simple description of the action. For something like an overhand shuffle, it isn’t just that the cards are being shuffled, but rather that the cards are being shuffled by the magician. Take that previous trick where the Ace of Spades goes into the middle of the deck, the magician

shuffles the cards, and then shows the Ace of Spades is on top. Do that same trick where the spectator shuffles the cards, and you’ve got a near miracle. There’s a reason why Chad Long’s Shuffling Lesson trick hits hard. If you want to really convince them that the external reality is genuine, well, get them to do it.

Now, if any of this brought to mind Tommy Wonder’s The Mind Movie, give yourself a pat on the back. One of the big problems with a lot of magic that gets put out now are tricks that serve as demonstrations of a move or strategy. Some guy thinks “Hey, this folding coin is nifty. I’m going to do a four-phase coin through table with it.” I’m a big fan of some of David Roth’s work, and I think he’s on to something with the effect, but the repetition of that display sequence is troublesome — it’s simply a bit too affected an external reality. If you’re going to be dirty anyways, the flipper coin simply makes more sense.

And this is where the Mind Movie comes into play. The Mind Movie is essentially an elaborate construction of the external reality, right down to every detail necessary to make the magic potent. Where Tommy Wonder’s brilliance shines through is in the idea that a simple (almost cursory?) analysis your idealized choreography or illusion will immediately yield “Shadow Areas”, opportunities to do the dirty work. It’s a big part as to why some of his misdirection is so good (look at that cups and balls routine for some of those steals), but it can be broadened to other things, including assumptions about the magician (“He’s a very skilled sleight-of-hand artist.”), his props (“He always uses a regular deck of cards.”) or the surroundings (“These bread rolls belong to the

restaurant.”). Implicit in each of those three parenthesized statements are assumptions that can be taken for granted by the magician.

There’s a dark side to this as well. You might find that in the external reality that you’ve got in place, that not only is there enough information to act as a tell for the technique you’re using, but there’s enough information to act as potential tells for techniques you’re not using — keeping sleeves rolled down for a coin vanish, for instance, or else using your fancy tricky-looking deck of cards. Here, those Shadow Areas that really ought to be invisible in the external reality, suddenly start sprouting up with neon lights. This is essentially the bane of bottom-up thinking, trying to find the trick that accommodates the method, rather than the other way around.Anyways, enough blabbing about this. This was meant to be a couple hundred words just to introduce the terms, but as is known to happen here sometimes, verbal diarrhea took over. For all you tl/dr folks, go get Designing Miracles and Tommy Wonder’s Books of Wonder.