Month: March 2019

One of the things that armchair mentalists say is that having “misses” in your show makes what you do feel real. I get what they are going for, however I’m not sure if they mean complete misses, or close enough to kinda be a hit on a technicality misses.


Here’s the example people use to describe why it you need misses. Let’s say you go see on of the TV mediums who talk to dead people’s spirits. They throw out stuff all the time and that doesn’t land. However if they did a full program without only a couple of hits, I think you’d probably never buy a ticket to see them again. Also they are doing a different type of show than a mentalist show and the audience expectation is very different.


Back to a mentalism show. If you miss the word someone is thinking of completely it’s a loss for your show. Typically this happens when your method for the trick fails, like you don’t get a good peek at the word. This is bad.


A good miss that, while still a miss, but is a hit goes like this. They are thinking of the word and the word is “submarine”. You ask them to visualize the word. You say, “There’s a “U” in it? Great. Is there an “A” in it?” You continue, “visualize not the letters, but what you are thinking of, like in a scene from a movie…” You then write down and reveal the word Underwater, which is wrong. However you can then show that essentially they mean the same thing. The word sub means below, and the marine means water, or however you want to connect the two. this is a good hit, because you’ve planned it out and it’s not really a miss.


TLDR: Script your misses, so they aren’t really misses.