Boston Magic Lab…

Tomorrow night I’ll be working on some new material at a virtual magic open mic. This is a free show, but it’s ticketed, so to watch you’ll need to go to:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-magic-lab-a-virtual-open-mic-magic-show-tickets-122881659351

boston magic lab

We did a quick run through and it’ll be a fun show worth checking out!

Physical Impuzzibilites…

The Impuzziblities books are great, I’m into my second one and recognize some of the stuff from Jim Steinmeyer‘s other books that I have. It hit me last night why I wouldn’t do most of the material in the books. It’s pretty simple, they are too procedure heavy. Most of the tricks like if you just did the formula you’d get the same results. Jim in beginning of one of the books mentions they are puzzles, so I’m not knocking him or the books for that.

What they tricks in the books need is a physical effect to stick the trick. That takes it out of being a puzzle. Yes, it’s cool when the whole audience has the same card, or is holding up the same hand, but it isn’t an amazing magic trick.

Here’s an example I thought of last night:

There’s a coin trick in one of the Impuzziblities books where you have a row of four coins (dime, penny, nickel and quarter) on the table. Through a bit of procedure a coin is picked. You eliminate one (the quarter) by putting it into your right fist, leaving three coins on the table, one of which is the coin they are thinking of. Then a little bit more procedure and they are thinking of a new coin. You put the remaining coins into your fist with the quarter. You then open your hand and all the coins had disappeared except for the coin they are thinking of, which is the nickel. Your hands are complete empty aside from the nickel.

As far as method for the coins is pretty simple. Use a 21 cent trick coin set and you’ll need to switch the quarter with one of the nickel shells with a Bobo Switch from Modern Coin Magic. You do the switch very early on in the trick , you have a ton of time to ditch the quarter. You will need to tweak the trick a little bit from how Steinmeyer wrote it to force the nickel instead of the penny. Or you could do it as written and end with a dime and penny set, using a click pass get rid of the nickel and quarter.

I think adding the physical trick to the verbal instructions moves the trick a bit more from the puzzle side to the magic side.

Handcrafted, Gluten Free Progressive Anagrams

Yesterday we handmade a progressive anagram from five words. If you didn’t read yesterdays post, go and read it, or this won’t make a lot of sense. One thing I didn’t like was that the first YES or NO question have a 60% chance of getting “No” answer. Using the same method to make the progressive anagram, by eliminating the vowels first, but this time examining the vowels, we’ll get a better sequence.

here are the words:

Beer
Agreement
Heat
Bowel
Touch

I noticed that all of them have an E except for one word. If we eliminate the E first, we’ll get an 80% chance of a YES. If we get a NO, we immediately know the word. This is way better than yesterday’s layout. Here’s what today’s flowcart for the same words looks like:

E ————–> Touch
|
Beer, Agreement, Heat, Bowel


I’m going to eliminate another vowel, I’ll do A, as the only other vowel that’s used in the words is O, and that’s only in one word, which would give me a 75% chance of getting a NO answer. The A will give me a 50/50 chance.

progressive anagram

At this point we have two pairs of words, so we just need to find a letter that’s only in one word of each pair.

progressive anagram

While essentially the same as the progressive anagram from yesterday, this one is slightly better as the odds of getting a YES on the first letter are better and if you get a NO on the first letter you immediately know the word, which is a huge advantage. Also there’s only one word where you’ll would get two NO answers, where in yesterday’s flowchart there were two instances.

Now let’s compare this to the what a computer will come up with. I plugged the same words into a progressive anagram generator and here’s what is spit out:

progressive anagram

Essentially the computer came up with the same solution as I did today. the difference was we chose different letters for splitting the last two pairs, but that’s arbitrary. The nice thing about the computer is that it did it in one try, and in about 1 second. Knowing to do it yourself is a solid back up and you understand the process a bit more.

Handcrafted Progressive Anagrams…

With moving to virtual magic shows, I’ve been playing a lot with progressive anagrams. If you’re not sure what a progressive anagram is, the basic effect is someone is thinking of a word. You then ask if a several letters are in it and based on their “yes” or “no” answers you can determine the word. Essentially it is a flowchart that uses a process of elimination from a list of words. The flow chart and based on YES or NO answers to whether the word has a letter you will either move down the list or to the right. 

If you get a YES, you move down.
If you get a NO, you move to the right

That’s it.

Normally I use an online progressive anagram generator to create these flowcharts. For fun, I thought I’d try to figure out how to create them myself. Since I use them a lot, I’ve noticed a few things that are the basis of how I do mine. I’m going to hand make a progressive anagram.

The first thing we need is a list of words. I used an online random word generator and using 5 words. The words it gave me are:

Beer
Agreement
Heat
Bowel
Touch

I’m going to start by eliminating vowels, so I’ll start with the A.

Currently my flow chart looks like:

A -> Beer, Bowel, Touch
|
Agreement, Heat


Remember if they say YES you move down and if they say NO, you move to the right.

I’m not the biggest fan of having a 60% odds of getting a “no” answer on my first question. For the sake of simplicity to explain the easiest way I’ve found to do this, we’ll keep going with the A.

For the next question, if we will eliminate the E, so the flowchart will look like this:

progressive anagram, mentalism

Now we have two sections, each with two words we need to figure out. It’s a simple matter to figure out a letter that’s only in one of the Beer/Bowel pair or in the other set of two words. We’ll start with the Beer/Bowel. Let’s eliminate the O, and the flow chart will look like:

progressive anagram

Then we’ll find the letter that’s only in of the Agreement/Heat pair. That letter is H, so here’s the final Flowchart:

progressive anagram

And there you have it, we hand build a progressive anagram.

