Back in October 2023 I posted a two part intro to what would have been my next post, a video about a trick I had been working on. However upon performing this trick in a magic competition it did not have the impact I had hoped for, a fact that was mostly down to my volunteer selection.
He didn’t get into it, so it didn’t land. I have since performed it again in a different competition and while it went much better, I’m now of the opinion that this kind of magic is kind of wasted on an audience of magicians.
I don’t have the video of the performance¹ so allow me to describe the routine.
We open with a brief monologue about coincidence. The second performance I had more time² so I added an effect where a card is chosen from a deck of 36 cards, which are then shuffled and laid out in a 6×6 grid. The volunteer rolls a die twice and the numbers are used as coordinates to find their card in the grid³.
But then the premise is laid out:
“The only real difference between breaking someone’s legs with an aluminum baseball bat and performing a secret ritual to make them sustain similar injuries while accidentally falling down the stairs is that no jury in the land would convict you of the latter, because any scientifically minded person would put it down to mere coincidence.”
I then begin the ritual by obtaining a person with a nemesis. Someone who, if they could get away with it, they would take the bat to. I give them a small wooden figurine and ask them to emblazon the chest of it with this hated individual’s initials. I then take it back and draw an occulty symbol on the back, before handing it back over to be examined. When they’re satisfied I take it back one last time and place it initial side down on the table and put a leather cup⁴ over it.
I then take out the box. The box has a post-it note on the front and inside is a slip of paper, a pencil and a pair of scissors.
Using the scissors a paper doll is cut from the post-it note with a similar silhouette to the wooden equivalent under the cup. This figure is given to the participant to scrunch into a ball with great spite, after which they are invited to stab it with a pin. This pin is then stuck in a cork⁵ to keep the sharp end away and placed beside the cup.
Finally I use the pencil to draw a similar figure on the piece of paper and put it inside the box. As an after thought I ask the participant to write on the back of it something they would like to say to their hated figure. The lead is then snapped from the pencil and placed into the box⁶, which is clasped shut and the participant is finally invited to shake this vigorously, rattling the pencil lead around inside to make marks on the drawing.
Then begins the reveal. They take out the picture to see the pencil marks on their drawing⁶, and make note of where they land inside the outline.
With the pin removed, the cutout figure is unfolded to see that the holes left by the pin are almost identically located⁵.
Then finally I lift the leather cup to reveal that the wooden figure is now standing up, initials facing the audience, with a number of holes gouged in it filled with blood⁷.
The participant is given this to keep as a reminder and finally told, “Just remember, if anything happens to your nemesis over the next month or so resulting in similar injuries, you can tell them, with a hundred percent certainty, ‘it’s just a coincidence’.”
Origins
I have a book called 202 Methods of Forcing by Theodore Anneman⁸. Since buying it I have heard the same verisimilitudinous platitude from countless magicians.
“If you have 100 methods of forcing and one method of revealing a card, you have 1 trick. If you have 1 method of forcing a card and 100 methods of revealing it, you have 100 tricks.”
You have probably heard something similar. I am here to dispell that notion by saying that a force can itself be a reveal, if you’re happy with the effect being that of an increasingly strange coincidence.
In that case if you have 2 forcing methods and nothing else, you have one trick. If you have 3 forcing methods you have 3 tricks. If you have 4 forcing methods you have 6 tricks. If you have 100 forcing methods you in fact have 4950 tricks⁹.
This isn’t limited to forcing cards, if you can force a number, a word, a shape, a pattern, it can relate to other forced “random” occurrences to ramp up the oddity of a coincidence.
But there is a psychological quirk keeping most performers from really using this fact.
Mind Forged Manacles
One of the most sought after holy grails in magic is the ACAAN, or Any Card At Any Number. This is often referred to as The Berglas Effect after David Berglas, who for a while seemed to be the only human capable of perfoming it cleanly with any kind of regularity¹⁰.
The cleanest ACAAN is this:
A deck is placed on the table. Two randomly chosen volunteers are asked to name a number and a card. That number of cards is counted off and the one in that position is the named card.
This is a fun routine you can try in the comfort of your own home. Shuffle a deck, name a card and a number and see if it comes up. There’s a 1 in 52 chance of it working out.
What I find interesting is that people ascribe success in this trick to the actions of the magician, even though in the cleanest handling the magician actually does nothing at all. Sometimes this root causality is backed up by a faux explanation of the magician predicting the number and card in advance. Sometimes they gesture mystically to the deck to apparently place the card in the right place before the revealing count.
All framing devices attempt to focus the root of the effect on the actions of the magician either during or before the performance. This framing is a cage, locking performers into a particular style of effect and a particular narrative in the spectators head.
It’s always, “I met someone who did a strange thing.” When it could be, “A strange thing happened to me.”
Back to the show
So in the performance the final moment is the reveal of the wooden effigy¹¹ with new wounds, this is the ta-da, so to speak. But if the person in real life suffers an accident which even vaguely resembles these injuries¹², that becomes the true finale and is a finale I frankly wouldn’t want to be held responsible for. It just becomes this spooky moment which can’t quite be explained. More magic should feel that way.
Ideally it would be great to perform magic tricks where I dont even have to be there at all, maybe the audience don’t even know they’re being performed to¹³.
Until such point that I figure that out I have a secondary plan. You may notice that every part of the method for this effect is sourced and credited in the footnotes. The reason for this is that the more people who go out there performing it, the greater the chance that people will experience the true finale. This is something that really deserves to spread beyond me, through all of you.
¹ Okay so I have a video of one performance but it was the one where it didn’t land at all so I’d rather not share it.
² An oddity of my two magic club memberships is that when I work on a bigger routine I have to write a 7 minute and a 10 minute version if I want to enter both competitions because of disparate competition rules.
³ It’s in Henning Nelms’ Magic and Showmanship, look it up.
⁴ I like the aesthetic of the leather cup but it is also 100% integral to the method for the finale. See the cork trick by Sol Stone. The ruse of drawing a complex symbol on the back is a method I appropriated from a trick called Change, from Jerx Amateur Magic Monthly (JAMM) issue 12.
⁵ Method similar to A Bloody Good Point from Joe Givan’s Magic From The Attic
⁶ In truth a locking Miracle Card Case I picked up second hand from a club auction. I spent a long time looking into ways to make a fake pencil lead which wouldn’t leave additional marks in the process of shaking the box but it turns out a regular pencil lead lacks the weight to leave a mark no matter how hard the box is shaken.
⁷ In reality the blood is tiny spots of nail polish. It has a far more sanguineous appearance than any paint I’ve tried.
⁸ The sequel to 101 Methods of Forcing. Interestingly it contains twice as many forces but only has 54 pages, whereas the original had 32. I can only assume Anneman became more concise in his writing.
⁹ Thank you Carl Friedrich Gauss.
¹⁰ I have heard many accounts of how this was achieved, none of which are in the slightest bit impressive so I’m going to assume they’re true and not share them any further. The best effects often have the most disappointing methods.
¹¹ Oh, Effigy, F. E. G. now I get it.
¹² I purposefully give the effigies a mark on the head, leg and opposite arm to maximise the chance of a hit on accident similarity, encompassing both sides of the body on all extremities with high low and medium placement, allowing for any Street Fighter 2 move to cause one of them.
¹³ I cannot wait to be a ghost. It’s gonna kick ass.