I have literally no idea how this is done.
And, after some googling around, neither does anyone else. (I got this link from a Cracked.com article about secrets that only two people know…)
Incredible trick, Max and I got suckered into looking at the “revealed” videos on the right. Nothing there, right?
Q
Gadzooks!
Wish I knew how to do that.
Would you mind posting the Cracked article?
Great trick, but in the video, his spiel when he’s doing the trick on stage is totally bogus. He says there are 52 cards, and 52 numbers, so the chance of getting it right is 52 squared, or something. Uh, no. The number specifies one card out of the deck. The chance of guessing it right is just 1 in 52.
The clip we know is obviously not unedited. We’d have to see an unedited performance, multiple times, in order to see what’s really going on. I suspect that the deck is stacked in a statistically advantageous way, and the performer knows how to select participants in a statistically advantageous way. It’s not a big stretch to expect a lady to pick the queen of hearts or a guy to pick the ace of spades, a card sharp would have detailed knowledge of such things.
From that point it’s a matter of not committing to the countdown unless the right card/number combo has been chosen. That’s something you never see on Youtube, because who wants to see a clip of a guy saying “come back tomorrow, my psychic powers are sprained today”.
Or it’s just outright fraud… I mean really, a TV show by definition is a pre-staged event.
Apparently neither does the magician, since he said he magically influenced the woman to pick the ace of hearts, and she picked the queen.
Note that the conditions before the video cleverly specify that persons 1 and 2 are not stooges, but does not say so about the third person. It leaves you with the impression that all three were ruled out as stooges, when it in fact nothing of the sort happened. So it’s likely that the third person is an assistant, and just provides the specified card from somewhere on his body.
I can think of a lot of things he could do, making the huge assumption that none of the other people are ringers.
First, neither magician really let anyone examine the deck. The first said “you can see all the cards are different,” but I sure couldn’t see that. The second didn’t even do that much. So maybe there are really only 20 different cards in the deck (duplicated to make it look like a full deck), and if the person who names the card doesn’t pick one in the deck, he does a different trick from then on.
Second, there are different ways to get the number. If the first person names a number he doesn’t like, he can then have a second person name another number, and add or subtract them together, just to make it “harder.” All kinds of variations on that.
Third, there are different ways to count. He can have the guy turn the deck over and deal all the cards face up, so he’s counting from the bottom instead of the top. Or if it’s a small number, he can have the guy deal out all the cards in that many piles, and then go on from there to eliminate cards until the one he wants is left.
Stuff like that.
The trick could also be done with a ringer choosing the number, and the other two participants genuine. Yes, the video says there are no ringers. And we believe this why?
My guess: The cards are arranged in some pattern, such that there’s some simple formula to calculate the number given the card named (notably, when he shows the deck in the first performance, the suits seem to be together, and he never shuffles). Genuine audience member #1 chooses a card, then stooge applies the formula and gets the correct number for that card (notably, he doesn’t write it down or otherwise commit to it until he’s heard the number), then genuine audience member #2 counts out the cards.
The trick could also be done the other way, with a genuine audience member choosing a number, and then a stooge choosing the card (you’d need a slightly different version of the formula for this). In any event, the genuine audience member has to go before the stooge, and the stooge can’t commit to his choice until the genuine choice is revealed.
If this post is to be believed then it is not a setup with ringers in the audience.
In the first clip, aren’t those celebrity guests on a talk show? (The only one I recognized was Tom Jones, who didn’t participate in the trick.) It would be hard for the magician to keep the trick secret if he had to recruit his ringer from whoever happened to be on the show that day.
People, please…just because the video says there is no ringer does not prove there is no ringer.
Yes, even (maybe especially) celebrities.
mmm
I was amazed by this trick as well and was debating posting about when I saw this. I keep coming up with “how tos” and then dismissing them.
I’d be surprised if ringers were used. That would mean the number of people that know the secret of the trick grows by quite a bit. Yet this trick’s secret has stayed secret, which suggests that very few people know it.
Watching the second clip, it looks like the guy who comes up on stage is a stooge - watch how he holds the cards after the magician says “22”. Looks like he’s manipulating something.
On the Parkinson show it’s hard to be sure, and I guess the assumption is that somehow other people involved in showbusiness couldn’t possibly be ringers… The magician moves something just before the reveal, but the camera moves so it’s impossible to see whether it’s just his own hands, or if he touches the cards.
That’s true, but it’s my impression that professional magicians generally shy away from ringers; they have other ways to do the trick. The suggestion that he’s got a series of tricks to do, and that the video we see is the trick he does when things work out properly, is the most plausible. I also wonder in the video about the moment when he moves the table: any tiny little hiccup like this in a magic trick is an opportunity to do something, and while I didn’t see him do something, I wonder whether he did.
The suggestion that the person counting the cards is the stooge is possible, though unsatisfying.
Yes, but if we don’t accept that he’s not using a ringer, then we have to throw out the idea that this is a very difficult trick that only two people know how to do. Doing this trick with a ringer would be trivially easy, something any semi-competent magician could pull off. If other magicians can’t figure this one out, then it suggests that they’ve seen it performed in circumstances that rule out the possibility of a ringer.
Of course, it’s possible that everything about this trick is, well, a trick, including claims that other magicians can’t figure it out. A quick bit of Google on “Berglas Effect” indicates that the trick is well known for being impossible to figure out, so the reputation surrounding this isn’t pure hype, and strongly suggests that ringers have been conclusively ruled out.
Why do you get the impression professional magicians don’t want ringers? I can see why they would try to give that impression - but I’ve not seen anything to suggest it’s true, and I vaguely remember a couple of things that say they do use them. Nothing I can use as a cite though…
The thing that made me suspicious about the guy counting the cards even before the reveal was the way he came on stage before the magician had finished inviting him. His body language seemed a little off for a genuine third party.