In a number of years of hearing about magicians and how they do this sort of trick, I have read several admissions of use of “hot reading” techniques but none of using audience plants. I don’t know whether this is because magicians simply won’t admit to the latter but will admit to the former or whether there is some particular reason they don’t use audience plants.
Ianzin may know, as you say.
William Poundstone, in the book Big Secrets, offers up some interesting thoughts on Kreskin’s act. Bottom line, is he uses many methods to get information and he is very good at his profession.
The magician isn’t using “underhanded tricks” or being devious. S/he’s being ENTERTAINING. That’s what being a magician and performing a show in front of a live audience means. Agreed, Kreskin is very good at his craft as are others in the magic business, but the bottom line is that it’s a show for entertainment purposes only.
I certainly don’t mean to imply any moral criticism when I use terms like “underhanded” in relation to magicians. As you say, they are just being entertaining. However, it’s hard to find a good word to describe the type of trickery discussed above without giving the impression that one is being judgmental, particularly when one is describing trickery that may well involve lying either outright or by implication.
How could you possibly be convinced that he has no assistants with him and no plants in the audience? Maybe you can conclude that most of the audience aren’t plants, but a half-dozen plants in a crowded auditorium would be easy. And for many tricks, you only need a small number of plants, or even only one.
For example: I’ve often seen variants of a trick where a magician has, say, 200 different people write something on an index card. He then says “OK, the first person, John, wrote ‘puppy’”, and checks the card. Yup, puppy. John gasps in disbelief. “The second person, Alice, wrote ‘867-5309’” He checks the second card, and again he’s right. "The third person, Robert, wrote “supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous”. He checks the third card, and this time it’s Robert who’s amazed. A few minutes later, he’s gone through all 200 cards, and he’s been right every time.
Of course, everyone knows that he doesn’t have 200 plants. The expense would be prohibitive, and besides, most of the audience probably knows one or more of those 200 people personally. But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t do the trick using plants, since he only actually needs one. Everyone else is a genuine audience member, but John, the first guy, was a plant. The magician already knows what John’s going to write. Then, when he’s “checking John’s answer”, he’s actually looking at Mary’s card. When he checks that answer, he’s looking at Robert’s, and so on.
Kreskin was one of the few people to ever get banned from Art Bell’s radio show after he predicted the greatest UFO sighting of the century on a certain date. Naturally, nothing happened. You have to be a pretty big fuckup to get banned from Art Bell.
I read the same “Big Secrets” book mentioned above. It got much of its material from a book called “Psychology of the Psychic” published in 1980. It’s worth reading to understand the full story behind Kreskin’s methods, but for right now I’ll note
–All the methods of Kreskin were exposed without the use of plants.
–Kreskin will ask people to write their thoughts on paper and then either fold that paper or put it in an envelope. He often suggest SS or phone numbers be written down. He then swipes the messages and hides them underneath the note pad
–Kreskin is incredibly skilled at coaxing people he “mind reads”. He is vague in many of his questions and lets the subject fill in the details.
I prefer it 100 percent spoiled, myself.
Well, don’t keep me hanging! 
-FrL-
I pay my money to watch magic shows so I can be entertained and think ‘how did they do that?’
Whether the magician is using many, many hours of practice (close-up card tricks), well-built props (flying, sawing people in half) or knowledge of people (misdirection) doesn’t bother me.
I suppose a plant or a camera trick does disappoint (mainly because anyone could do it.)
I was delighted to be on a televised Derren Brown show.
He did three pieces of magic.
I knew how he did the first (because it was about chess and I can do it myself.) It still required him to remember perfectly, without notes, about 500 chess moves in groups of 8. :eek: This is extremely difficult for an inexperienced chess player (Derren has no chess rating.) Derren did it all in one take over 3 hours.
He did an envelope switch on me. I was about 10 feet away and watching him the whole time. :smack: I realised almost immediately how he had distracted me, but it still needed split-second timing and skill.
I still don’t know how he did the third trick. 
After filming, Derren could have left (his car was ready.) Instead he came over, thanked the participants, chatted and signed autographs. 
That’s how magic should be done.
A real basic method of getting info that someone writes down is to have them write it on a pad of paper then take that piece of paper off the pad for themselves. The assistant then retrieves the rest of the unused pad.
Of course the pad has the carbon copy of what the person wrote a couple pages down into the pad.
Who supplied the audience members with the pens and papers? If it was a single sheet of paper they would still have to press it against something to write on it. A clipboard that leaves impressions on it when written on?
OK, here’s a start:
Theater may have a box office (that is, they sell their own tickets) and lots of people pay by credit card or (as previously noted) check.
Theaters usually have a “Will Call” booth.
Theaters often have season ticket holders and other regulars.
