Yup, I’ve seen fabulous mentalist Derren Brown perform this trick on telly. It’s pretty impressive, especially as the marks usually have no idea how much change they have anyway until it’s counted out.
Ianzinis Brown’s mentor, so in this matter I would defer to his answer above.
Wow, she is incredibly psychic. Last night after reading this I emptied my pockets of change out of curiosity and I had 3 quarters, 1 nickel, and 3 pennies. 83 cents.
I know it is just a coincidence (I hope) but it is still pretty freaky. Maybe there is just some odd formula? Quick, anyone else have 83 cents on them?
(I had a nickel in change from a vending machine and the rest was from lunch in case anyone was wondering).
Hilarity, is it possible that, while you had not gone into the Safeway, you had something in your possession that made it easy to guess what you had spent? You mentioned there was a coffee shop nearby. Maybe you had a particular-sized coffee cup in your car (it doesn’t matter if you had bought it just then or not). The lady saw the cup and knows that it costs a particular amount. Let’s say that size of coffee costs $2.00. If the tax in the area is 8.5% (just guessing), then the tax would be 0.17. She could be guessing that you had just bought the coffee from the coffee shop and handed the server $3.00, and received 0.83 in change.
This could work with any item that costs around a dollar, too. I am thinking something like a bottle of soda or water, which typically costs a little over a dollar in this area, would be a good tip off. She may know what items in the area cost around a dollar and is guessing that most people won’t use plastic for something that low.
A lot of times even the magician is amazed to hear how amazing his trick was. People not only don’t remember things well, the trick itself is frequently designed to encourage mis-rememering.
Here’s what I think actually happened:
Beggar Lady says “If the change in your pocket and the change in my pocket equal 83 cents can I have it?”
“Ok.” says Hilarity, holding out some coins.
Beggar Lady digs around in her pocket, pulls out some coins and dumps them into Hilarity’s hand with those already there. Hilarity counts them and, amazingly, the coins total exactly 83 cents.
The way I’ve heard the Denmark trick, it usually starts with a casting-out-nines math trick to get the mark to the number 4, then you convert that to a letter (A = 1, B = 2, etc.) to get D, and then you ask for any country that starts with that letter (even without the Europe restriction, most people still say Denmark).
Almost. I looked in my wallet. 58 cents, a quarter short of 83. So I looked into my pocket. Guess what? A quarter. 83 cents! Then I looked in my other pocket. Two dimes. $1.03. Almost.
I’m a little surprised that some of you are speculating that it might be the change she had left over after a common purchase, such as a coffee. For me it just wouldn’t work like that. Am I the oddball here?
Quick straw poll:
When you leave the house every morning, do you start out with exectly zero in coinage, and pay for everything in bills?
Or do you more or less always have some change on you, and the amount fluctuates throughout the day?
Zero in coinage.
Hee. I tried it, and funnily enough, I have 166 cents: exactly twice 83. (It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some sales tax rates lend themselves to change in multiples of 83, as some people have speculated).
I always have some coins floating around in my wallet and pockets. Pockets may start at zero if I’m not wearing yesterday’s jeans, but the wallet usually accumulates.
Everyone’s fixated on 83 cents as an amount that may be very common for some reason or other, but the OP went through the wringer twice (or maybe three times, depending how you look at it) with the “beggar lady,” and each time the amount was different.
She just fires off a number, startling the mark with the oddball question. Occasionally she hits it dead on. A significant minority of the time, it’s close enough that the mark glances at the change and is happy to “see” it’s the correct amount and hands it over just to get the wiry witch out of their face. The rest of the time, she’s way off (like you have a quarter, and she said 83 cents). Then she says, “Jesus, haven’t eaten in so long I’m losing my powers” and so you hand over the quarter.
FWIW, I have .21 in my pocket.
$1.23 in mine. It must have started out as $0.93 this morning.
I almost always start out with zero coinage. Then, during the day, even if I accumulate change I still tend to pay in whole dollar amounts rather than count out the change from my pocket. So usually any change in my pocket will be the result of one or more transactions and therefore may have a probability distribution based on .99, .95 and the 6% PA sales tax.
Started with zero, still have zero.
eta: If a beggar could guess the amount of change I had, I would give it to them.
Think about this. Why does she seem to concentrate on amounts less than a dollar?
If I was doing this by sheer random guesses, I would probably go with somewhat higher amounts. Somewhere between a dollar or two. There must be a lot of people, especially women with change purses, who have a few quarters and some other coins. If you’re depending on profiting from a small percentage of random lucky guesses, why not try to maximize your return by going with higher guesses? Ten lucky guesses when you’re guessing $1.83 nets more than ten lucky guesses when you’re guessing 0.83.
I think the fact that she goes with lower amounts may indicate that she knows that she can maximize her profits that way. Which means that she knows that she can get it right substantially more times with those small guesses, even if it means that she lucks out on the bigger caches of change. To me this indicates that there probably is some trick that only works with smaller amounts - amounts that you would receive in change from a single transaction.
Of course, it could also be that she stays with smaller amounts simply because she’s insane.
Maybe she’s from the future and already read this thread. If you hadn’t posted this, it probably wouldn’t have happened.
Because that’s what Hilarity and friend were carrying?
I’m still not convinced that the lady was guessing. It’s seems extraordinarily unlikely that she’d be spot-on 3 times in a row. Like I said before, given that an average person has 0-99 cents at any given time, she’d have a one in a million chance of doing what she did.
And given that stage magicians do the exact same trick, and need to pull it off pretty much every time, I’m guessing that luck has absolutely nothing to do with it.
You’re overthinking this, no? As has been stated by posters far smarter than me, what she mostly wants is to get the hand into the pocket, because then she’s won the loot. We don’t know what type of amounts she usually guesses, because we have such a tiny sample of her work: 83, 33 and 21 cents (if memory serves). Maybe she also guesses $1.18 and $1.71. But the point is, she wants you to go to pocket and haul out the change, because then she knows you’re not going to have the heart to put it away without giving it (or some of it) to her. Don’t forget, her ultimate goal is to get money, not perform mind-blowing street theatre.
I suspect she got it right maybe once with the OP, and the other two times, got close enough that the OP and friend were happy to see just that amount, just to be done with her. And they would have given her the money anyway, even if she’d been way off.
I believe that stage magicians are actually doing another trick, as ianzin pointed out – one that involves writing down the amount, etc.
I think the bigger question is if this beggar lady so smart/magical, why is she a beggar? 