The Merits of Failure

M
ike 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. Lets
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 didnt 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 youre a magician and you cant pull off
100% (let alone a mere 40%) of your effects, chances are
youre 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 dont have any exact data on this, but Id 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, thatd be impressive.
Chan Canasta probably isnt 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, its 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, theyd win the lottery everytime. That
they dont speaks to one of two possibilities: (a) theyre
frauds, or (b) their powers are imperfect. (a)s not really all
that fun to fantasize about (unless youre 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, weve 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, its frequently mysterious to us. Yeah,
there are scientific theories behind the concept of deja-vu,
and various studies have shown that we can read peoples
thought processes simply by following their eye patterns,
but even still theres a nebulous quality to the whole thing
thats 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. Weve 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, magics 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 wouldnt want to claim the
power that you can make things jump from one place to
another, as itd 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 thats not kosher,
and yet were still far short of the success rate thats
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, youre still like them
sometimes.
Theres also the intriguing idea of using failure as a way
to give further character to the mentalists power. Say
youve 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, doesnt it
make more sense that somebody with psychic powers
wouldnt 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
dont miss by much. If theyre thinking of the number 35,
you could say, Something in the 30s. and then apologize
for not getting closer. If theyre thinking of the Jack of
Hearts, narrow it down to a red Jack and then ask if youre
close. If theyre 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 whats written down is out-of-the-ordinary, the
more that suspicion can fester.
However, say that youre having trouble divining
somebodys thought. Say that your character sees
thoughts. At that point, you could reveal something thats
wrong but looks similar eg: theyre thinking of a turtle
but you draw a car thats got a strange turtle-like
appearance. Say, on the other hand, that your character
hears thoughts. At that point, you could reveal something
thats wrong but sounds similar eg: theyre thinking
Albuquerque and youre 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 isnt 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 youre a
magician, and if you have access to tricky means of getting
that number, then you can tell them the exact number.
Since you dont 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. Its 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 didnt 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 its
possible to make failed attempts play well, then it follows
that theres room for greater risk-taking. Say you dont
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 youre 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, youve already done a great job getting that far
(assuming you can sell the showmanship properly), and if
you hit, well, youve 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, theres nothing keeping you from
following up the miss with something else thats even
more difficult but for which you have a surefire successful
methodology. Say youve got ten items on the table, and
theyre thinking of one, and you narrow it down
successfully to the watch and the candlestick, and they
confirm that youre right, and its 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, youve 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 Mavens Kurotsuke is an example of this.
(Ill 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, youll know thats 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, thats 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 wasnt.
However, if youve seen Derren Brown do the routine,
youll notice how youve 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 dont know if Brown has an extra method in play,
but I dont really care, because the strategy is sound
take the risk, knowing that if you succeed youre the man,
but even if you fail youre 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 dont
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
doesnt, right?
Well, its 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 Harriss notions of a Permanent
Piece of Strange). Maybe you cant restore the cigarette or
bill perfectly, and a third of the tears didnt heal (while just
enough tears did get healed so that mystery remains).
Maybe you cant find their card doing the blindfolded card
stab, because you dont 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 cant heal the coin afterwards, leaving a hole and
bits of their signature.
Its 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 dont want to open with one of these
failures unless you had super-high prestige with your
audience, and also that you probably wouldnt want to
close the show with this sort of failure either, since it
would be awkward (and even if Im right and there were
long-term benefits of Blaines failure, that ending did feel
weird when watching it). Even if Im right and you dont
want to open or close with this, more than that, its 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
well get some great ideas from them.
An Offbeat View on Misdirection and
Cover



