Are there any magic trixks so good that even professionals don't know how it's done?

Cafe Society
1

I was thinking about Penn and Teller’s recent show “Fool Us”, where they get a chance to watch a trick once, from one angle, in the audience; and then they have to work out exactly how it’s done. i didn’t watch many but they had a pretty good success rate. Are there any tricks though, that even after repeat viewings professional magicians cannot work out.

Not necessarily replicate, perhaps it does require a lithe body or an amazing memory etc., just figure out. For these purposes I’d disallow any trick that has never been performed in front of an audience or requires a volunteer who is not explicitly one of the magician’s assistants, unless it has been performed with a volunteer who would be unimpeachably honest.

2

Yeah, we had a discussion on these boards not long ago about a card trick David Berglas does that certainly very much impresses the professionals. There are theories about how it is done, but, I think, nothing definitive.

I think it is this one - (no time to check now)

3

First of all, at least one person knows how every trick is done. There are many that only the originator knows every last detail of, but professional magicians can figure out each one. However, unless the sole person who knows how a trick is done admits to it, no one else will ever know if they’ve done more than replicating it. It’s pretty rare that a trick is that much of a secret anyway. Professional magicians often need staff and assistants that know the details of the trick.

The very best magic is done with the simplest of mechanisms, deft physical coordination by the magician and confederates, and the a complex understanding of human behavior.

I haven’t looked into in detail, but there are published instructions for this trick. It’s similar to one I use a lot, but more complex since any magician knows how mine is done.

4

Some of the stuff i’ve seen on Mindfreak with Chris Angel defies description. He makes you wonder if he’s some kind of wizard…

5

A wizard of camera tricks, mainly. :slight_smile:

6

Let’s hope **ianzin **finds this thread. I believe he is one of our biggest experts in pro magic…

I would also make a completely unknowledgeable WAG that there is a big difference between Big Magic (“wow how did they levitate/make that big thing disappear/break those locks/survive that gunshot, etc…”) vs. appreciating the craft of Small / Close-in Magic (“wow, that is clearly a manual dexterity/misdirection-based move, but I don’t see how they do it!”)

7

I would love to know how this is done, but can’t find anything online.

8

The only way I see that trick working is if the man handling the cards is in on it, since Berglas never touches the cards himself.

9

I can’t recall the details, it was too long ago but I recall reading an article about a guy who was a “magician’s magician” who specialized in performing tricks that baffled other magicians. He did it partly by deliberately devising his tricks completely independently (including avoiding reading books on magic) so he’d use approaches they were unfamiliar with, and partly by knowing what magicians would expect and manipulating that. I recall one trick that he revealed the secret of, a card trick he called a “tuned deck”; it turned out that the main trick was the name of the trick itself. In reality, he performed multiple card tricks, all calling them by the same name of “tuned deck”; the other magicians kept trying to figure out what that meant. And since he kept switching tricks, every time one thought he saw what the trick was the next performance of the “tuned deck” would “prove” him wrong.

10

All t.v.magicians have consultants.To vanish an Airforce jet or space shuttle from NASA they must know the method .You cannot alter or damage the property.May have to close down roads to protect the secret.Now mind reading tricks called mentalism is the hardest to figure out.The most common card named is ace spades.Next queen hearts.Then king spades.Any three cards removed from a face down shuffled deck.Spectator puts each in a envelope without looking.Magician secretly switches the 3 envelopes for 3 more with those 3 cards inside.Now he names a random card.He eliminates 2 envelopes.The magician uses a elimination force.so he gets envelope with his card inside.I know which envelope has what card because I use starch water to soak 2 envelopes across opposite corners.They bend easy 1 way & are stiff the other way.Its an old gamble svam from the Houdini era.

11

I think you guys are still around. Here’s a link to one way of doing the trick called “any card at any number”. The trick in the link provided by @njtt above is much easier to do. You can impress your friends. Start by putting the Queen of Hearts at the 10th card down in a deck of cards. Then tell a friend of yours to say “Queen of Hearts” when you ask him to name a card, and tell him to say “Ten” when you ask him to name the position in the deck. I don’t think I need to say more.

