I was pretty disappointed with the CD trick; it seemed obvious that it was just a gimmick with the players. The card magic was a pair of fairly obvious forces – the second one is harder than the first one and has different options depending on the chosen number. They were done very well, but there was nothing particularly innovative or new about them. With a guy like Teller watching you, you really have to come up with something new and different, especially when it comes to close-up magic and sleight of hand.
Kind of disappointed with the latest episode. The Piff guy was more humorous than magical. The only thing that made his card trick different was that the card was signed by a spectator, but it had to be signed in a certain area of the card. That allowed all kinds of the usual trickery to be used, such as a whole deck of trick cards that can be “peeled” off to reveal the predicted card. The second magician was quite entertaining in a Vegas-like act, but he did nothing that could have been expected to fool P&T since it was simply sleights and a gimmick shoe. The CD guy was pathetic and there were so many ways that the CD players could’ve been gimmicked so that the right songs were played. The last act was just some very well-executed card forces. It was not surprising that no one in this episode fooled P&T. I think the way to fool P&T is to do a trick really well, but with enough variation from the usual technique that the magician can honestly say that P&T is wrong when they guess the more obvious, common approaches. Being the pros that they are, there’s no way any magician can fool the duo with tricks based on special equipment or established sleights.
That was a great point made above that the show falls flat when P&T has to indicate how they think a trick was done. Sure, they have to respect the magician’s code to not reveal the secret of a trick. Perhaps they can at least say what broad category of technique was used, such as sleight of hand, misdirection, card force (used by P&T to explain the last trick this last time), cognitive illusion, equipment, etc. That may be a reasonable compromise between a complete reveal and an ambiguous and anti-climatic “I know how you did it”.
I was surprised to see the guy from the original special (who did a pretty weak gimmick deck based card trick on that show) come back and fool Penn & Teller this week.
I kinda liked that he came back with a trick that was very specifically designed to fool them. He basically gave them a bunch of random tasks to keep them busy and had the the fakeout of the briefcase. It was kinda cheap, but it showed he’d put some thought into the specific problem of fooling the magicians,.
P&T’s trick: Penn obviously slips Teller the glasses when he knocks on the concrete block with the billiard ball. As to how Teller gets the glasses on his face, I’m thinking one of the arms he’s using to hold the thing on his head is fake, and he uses his real hand stuffed in his jacket to shove the glasses on his face why everyones watching Penn mess around with the wand and ball. Even after the block gets knocked apart, Teller never makes any move to finish pulling the thing off his head or shift his hands to a more comfortable position.
At 6:30 of this segment of the show, does the magician (Bellars) state that he didn’t write the scrawl on the piece of paper in his shoe?
Correct, someone else wrote it and got it to him.
I think his confederate attached it to the briefcase while he was keeping P&T busy, he touches the case when teller brings it up. Then, while the host is making a big deal out of opening the briefcase and getting the glove out, the magician kinda hides behind him and looks down for a second and shuffle his foot.
So best guess, he snags the paper off the brief case, drops it on the ground and his sole isn’t attached to his shoe at the tip, so he can pick it up that way while everyone is expecting something impressive to come out of the briefcase.
I bet if Penn had brought the case up and Teller had watched, he wouldn’t have “fooled them”.
Thanks.
The way the end of the trick was edited together may have made for snappy TV viewing, but unfortunately left out crucial moments that us eagle-eyed sleuths could have used to figure out the trick.
I was wondering about that and here’s my totally ignorant guess.
I was struck by the rather forced manner in which “Wossy” was forced to make his choices, almost to a timetable?
If so, perhaps the balls, when sitting in their case are depressing some sort of foam that springs slowly up after each is removed.
Sneaking a look at the case when all are gone (which he did) and knowing where they originally were (which he did) he could make a fair stab a the order of removal.
This would, of course, depend on keeping the removals nice and evenly spaced.
looking on YouTube I can see that the gap from 1st selection to 2nd is about 15 seconds. From then on it is about 6-7 seconds and 6-7 seconds after the last one is done he leans over, sneaks a look in the case and shuts the lid.
I reckon I’m not far off with this one, the longer gap from 1st to 2nd won’t matter at all as you will then be certain which the first one was and reduce the amount or uncertainty you are dealing with.
So, two tricks in the latest episode fooled Penn & Teller.
(elcentauromagico’s YouTube channel currently has the latest episode (Episode 5) uploaded to it).
Certainly Nick Einhorn’s trick was the most impressive in my opinion. Assuming the participating audience members weren’t stooges (which would make the trick pointless), any ideas how this was achieved?
My WAG… the tables could have been rigged with all three meals concealed beneath each table, and some sort of remote control device could then “load” the correct meal under the otherwise empty serving tray (the magician handled the serving trays to begin with, so if they were all empty to start with, no one would have noticed).
Some interesting analysis from this Yahoo Answers post pointed out that we never actually see the notes that the three men read from, and perhaps what they said aloud wasn’t what was actually printed on the notes, eg, they could have read “<Say your name> will be served pizza”, etc.
The other trick that fooled Penn and Teller could have been achieved in a few ways… it was certainly interesting that Penn and Teller claimed to see a “flagrant” deck switch, only to have the magicians deny they did this, and then deny they even pretended to do it as a red herring.