T
odays essay is way out there. Ive 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 Tzus Art of War. Plus a bunch of
stuff on Street Magic. Lets just say its one of the more
creative efforts to tackle magic theory out there.
Before I get into their views on misdirection, Im 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 dont 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, its misdirection.
If, on the other hand, you lift the cup to show a surprise
(Look! Theres a ball here that shouldnt be here!) and
use that as misdirection to do something else thats
sneaky, thats 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 lets be honest,
strategically, in both situations its damned important that
they dont see the method, and in both cases this is
accomplished by manipulating their focus. Honestly, Id
argue that there are more than just those two approaches
to focus-shift as well, so Ive got no problem sticking with
misdirection as its an industry term. I respect anybodys
right to disagree on that point, but I wont be entertaining
rebuttals on it here, because weve got a bit deeper to go in
order to look at Evans and Cravers 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? Wheres the misdirection there? Shouldnt we
broaden the term misdirection towards the things that
make other techniques work?
Now, theres 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, theres a
very compelling idea there. Theres the strategy and
method (X), which were forced to use. Theres the effect
(Y), that we want them to see. And then theres (Z),
misdirection (EE-NC definition), which strives to move
everything away from the strategy and towards the effect.
I personally wish they hadnt used the term
misdirection to describe Z, since in my mind cover is a
more-than-adequate description for what theyre talking
about, and allows us to continue to use the traditional
meaning of misdirection as a subset of cover.
Misdirectional cover is a term Ive seen bandied about
and in my mind its 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 Im off-base with this one. But
whatever, its 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). Ive also seen the term
psychological misdirection used in various nebulous
ways, and Ive probably even used the term myself once or
twice in various places on the olde blogge.
But theres one other thing thats 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. Theres a different
feel to both routines, and I think theres something to
take away from that. Lets assume were 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
wont 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 kids book, but even at
best still gives the audience a non-magic explanation for
whats happened, a feeling of self-workingness to it that is
almost endemic to the way the trick unfolds. Whats 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 Cravers thesis,
because it sort of suggests an all-encompassing approach
to misdirection. I think that one thing thatd 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 whove 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 its generally (a) got a soft touch to it so it
doesnt 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 Im
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, theres a dynamic to it thatd
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 its as if the
performer is shifting modes too indiscriminately. It should
seem that, done well, youd 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 its
just the magician in me that makes it seem obvious, but I
think that what we can tell specifically, audiences can still
sense ambiguously. Ive 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 dont know how many paragraphs worth of
speculation Ive 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,
youve betrayed yourself as somebody who cherry-picks
their agents of trickery. But even if you succeed, now
youre 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 Im describing is an over-arching,
focused and consistent cover strategy, one thats 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. Thats the
best I can describe it. I dont know if Evans and Craver
intended these interpretations on their idea, or would
want my messy mish-mash of thought thats resulted from
it. It sucks, because somewhere in here I think theres
actually the seeds of a definitive theory about the nature of
mixing subgenres of magic, but words are failing me
today. And Im not hungover. Maybe Ill 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 its all about
than magicians. To see why, start with the question: why
do you think they call it shade?







The Frame of Action and
Misdirection
April 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