12

David Copperfield’s History of Magic is mostly an advertisement about his colossal collection of magic paraphernalia, but is still worth looking at for the pictures. He mentions at least one illusion that’s not in his collection that he says the exact workings of is no longer known.

I agree that major illusions are worked out by specialists, but their business is to work out variations that others haven’t thought of yet. How long these stay unknown is the big question.

I would be surprised if the master close-up magicians didn’t have their own variations they haven’t revealed to the profession. Why would they? Why get them imitated by lesser others?

But we’re talking about shavings of the top 1% of the masters.

13

I know this is a post from 10 years ago, but for this former semipro magician, this particular trick is “foolproof” and doesn’t require any technical skills, so I can’t see real pros being impressed. Of course, one of the secrets of magic is showmanship and some of the best tricks are really simple. This isn’t criticism of Berglas, more power to him for impressing people.

Having confederates posing as unsuspecting audience members or participating audience members is actually used by even the best of the professionals. I remember watching one top pro and the guy pulled up from the audience was clearly a magician himself. From the way he handled the cards, it was obvious that he was trained.

The interesting point was that the participant was carefully checking each card to make sure it was only one and not two cards together. Someone randomly selected simply would never do that. Actually, because I was first looking at it on my phone, with the poor video quality I thought it may be a rough and smooth deck, where the top of any two card pairs would be the Queen of Hearts, but it was just the confederate carefully counting the cards to ensure the count was correct.

Fooling people is only part of the art. There is also the various technical skills as well as performance and showmanship. Back when I was still an amateur in the 80s, a lot of my fellow magicians would trash talk Copperfield because a lot of his shows weren’t that technical. Well yeah, but he puts on a show that 99.9999% of magicians can never touch.

Even below the pro level, a good semipro or really sharp amateur should be able to understand the tricks of a lot of the professional’s routine. There are only so many ways that things can be done and with experience then it makes it easier to guess.

BUT, that doesn’t mean we could actually become a professional. Generally there is a reason for that divide.

As Penn has said on the show, there are only so many possibilities in magic. In order to allow magicians to fool the dual, they don’t allow Penn and Teller to make too many guesses. If you have watched the first shows, they did allow more guesses, which made it much more difficult for those early contestants.

Pros will also make some moves which are designed to fool other professionals. People appearing on Fool Us routinely do that hoping to throw P&T off.

However, all of this are for the good professionals. Then you get the superstars.

People like Paul Gertner who blow Penn and Teller away. Penn repeatedly tells you that he is the big, dumb guy who is can easily be fooled and Teller is the sharper one. Penn isn’t stupid, of course, but Teller really is among the best.

14

Maybe magicians criticized him for that, and maybe magicians think his showmanship is all that, but that’s not at all what I think. Now, take someone like The Amazing Jonathan: A lot of his tricks weren’t technical at all, but he was highly entertaining. Copperfield, by contrast, was so obviously fake, while purporting to be serious, that it wasn’t entertaining at all.

15

He was a comedian who did some magic, so of course he was highly entertaining.

There are millions and millions of people who disagree with you. Forbes has him as the most commercially successful magicians of all times with sales of over $4 billion.

As I said, he isn’t the most technical magician. Certainly, he doesn’t appeal to everyone, including you, but that isn’t the question. He sold shows like no one else at the time. He has a lot of detractor among magicians because they don’t consider his act to be magic lite, but they miss the point. Magicians naturally prefer the Paul Gertners, but most people aren’t going to appreciate him like other magicians will.

I went with my girlfriend at the time to a live Copperfield show in Salt Lake City in the last 80s, and while there wasn’t really anything that fooled me, the show was good. Early in this career, he starred in The Magic Man musical in Chicago in which he sang, danced and did illusions. The cast of his performance was fantastic, with real dancing by the assistants.

His live performances were much better than his rather mediocre grand illusions, the worst of which was probably the Great Wall of China, although he may have done others which I haven’t paid attention to.

I think there is also a difference between people who are not magicians evaluating entertainers on their person preferences and those who may simply be jealous of other’s success. I could do better than that. Well, no you can’t or you would be performing in front of thousands instead of hundreds, or just three of your friends at a bar.