On further analysis of Einhorn’s trick, I speculate that the notes had all three messages printed on them, each note being identical and looking something like this:
Message for Table 1: <say your name> will be served xyz…
Message for Table 2: <say your name> will be served abc… etc.
Note that Einhorn tells each guy which table they are sitting at, then asks them to read “your message”. And the last guy to read certainly looks like he is reading from the bottom of the note.
If the above is correct, then the only part of the trick left if figuring out how the correct meal was at each table.
And on some further and final analysis, I speculate that Einhorn had a “set” of envelopes ready for each possible iteration of the serving trays, and produced the relevant envelope set once he knew where each meal was placed.
So… in summary.
Once Einhorn has the three meals placed on the tables, all he had to do was produce the “correct” set of envelopes for that particular permutation of the order of the serving trays. From that point on, it makes absolutely no difference which envelope each guy is holding, nor which table they sit at.
In the last act it was pretty clear that the other guy signals each card with the position of the hand in his pocket. You can see he has a different number of fingers out and in different positions on every card. That only leaves the last few cards where he didn’t seem to be giving any signals.
They confirmed that they didn’t change the order of the cards Jonathan shuffled, switch out any cards that Jonathan shuffled, or switch in another deck. The exact wording he used seemed very carefully selected, as he was always referring to “the cards that Jonathan shuffled.” So it didn’t disallow adding a few of their own cards to the bottom. That’s probably the clumsy move that everyone saw. If it’s true, then it seems like they got through on a technicality more than anything.
But the woman sent each man to a table after they already had their envelopes, so even if he knows which meal is in which envelope, it doesn’t really help him.
The audience members not reading the literal message on the envelope might be true, though it seems pretty gutsy on the part of the magician to gamble that three random people will follow the instructions. On the other hand, in the magicians little promo-video, he did mentions something had gone wrong with the trick in rehersal, so maybe thats it.
Watching again, you can see what P&T thought was a deck switch, when the host passes infront of the magician he switches which hand is holding the deck of cards, making it look like he put the first deck in the box and pulled out the second. But in reality, I think he just switched hands to use his right hand to put the deck back in the box (or whiie adding cards to the bottom for the final part of the trick).
Agree they must be signaling somehow, but if they were I couldn’t see it. His hand is in a pretty similar position each time, and given the number of cards, he’d need a pretty lengthy set of signals to communicate with just hand position. He does say a slightly different piece of dialogue however, after he sees each card (“think of this person”, “think of that person”, “now this person”), so I think thats how he signals the cards.
On the last couple, he presumably added those to the bottom.
I really hate when magicians say “I’m going to pick a random person from the audience… you sir” - I mean, from that point on, even if you really are picking a random person, I always assume it’s a shill. And with so many tricks, the only “magic” involves the randomness of that random person. When you throw a shill in, the trick becomes trivial or pointless.
So if the magician’s really did pick people at random, I wish they’d turn around and toss a tennis ball into the audience or something to pick someone.
The meals trick of course featured just such a thing. Either everyone really was random and it was a clever trick, or they were shills and it was just a stupid act of going through the motions. Why not make it that much more impressive by showing us a real, or at least plausibly real, random selection?
Penn said they were sure that he’d actually picked someone at random, but I wonder how it is they were confident in that.
Even so, as discussed up thread, the cards could’ve just said [state your name], which is also lame. The thing is - there’s so much social pressure on the random people at that point - are you going to be the one to stop and blow the trick in the middle of a tv recording with a huge audience looking at you, or are you just going to go through with it as you were asked? I think the vast majority of people would just be pawns in that trick, and that’s also the … dishonest sort of deception, if you know what I mean. Also lame.
I’m assuming that you’re meant to trust that there are no audience plants involved in any of the tricks as part of the “ground rules” of the show (I think in one of the earlier episodes Jonathan Ross mentioned this his opening spiel, along with saying there is no camera trickery involved in what the TV audience sees etc.) and Penn was saying as much.
I do agree though that I always feel some doubt though - especially with people who seem to be very comfortable up there in front of the audience, lights, cameras, etc. (but I guess that’s just projecting how nervous I’d be in that situation).
Hi all ,
Im new here…
Ive always loved puzzles and trying to work them out , whether its magic tricks or murder mysteries(If you have never been on a murder mystery weekend or night then i highly recommend them…they are great fun).
Without spoiling how this was done i dont think the prediction paper was on the briefcase and this isnt how he gets it.
If you go back and watch it again without thinking that way then i think you will see what i did and realise how it was done.
If you cant see it and want to know then i will let you know…
But its definitely going back and watching it again and trying to solve it…
But im 99.9% sure it isnt on the briefcase.
I dunno. I rewatched it on Youtube. After the words are written, the only thing that he touches that comes from off-stage is the briefcase.
At one point he sort of awkwardly walks over to the table by the dart board, so I was thinking maybe he got it from there, but thats on stage the whole time, so I don’t see how a confederate could’ve gotten it to the table for him to pick up (I guess the confederate could be inside the table, but that’d have to be a damn small person).