A
long 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 didnt want audiences to
see a move. And then, as an experiment, I tried applying
that principle to monte.
The problem wasnt that I couldnt 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? Theyre 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
thats 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 its expertly
done you could be staring straight at the deck and damned
if it doesnt look like nothing at all happened. In fact, if
magicians werent so fond of the term misdirection and
its implied mysteriousness, wed realize that cover is
actually the better term for what were 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 thats 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 Im 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 whats in the shot, and whats
outside of the shot. If something happens within the frame
of action, thats good for the spectator whos trying to
perceive the effect. If, however, they suspect something
apparently happens outside the frame of action, youre 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, its 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 weve
developed can survive some scrutiny, so long as we dont
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 its
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 dont 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 dont 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 youre 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 its nowhere near as bad as some of
the going fishing actions youll 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.
Im serious, do this exercise, and youll not only be
surprised at how little covering motion youll need, but
youll 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 passs speed is
that its 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 dont 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
cards on top, then it stands to reason that something must
have happened when they werent looking. But if you look
at something like the shuttle pass, now youve 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, youre 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 youve 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 wouldnt 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 youre 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 its in-frame, so they cant suspect that
something sneaky happened when they werent looking,
but its out-of-focus, so their attention isnt too tight on it
and in a position to pick up false tells or whatnot. You can
easily see this for yourself. Assuming youre 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 youre holding a ball in the right hand, theyre
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 youre holding, then up to your eyes, and then back at
the ball. You then say youre 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 thats 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, its 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 theres 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 didnt miss anything, because they
didnt. 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 wouldnt 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 youre repeating the effect and
trying to make it seem like youre 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.
Theres 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. Its not
the most practical method, but few of the hardest-hitting
ones are.
Still, for one that is, take a look at Juan Tamarizs
approach to framing the DL turndown and change,
described in a Genii article. Youll 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 wont be
enough to fool you completely, but imagine that
heightened effect on somebody whos not expecting
anything?
Its easy to get this stuff wrong and apply it too broadly.
Theres an Aaron Fisher video out there that describes the
correct way of doing the DL, and its tailored towards
making sure you dont get busted on the move. There are
some merits to what hes 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 youre turning over two
cards, but all that action absolutely can raise the
generalized suspicion of a switch, since theres 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 whats going on, instilling
the idea that this is what will help them find the secret,
since youve already established that you dont 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 theyll have nothing.
In theory, anyways. Tyler likes to point out that magic is
frequently a game of percentages. We cant know with
100% certainty that if were giving them the Kaps/Malini
subtlety in-frame-but-out-of-focus that their eyes wont
shift to that hand and immediately recognize that theres a
tad more tension than normal and want to make sure
youre not classic-palming something. Or, paraphrasing a
Tyler Wilson joke, Dont you hate it when they guess the
correct method? Youre 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 Realities
March 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



F
irst, 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: Whats 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
isnt considering enough factors.
If you put a card into the middle of the deck, and do a
convincing shuffle, and then show its arrived on top,
youve 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 doesnt get detected, and then show its arrived
on top, youve done a magic trick. The spectator doesnt
know whats 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 dont (assuming theyre
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, lets say youre 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. Its essentially like a slow-
motion Stop! trick, if that makes sense.
Anyhow, say youre 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 youve 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), youre taking a bit of a risk when you do
something like Bill Simons Prophecy Move, but frequently
all it takes is one little detail (turning the inserted card
over to show whats 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, youve got some
pretty powerful stuff at your disposal, although the
problem is usually that the routine cant be repeated. Not
an issue for stage or parlour, but problematic for
walkaround or repeat audiences such as a restaurant
worker might face. Theres 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, whats the difference between acceptable
external reality and no significant external reality?
Well, look at the jog shuffle. Something is happening to
the cards, and youre 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. Theres also
something like culling a selection thats returned to the
deck, where you dont 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
youll 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 itll 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 its a pick-a-card trick, its ok for cards to be
spread out, and then squared up after being spread. Its ok
to cut cards. Weve 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 thats
sorely underutilized but we have to be careful that in
trying to be clever were 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, its not so easy.
If youre aiming high and going for the absolute
appearance of nothing happening, then that means no tells
at all, which is technically very demanding. If youre
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 dont get
out, but at that moment, youre giving an awful tell thats
letting people know that if theres an internal reality to be
perceived, its happening at exactly that moment. The key
thing about these moves and these concepts of internal
and external realities is that were trying to mess with
what people perceive. A riffling action or a dipping action
is perceptible in order to make it imperceptible, youd
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 youre in a situation where the
internal reality cant be discerned, and in sleight-of-hand,
this is sublime.
We also have to realize that the external reality isnt
limited to a simple description of the action. For
something like an overhand shuffle, it isnt 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 youve got a near miracle. Theres a
reason why Chad Longs 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 Wonders
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.
Im going to do a four-phase coin through table with it.
Im a big fan of some of David Roths work, and I think
hes on to something with the effect, but the repetition of
that display sequence is troublesome its simply a bit too
affected an external reality. If youre 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 Wonders
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. Its 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 (Hes 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.
Theres a dark side to this as well. You might find that in
the external reality that youve got in place, that not only is
there enough information to act as a tell for the technique
youre using, but theres enough information to act as
potential tells for techniques youre 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 Wonders Books of Wonder.