Theaters may have parking lots.
All of these are rich sources of names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates and other starting points; I’m sure that the theater is happy to cooperate. With any one of these and a few minutes work you can come up with tons of info on a person. And that’s assuming that the audience isn’t asked to do anything at all aside from show up. If they are writing stuff down on paper as part of the act then many other tricks come into play, as has been pointed out.
Okay, so that’s basically what I already said in my first post.
-FrL-
Yeah, just kind of expanding on that. No need for plants, really, although I’m sure that some really cool tricks can be best pulled off with confederates.
I have heard of some magicians who send people out to the parking lot to look inside cars for information, but with identity theft these days its probably less fruitful.
Seriously though, I know its a cliche, but why don’t any of these guys pick lottery numbers, or the final score of sporting events? What does that tell you that NOT ONE has ever tried to do this publically?
that’s the key–being in the audience. Magicians do “impossible” things in front of an audience… but only in front of an audience, and nowhere else.
If someone could actually do those things in real life ( i.e. read your mind, tell someone his Social Security number, or identify his grandfather, or whatever), couldn’t they make a lot of money doing it for a useful goal, not just to entertain.?
I like a good magician who admits he is a showman…
But I hate a magician who claims he has supernatural powers (remember Uri Geller?)
If you can really read minds, why limit yourself to silly games on stage? Why not work at something useful?
Maybe be a police detective?( know whether the suspect really did it–you’d never need to follow bad leads)
Or even be a real estate agent?(by knowing how much your client was really willing to cut his price, you could close deals fast)
.
Ahh…just think of the glory …“Kreskin the magnificant real estate agent”-----gee… is that gonna win him a lot of many fans?..
At the wikipedia article for Kreskin, it says he does not claim to have any supernatural powers.
-FrL-
Seriously though, I know its a cliche, but why don’t any of these guys pick lottery numbers, or the final score of sporting events?
**
What does that tell you that NOT ONE has ever tried to do this publically?**
It tells us what the vast majority of people automatically know, that you’re watching an entertainer.
The point isn’t to make you believe it is “real”. The point is that you know it’s a trick and yet you’re fooled by it anyway. That’s the fun of watching a good magician. I’ve been studying and performing magic for 30 years and yet I am a great audience for magic. It doesn’t matter one whit that I know exactly how it’s done, the performance is everything. I’ve seen guys perform miracles with nothing more than the stuff that can be found in any kid’s magic set. There’s a big difference between a pro and a schmo and the difference isn’t the method used to achieve the illusion.
I’ve seen Kreskin’s show in person and I’ve seen him many times on television and I think he’s one of the best. Always a very entertaining show.
Thing is, the magician’s code is that they never reveal the secrets of how they do things to the audience. And the reason for this is that the secrets are often so cheesy and simple that you can’t believe you could be fooled so easily. I’m talking Vizinni yelling “What’s that?” and switching goblets while Wesley’s back is turned level cheesy. Some tricks have elaborate presentations with complex props and stage shows, and the core of the trick turns out to be some 5000 year old card switch trick that was hoary when Moses used it to bamboozle Pharoah.
True story: Many years ago, (I think I was in high school at the time) I was in the audience at a magic show, and I was not a plant. The magician asked for volunteers for mind-reading, and I volunteered. He told me to think of a flavor of soda. My first thought was sarsaparilla, but then I changed my mind to root beer. I’m not sure why I changed my mind, perhaps I thought that sarsaparilla was unfairly difficult. The magician then announced that I was thinking of root beer.
I was, and still am, impressed. Being the volunteer myself helps me to be sure that the volunteer was not a plant. I’ve tried to think of how he did it, and can come up with only two ways: Perhaps his patter beforehand had included the words “sarsaparilla” or “root beer”, in such a manner that no one would take note of it, yet anyone would have been subconsciously forced to think “root beer”. Another possiblility is that I mouthed the words without realizing it, and he read my lips.
But one thing is for sure: There was no way he could have done any advance research, of the sort suggested by the “pieces of paper” mentioned throughout this thread.
I’ve never heard of mentalists doing soda. However, they often do shapes. The common one is to say something like: “Think of a simple shape, like a circle or triangle…”
There aren’t actually that many simple shapes that the average person will think of. By naming two very common shapes in his patter, the mentalist has only left few possibilities. I can’t recall the statistics precisely now, but by doing it the right way, the mentalist can make it seem that you are being offered a big choice while actually leaving it so that the audience member will pick the one remaining common shape a very high percentage of the time.
One of the things that happens when audience members try to remember what magicians did is they leave out small but important details. Particularly when remembering tricks from long ago.
Are you certain that the guy didn’t say something like: “Think of a flavour of soda, like coke or lemonade or [etc]” thereby boxing you into few choices?