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This is a stellar example of a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect. The vast majority of magic tricks are

This is a stellar example of a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect. The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. The effect is amazing but the method is actually quite mundane. This is one reason magicians don't reveal "secrets". The reality is most magical methods are rather disappointing compared to the astonishing impact of the effect created. For any magical effect there are almost always many possible methods and, conversely, for each method there are multiple possible effects. This method provides a way to know the location (or absence) of each card in a shuffled deck without the performer handling the deck. For most of the effects which could be accomplished with this method there exist a wide variety of alternate, much simpler, methods. Using any of those easier and cheaper methods would likely appear identically amazing to audiences. And that's why I love this method. As a technologist and magician, I've always had a special fondness for wildly complex methods - that rare kind of magic where the method actually IS as amazing as the effect.

yupper32 4y ago
> The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. The effect is amazing but the method is actually quite mundane. You're probably right about it being the majority, but I'd say a lot of good slight of hand also falls into the category of the method being amazing. Penn and Teller are also famous for doing tricks with the secret in full view, and they're often more impressive than the trick done normally.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  The routines in that case are designed to be entertaining, they don't give away secrets that aren't theirs to begin with, and there's often a double bluff where they purport to give away secrets, but there's still an element they don't disclose, or the supposed secret is just misdirection (e.g. the phone inside fish trick) A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. They don't reveal those tricks.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. This is the mindset I don't understand. Unless the secret is something the spectator might reasonably consider "cheating" (like, if it turns out that a video production that's ostensibly of a live performance actually used post-production visual effects), I don't see in what sense knowing the secret ruins the trick. Perhaps for some people it might, but as long as the "secret revelation" content is separate from the "trick performance" content, I trust people to identify for themselves which content they want to watch.
    - zbuf 4y ago
      All magic tricks are cheating. It's just sometimes the cheat is just something you didn't think of and not a lot more. Sometimes it's a gadget or gimmick; not something that requires a lot of practice. Of course there's amazing sleight of hand -- you are correct. But a lot of magic is creativity & performance, not necessarily skill. The lines are blurred and that's the fun.
      - tshaddox 4y ago
        > All magic tricks are cheating. It's just sometimes the cheat is just something you didn't think of and not a lot more. I think we're using different terminology here. I think there's a pretty big distinction between, for instance, the widely known variants of the sawing a woman in half trick where there are two people in the two halves of the box, and watching a video broadcast of a magic show where it turns out they just used visual effects to accomplish the effect. Perhaps the lines are blurry and different spectators might disagree in some cases, but I think there's a set of explanations that would be considered "cheating" in the negative sense.
        vanviegen 4y ago
        Exactly. When the audience needs to observe the trick by proxy, because it's not practical to have everybody touching the object, standing on stage, or being in the TV studio, that proxy must be honest. If I can't trust that to be the case, I'd only be interested in a trick if I can be the one on stage touching the object. No more global audience for you, cheating magician.
- mrandish 4y ago
  > a lot of good slight of hand also falls into the category of the method being amazing. That's true but when slight of hand is amazing it's usually amazing in a different way than the OP's method. At the highest conceptual level, the "secret method" of most sleight of hand can be boiled down to "You hid something in your hand." At least to other magicians, uniquely good sleight of hand is amazing due to the insane level of skill and years of rigorous practice required to "hide something in your hand" in a way that appears impossible. While developing the OP's method did require amazing effort and serious engineering skill, someone else could then perform with that method without the same unique level of technical skill.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > At the highest conceptual level, the "secret method" of most sleight of hand can be boiled down to "You hid something in your hand." I'm not sure if I agree with that. There are certainly some clever and skillful methods for how an item is literally stored and retrieved, but what's more interesting and impressive to me is the overall choreography. The way all the moves are sequenced and how one move provides misdirection for another move is where the magic happens.
    - mrandish 4y ago
      > what's more interesting and impressive to me is the overall choreography. Yes, I agree. You've described appreciating a magical performance like a magician would appreciate the work of another magician. The general public usually focuses on what they perceive as the "trick" part of creating the illusion (such as an object hidden in the hand they are unaware of). Advanced magical skill involves understanding and then perfecting the often subtle surrounding elements that make the effect so deceptive. In the past I've taught sleight of hand magic to relatively novice students and in the beginning they are always puzzled that even when they've learned "the move", a spectator will often just say "it's in your other hand." Yet when I perform the exact same move to similar spectators it never even occurs to anyone that something might be in the other hand. The difference is a dozen subtle things from where my eyes are looking, to the position of my body, to the pacing of my speech. I had to learn these techniques from my mentors and then rigorously practice them until perfected. In a lot of sleight of hand magic, any "move" by itself is not all that deceptive. The context and choreography around the move are what elevate the performance to what seems like real magic.