Small Things…

In May I started worked on a trick that was my version of Albert Goshman’s Cards Thru Newspaper. You can search for those blog posts, but it shows how the trick progressed from the original Goshman trick to what I’d now consider an original magic trick/routine.

Essentially the original trick is that four cards appear one at a time and reappear under a folded up piece of newspaper. I took out what I didn’t like, the cards and newspaper and ended up using an envelope and four polaroid pictures. The pictures disappear and reappear under the newspaper.

It’s been five months since I started working on it, and really, it should have progressed further, it’s been slow going, mostly because of laziness on my part and not putting in as much work on it as I should be. I’ve been doing it as “preshow” for some virtual shows, but really I should be out at virtual open mics doing it and working it in.

polaroid magic trick

I did recently make a change. I’ve been using this trick in pre-recorded virtual shows lately and a problem the trick had was the problems is that the Polaroid pictures are soo glossy, that they are hard to see on camera. They reflect too much light, and you can’t see them clearly. I took some brochure paper and printed the Polaroid pictures onto that paper. It’s a semi-gloss paper, so while it’s shiny, it doesn’t reflect nearly as much as the actual Polaroid picture.

The row on the left are the real Polaroids and the right are the copies. When they are side by side you can see the copies are a little less vibrant than the originals. However without a side by side comparison, you really can’t tell.

Keep working on your magic, even if you’ve been doing a trick for years and it’s a polished routine. There’s usually still improvements that can be made. Sometimes these are small improvements that no one will really notice, but these little things add up!

Making the T&R Card Play Bigger…

The last couple of days I’ve written about the torn and restored card that I’m working on. Now that I have the technical end pretty much worked out, the next step is figuring out how to make it work in a show. Right now with virtual shows, it’s easy because I can hold it close to the camera. Once “socially distant” shows are more common, I’ll need to make it bigger than just a playing card.

The original version that Harry Anderson did used a card that was bigger than a jumbo card. Yesterday I made a gimmicked card using a jumbo deck and while it’s visible, the way the current jumbo cards are made, they are too hard to make to be practical for use in every show. That got me thinking about the Phoenix Parlour Decks. These are between a standard deck and a jumbo deck. Being slightly better is a huge advantage for visibility.

While I’d love to be able to do the gimmicked cards in jumbo size, the availability of the old stock jumbo bicycle cards makes this something that would have a limited life. Ideally when I create, whatever I use will still be in production, so I can at least stock up on them.

Torn & Restored…

In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about a torn and restored card I was playing with based on a method by Harry Anderson. I think Harry’s method is really clever, and his full routine takes the trick from a simple torn and restored card to an amazing finish!

Here’s me trying out my version for some magicians the other night:

What’s neat about the tweak I made to the Anderson version is that you are actually tearing up their card, but the restored card you give back is the original card! It would make a fun magic dealers ad:

  • No Duplicate Names
  • No Double Writing
  • You Actually Tear Up Their Card
  • The Card Can Be Given Away
  • Self Contained Gimmicked Card
  • No Latex Flaps
  • No Elastic
  • No Invisible Thread

I’m having a lot of fun with this torn and restored card. I wonder how it will play once we get back to live, in person shows.


Gallery View…

A trick I’ve been using on Zoom is having someone think of someone’s name in the zoom room and then telling them who they are thinking of. What I like is that it’s “propless mentalism” and it feels impromptu.

Here’s what it looks like:

What I like is that you are changing the texture of your show when you do something like this. You are taking the focus off of a single screen and moving it to the gallery. During a trick like this, you get to watch everyone, and everyone watches waiting to see if they’re the one that the person is thinking of.

Moving the visual focus from you to the audience gives your show some texture. While something like this may not be for everyone, it’s something you should think about.

Clear Differences…

When you’re running a live virtual show, a lot more goes into it than simply turning on the camera on your laptop. Last night I was hanging out on Zoom with some performer friends and normally I just use my laptop’s built in camera, however I decided to set up the studio. I put up lights and hung the blue screen, and it’s amazing the difference it makes!

In the picture below, both images were taken at the same time by different cameras.

The left was my laptop’s built in camera and the right was an external camera placed about an inch above the other camera. It’s crazy the difference it makes. Even if I cropped down the one on the left, it’d still look blown out, and murkier (probably worse).

You need to look at the product you are putting out, is it watchable?

The Present…

Last night I saw Helder Guimaraes‘s show The Present at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Well, sort of, it was over Zoom. The show was really great, I loved it. Helder is the first person I’ve seen who really did the “you do as I do at home” type tricks and make they fun, exciting, and most importantly, not feel like a bunch of procedure.

When you buy your ticket they mail you a box a props to use during the show. What’s cool is it’s not just of a box with a deck of cards and some string in it. It’s a box where he very smartly uses the contents. I don’t want to ruin anything is someone has tickets and hasn’t seen the show, but you’ll quickly notice if you’re paying attention with a magician’s eye that there’s more to it than what it looks like.

I think there are a few more shows at The Geffen Playhouse. I think some have the option of just watching and not having the box mailed to you. If you can afford it, I’d recommend getting the box, you should still have a good time without the box.