Ah very good.
whew!
There’s an old saying, in stage magic, about not showing someone the same trick twice. And, as it happens, I once saw a magician do a trick, and I couldn’t figure out how it had been done — until I saw him give a second performance the next day.
That may seem like a pointlessly general description, where (a) the specifics I saw that second time around would of course be the key, and where (b) you could of course ask me questions in hopes of eventually hitting upon the crucial detail I spotted. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t based on me seeing him perform that trick a second time.
Was his second performance the same trick?
Nope.
Did the trick seen in the second performance contain elements that revealed how the first trick had been done?
For the sake of clarity: he did multiple tricks in the second performance, just like he did multiple tricks in the first — but I think it’s fair to say that, no, there weren’t elements in a trick seen in the second performance that revealed how the trick in the first performance had been done.
During the second performance, did you notice something “peripheral to” the magician that tipped you off? For example, something about the way the venue was designed or built?
Nope.
Did he do two different tricks that purported to be the same trick? (for instance, doing the “pick a card” trick one time with a marked deck, and then a second time with a mirror behind the card-picker)?
If you had seen only the second performance (and from the same seats as you actually did, and with the same audience volunteers, etc.), without having seen the first performance, would you have noticed anything about how any tricks were done?
Was what you noticed due to a lapse of skill on the magician’s part? Was it deliberate on the magician’s part (perhaps for humorous effect)?
Was a “random volunteer from the audience” the same person both times?
Nope.
Nope.
I wouldn’t say it was a lapse of skill; I’d say he was exactly as skilled throughout the second performance as he was during the first.
Deliberate is hard to say, but it wasn’t for humorous effect.
No — but I’d say that was already ruled out by the question about whether another trick contained elements that revealed how the first trick had been done.
Did the first performance involve any voluteers (real or planted) from the audience? Did the second?
Did the first performance involve another person who was not presented as a volunteer from the audience (for example, someone billed as the magician’s assistant)? Did the second?
Was the second performance actually a magic performance? Or was it a performance of some other type?
Yes.
Yes.
The first and second were actually magic performances.
Were the audience volunteers all genuine volunteers, not confederates?
Was the assistant / other person involved the same person both times?
Did the trick you were able to figure out involve:
- Pretending to read someone’s mind?
- Making something disappear / reappear?
- Making some other apparently-physically-impossible thing happen?
Were playing cards involved?
To the best of my knowledge, yes.
Yes.
Cards weren’t involved, but that raises a question: what counts as pretending to read a mind?
Like, if I say “pick a card, any card,” and you do, and then I tell you to “now put it back in the deck,” and you do, and I do a couple of fancy shuffles and then spread the cards face up on the table and look at you and look at the cards and look at you and look at the cards, and say “and yours was: the six of diamonds?” — well, is that a mindreading effect? What if it’s the exact same trick, only instead of saying the showstopper line I open the sealed envelope that’s been on the table all this time, and it has my handwritten note that your card is the six of diamonds?
Does the answer involve something that someone said?
If so:
Did the magician say it?
The assistant?
An audience volunteer?
Some random audience member, worker at the venue, Uber driver who took you home, or whoever?
It’s hard to give a yes-or-no answer to this one. On the one hand, the answer happens to involve stuff that was said — but, on the other hand, if I’d seen the second performance without being able to hear anything, I still would’ve reached the same realization upon simply watching. So I don’t want to give a misleading ‘yes’ or a misleading ‘no.’
Hmm. I guess the sort of mind-reading scenario I had in mind was more like “magician is blindfolded, audience volunteer is told to draw a card and show it to the rest of the audience, everybody concentrates on that card, magician names the card without being un-blindfolded.”
So, no, it wasn’t that, and I’d say it wasn’t anything significantly similar to that — which is why I mentioned that ‘sealed envelope’ hypothetical, where the magician obviously isn’t (pretending that he’s) reading anyone’s mind if the whole point is for him to say uh, hey, the envelope was sealed before you even knew what the card was going to be, let alone before you started concentrating reeeeal hard on it.
OK, to clean up the mind-reading question a bit:
Was the trick you figured out based on the premise of revealing information that the magician shouldn’t have been able to know? This would encompass “he knew what the card was that the volunteer was holding”, but also “he knew before the performance what note to put in the envelope”, and the like.
Did the trick you figured out involve a particularly large number of audience volunteers? Did any trick in the second performance involve that?
Was there any change in circumstances in the second show that rendered it impossible for the magician to perform the same trick again? Anything that rendered it, while possible, inadvisable?