Tag: fishing

Zoom Fishing…

One of the biggest challenges right now with all of the Social Distancing is breaking in new material. Personally I tend to try to work out things on stage. I try them, I ad lib, I tweak and adjust. Right now some in-person venues are starting to open up and this is great and will make working on new material much easier.

Here’s an early version of a trick that I wrote about a month ago on this blog. It’s using “fishing” along with a physical prediction for the trick.

The big change that I made was that I’m pulling the card out of the envelope before the card is named. I’m taking a risk that the person can totally screw my ending by lying about the card that they saw. However the questions leading into the reveal makes it hard to lie, they just can’t make up a card at the last moment as they’ve already confirmed things about it. That’s not going to stop an asshole from just saying a different card, but it does make it harder.

Fishing on Zoom…

One of the methods that I still think is a great method for live stream magic shows are progressive anagrams, or tricks that use “fishing“. I’ve written a lot about progressive anagrams in the past, so today I’m going to talk about using “fishing” techniques over streaming video.

When you are “fishing” you are asking a series of questions to determine what a person is thinking of. This isn’t always a linear thing where you ask question A, then question B, etc. The answer to the question or statement will lead you to the next question. Sometimes these are general statements, like “I’m sensing water…” that would cover a range of things like a boat, a fish, or a cup. With something like a progressive anagram you are naming specific letters.

This is a technique used in a lot of book tests. You’d use statements like “your word is a long word…” which narrows down the list. Tomorrow I’m going to write about a specific trick that uses this technique that is perfectly suited for streaming shows!