Magic tricks: One that wowed, and my theory on one - right or no?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve occasionally tuned into Mondo Magic, on A&E, which follows around two close-up magicians doing tricks on the street.

First, the one that wowed. Take a dollar bill from the “victim,” fold it up, and ask him/her to name a foreign country that (s)he wants to visit. Unfold the bill, and presto, it’s changed into currency from the country named. And the included clips had some fairly non-obvious countries, like Costa Rica, Ireland, and Israel. Wow.

Anyway, the second was one done on the home audience. The magician held up a deck of cards, and announced he was going to flip through it (riffling through the deck in his hand by letting the tops of the cards flip past his thumb). The home audience was asked to remember a card from the deck as he flipped through (except the King of Hearts, which was the bottom card of the deck). So he flipped through. He then showed graphics of a few cards, one after the other, and asked us viewers to think “now” when we saw our card. The final result, of course, was showing the card I, at least, thought of: the 4 of diamonds.

Now, as far as I could tell from the flip-through, there were both black and red cards in it, so it’s not like it was the only red card in the deck. My theory:

The deck was “rigged” to not show any card that would be easy to remember, like a two or a face card (as opposed to something like an eight or a ten, which would be hard to make out), EXCEPT for the lone four. And since red cards would be easier to see on a quick flip-through than a black one, chances were maximized that the home audience would remember the four of diamonds, being the most distinct.

Sound right, magic mavens?

2

Spoilers ahead:

Actually (and I’m not sure on this), I believe the way it was done is the deck was rigged with one or two extra of the cards mentioned, so when the deck is flipped, we see that card a few extra beats than the others, thus it’s impressed in our minds. At least, that’s the impression I got when I watched it.

3

no and no.

4

This trick has an online version that made the rounds a while back. Snopes did an explanation and link to it here: http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/takecard.htm

5

Actually, never mind. I just realised that the snopes and the online ver are pretty much the reverse, where your card is taken away.

[slinks off]

6

Nope. This one’s pretty simple, but I’ll spoiler box and put a bit of random garbage in so it doesn’t show up in email notifications (someone needs to fix that so it blanks spoiler boxes as well as quotes, I think.

Dum-de-dum.
Doo-bi-doo.

devilsnew, do not just come into a thread and tell people they are wrong with no explanation of why they are wrong or why we should believe you. It’s damned rude.

OK, that should do it.

xgxlx had it almost right. The way the trick works is that the magician has marked the card he wants you to pick. He riffles the deck so quickly that you cannot see any card clearly, but when he reaches the chosen card, he pauses the riffle momentarily - just long enough that you can see it clearly. As a result, it’s the only card you pick up on.

7

You’re completely wrong.

:smiley:

8

First off, it’s TV magic. The times when the victim wants to go to Uzbekistan end up on the cutting room floor.

Next consider the countries that people will say they want to visit (remember they only have a second or so to come up with an answer). They basically fall into two categories. Either “back home” or somewhere nice and sunny. Do your stunt in Boston, there’s a good chance the country will be Ireland. Think of somewhere sunny. It’s Costa Rica. Or maybe Bermuda.

Also, remember that the magician isn’t picking people at random. These guys earn their money by being able to identify people who are likely to give the expected response.

You only need four or five currencies up your sleeve to get it right 90% of the time.

9

FWIW, this particular ep took place in Vegas. And the guy who said “Israel” DID have a noticable accent… Hmmmmm.

10

Similar to the old grade-school mind-reading trick. You do some casting-out-nines arithmetic to force your mark to pick a number you want, which ultimately leads to them picking a country that starts with the letter E. Then you tell them to take the second letter of their country, and pick an animal starting with that letter, and so on. Of course, you can magically determine that they picked “Denmark” and “elephant”.

Except one time I tried that one on my roommate, and he picked “Djibouti”.

If one were doing the currency trick live, one would just invent an “out” for when the mark names a country you don’t have prepared. You never tell the mark in advance what the trick is going to be. If he names one of the half-dozen countries you have prepared, then great, you palm the appropriate bill and do the trick you saw. If the mark says Uzbekistan, then you say “What a coincidence, here’s a clever little trick I learned while travelling through Uzbekistan”, and follow up with some completely different trick which has nothing to do with any particular country.

11

A great way to simmulate this trick to see how it works is to take a playing card, stick it in a page of a paperback book and riffle the pages. You will riffle thru all the pages but it will pause for a tad longer on that page so its the only one you see. It works the same way for the card trick. The guy may glue 2 cards together or something to make it respond differently to the riffle. If someone chooses any card other than the 4 of D then they are deliberately lying to spoil the trick because you can’t make out any card other than the 4 of D.

And yes, this IS how they do it. I saw it on one of those expose the magician shows on fox or something.