If there isn’t a scene in the Potter movies where Harry uses real magic to cheat at card tricks, then there should be.
Speaking as a magician, all of the illusions this guy did are easily bought at your local magic shop and are not really that hard to do. They don’t require any shills or people being in on the trick, whatsoever. What wins over the crowd and the judges was his presentation. Also, don’t forget that is TV and it is heavily edited, so you don’t see the magician’s entire handling of these tricks.
If you care to know the names of the tricks:
Ilusion #1 - “$100 Bill Switch”.
Illusion #2 - “Hundy Five Hundred” or “Slow Burn” (depending on which version you want.)
Illusion #3 - “Card Toon” (Probably version 2)
If you want to know how these are done, I highly recommend you go to your local magic shop and buy these yourself. As you can see, they are great illusions and worthy of the time and effort to learn them properly.
I know. And that means he’s spreading ignorance, no better than people who try to persuade you that magic is real. He’s no better than Uri Gellar or John Edwards.
Most magicians admit their powers are fake. Darren Brown pretends his psychological powers are real, and makes people believe in discredited pseudoscience like neurolinguisitic programming.
I think this is better suited to Cafe Society than General Questions.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Who knew prestidigitation could be so controversial? I thought the performance linked in the OP was well done, quite impressive. Of course it all comes down to skill, practicing and presentation. I never look up how the illusions are done on the internet. It would ruin it for me.
I knit my brow at people who “don’t like magic”. I have a friend like that who always huffs that she doesn’t like magic when it’s on TV. But then, there are a lot of things she doesn’t like, and she has little curiosity or interest in much of anything. I really enjoyed the Penn & Teller “Fool Us” show, for both the contestants and P&T’s illusions. I don’t know how you can’t be impressed with a skilled magician’s sleight of hand, patter, misdirection and talent. Even if I bought a trick at a magic store, I know I couldn’t do it half as well. Might be fun to try some of the easy ones though.
There’s a mention in the book’s that Ron’s twin older brothers do card tricks to impress muggle girls, and of course it’s easy because they’re doing real magic.
Yes he is better than people who try to persuade you that magic is real. How much better is your own decision to make but he shouldn’t be put in the same category as Uri Geller. He’s a modern version of Kreskin, maybe confederates and pop psychology concepts are a cheap act but it’s not supporting supernaturalism.
ETA: and even the Kreskin comparison is unfair, Kreskin claimed scientific evidence of ESP when he knew there was none.
And yet this is quite routine.
One reason I am glad we have YouTube videos and such of these old hackneyed bits is that maybe we can get rid of them and move on to newer, more original tricks. Or at least ones that require significant skills.
The CardToon trick requires very little skill. The only key step is pulling out 2 cards when the mark things you are only pulling out one. Something most people could learn in an afternoon.
Does he make people believe in those things? In the UK, where Derren makes most of his shows, I’m not aware of anyone who believes they are seeing anything other than a trick. I’ve even used a few of his shows as the basis for probability lessons, and I know for a fact that the average British ten year old knows a trick for what it is.
If we accept that an illusionist/magician/mentalist exists only to deceive our senses and perceptions (for entertainment) there are no limits to the methods he or she can employ to do so. Telling us that a trick comes from “psychology” is no different to stating a trick is powered by fairy dust. Stating that an audience contains no stooges or that a selection is random is no different to stating a hat is empty or that a padlock is unbreakable. When a trickster does his thing, nothing he says and does, nothing around him and nothing that happens can be believed.
What I was wondering is: What is a magician doing on this sort of talent show? (Although, to be fair, I never watch them apart from the very occasional YouTube link, so I don’t actually have any idea how unusual or otherwise this sort of thing is.)
How is the jury qualified to judge how good the trick is? I mean, a show like Penn & Teller’s “Fool Us” makes sense, but I don’t see a reason why Simon Cowell is more qualified to critique a magic trick than I am.
Simon Cowell is very highly qualified—he is one of the world’s best experts at recognizing entertainment, and selling it to mass audiences.
Penn & Teller’s “Fool us” is a terrific show, but mostly because you, the viewer, get a chance to match wits with good entertainers.
He also has a few hundred experts behind him, several newspapers covering the show and I expect he has people who are online, following interested viewers.
My impression from watching America’s Got Talent is that the judges don’t judge the quality of the magic, they judge the entertainment value of the magician’s bit.
So Simon Cowell isn’t looking for the same things Penn and Teller were.
Isn’t saying “it’s obviously slight of hand” just equivalent to saying “it’s obviously a trick of some kind”?
You have just articulated something I’ve been trying to figure out how to say for years.
Yes, this is exactly why I don’t like magic shows, UNLESS it’s one of those kooky deals where the magician explains how it’s done afterwards. If he doesn’t tell me how he did it afterwards, I just end up feeling like he’s kind of an asshole! For the very reasons you just gave. 
I can’t be impressed if I don’t know what the hell the magician actually just did. How can I be impressed by something I haven’t witnessed?
It’s the magician’s job to make sure I can’t see how skillful he is.
Yes. People go to schools looking to learn the psychology he mentions. People very often act like there are subliminal messages that somehow override our thinking. People, when searching for explanations of his tricks, actually jump to shit like the idea “he said one so that subliminally influenced you to pick the first card.”
As for your second paragraph: that’s just making excuses. No one believes that. A magician who is discovered to use stooges after saying he doesn’t is booed off the stage. Heck, just using stooges causes most people to think you are bad.
The reason we are astounded are the premises. If he can, say, use camera tricks (which Darren Brown fucking did), you can do anything. The only reason why magic is even interesting is that we limit what you can use to do your tricks.
You have only to look at how much David Blaine is decried for using stooges and camera work in his tricks. Or, hell, look at past threads on magic here. Heck, this thread: people are adamant in showing how Simon Cowell wasn’t in on the trick, as it would devalue the trick–even more than using only store-bought illusions.
Sleight of hand is a skill, not a trick. It’s like watching a great athlete at work. You may know that he’s just manipulating the cards, but he’s doing it so skillfully that you can’t see how or where.
This guy is definitely good, but I think the best sleight-of-hand artist working today is Yu Ho Jin
I don’t see a difference. If anything, this is worse, since there are trappings to make you believe that it is true beyond just magical thinking. No one with even the slightest amount of critical thinking can fall for Geller. People do fall for NLP. I even fell for it (albeit before Brown was on the scene).
Need I point out that Darren Brown did this trick? That’s NLP–neurolinguistic programming. And it’s pretty much indistinguishable from a form of magic. He can control your mind!
That video caused me, who had learned that NLP was fake, to start believing in that again. It actually took me catching him using the same claims in tricks that were obvious to realize that this was fake as well.
He’s not as bad as people like Ross Jeffries, who try to sell those NLP tricks (in his case, in order to hypnotize women into wanting to have sex with you–making it even worse). But I think he’s a decent match for Geller–at least, from what I’ve read about him.
He’s not just a mentalist, doing things that people know are fake (like reading minds). He does try to make you think his tricks are real, unlike most other magicians.
Can you recommend a better quality video than that one?
I respect the fact that you have strong feelings about this, but just for the record Derren Brown (note spelling) has never claimed that NLP is the method behind any of his effects. Other people may have come to that conclusion, in their unbridled moments of murky and uninformed speculative ignorance, but that’s not his fault. He has never made this claim.