tshaddox 4y ago
> This is a stellar example of a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect. The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. I don't know much about magic, but I've always felt that the method is almost always more amazing than the effect. I am vastly more interested in the methods, skills, and preparation that goes into a trick than I am in just watching a final performance.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  That’s fine. I think the next step is to also appreciate the live performative element and to perhaps integrate it all into your own routine. If not, recognize that people with other hobbies would rather appreciate a performance and then study what interests them with the remaining time.
bena 4y ago
Penn likes to say that a lot of magic boils down to no one really believing anyone is going to spend the time and resources to do the obvious thing. Magicians are people who are willing to spend the time and resources to do the obvious thing. Like people who seem to swallow things and then reproduce them later. The easiest method to do that is to swallow the thing and then regurgitate it. And you can train yourself to do this. But it takes time and effort. And is a little gross and if you're working with live animals, you are also on a time limit.
- happimess 4y ago
  My favorite example he gave: Buy 52 decks of cards. Put all the 7s of diamonds together in one deck. Let your audience member pick a card. It's the 7 of diamonds.
orlp 4y ago
One of my favorite magic tricks is one I've learnt. You have 31 cards prepared in an order determined by a linear shift register. The audience is allowed to cut the deck as often as they want (thus maintaining cyclic order) after which they draw 5 cards. Simply by asking which audience members hold red cards you can compute which cards they're holding. I've also performed this trick by combining two decks with different patterns on the back, allowing you to 'divine' their cards without ever asking a question. See here for details: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/01/mathematics_and_magic_the_de_b.html https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/01/mathematics_and...
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's amazing what you can do if you can memorize an (apparently) random order of 52 cards. It's not that hard to do (even for an actual random ordering) and it enables a decent number of tricks.
Agamus 4y ago
I too have a passion for complex magic tricks. And while what you say may be true for tricks which rely on gimmicks, with sleight of hand, the opposite is often true. I was a stage illusionist in a 'former life', and started practicing sleight of hand at age 6. The thing that kept me interested is that the methods of producing the effect were almost always far more interesting than the effect they produce. In my own art, I focused on vintage effects that were complex. I recreated dozens of effects from Dunninger's book, and relied on technological principles from that era - lots of clockwork and curious mechanisms. I could have produced the same effect in much easier ways, but what would be the fun in that? Many methods require inconceivable practice to master. One example is an obscure method of the "front to back palm" with a coin, which thereafter goes back to front - the most complex sleight of hand I worked on, which produces a completely mundane effect (showing the hands empty). In my experience, if you see someone doing sleight of hand - making cards, balls, coins, cigarettes appear and disappear - watching how they do it is much more interesting than watching the effect!
- mrandish 4y ago
  I too had Dunninger's book when I was a kid. You may already know this but it was subsequently shown by magic historians that Dunninger actually never used some of the methods described in the book and never even performed some of the effects shown by any method. He just made some of the effects up along with their supposed methods to have more fodder to fill the book. It's a pretty fascinating story and perhaps his 'best' trick.
turtlebits 4y ago
The method is interesting, but magic entertains because of the performance/mystery. If you use this tool without providing any of that, it's boring, and people will probably assume you're some form of camera/tool/cheat/hidden helpers and leave unimpressed.
MattGrommes 4y ago
> a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect I once heard this described as when you hear the method of a trick, a great trick is one where you go "Ah!" with amazement instead of "Oh", disappointed.
HWR_14 4y ago
Penn (of Penn and Teller) says that there are two kinds of magic tricks. Ones that are so unbelievably easy you cannot imagine the method, and the ones that involve so much work you cannot imagine the method. One time, he saw a magician perform a trick and guessed he had been in prison, because the amount of work it takes to prep it is so long there's no way anyone else would have the time.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  and Teller says that the secret to a good trick is to put in more effort than the audience thinks any same person would. The Prestige has tricks like this (some totally fictional, some based on real magicians).
feintruled 4y ago
Nice analysis! As James Randi said of Uri Geller “[he] may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.”
moralestapia 4y ago
I like this one a lot as it is amazing on both method + effect. Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCFXV6o7cro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCFXV6o7cro I won't reveal the method but here it is in Penn's words (from 1:20): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuKail7Jwwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuKail7Jwwg

yupper32 4y ago

> The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. The effect is amazing but the method is actually quite mundane. You're probably right about it being the majority, but I'd say a lot of good slight of hand also falls into the category of the method being amazing. Penn and Teller are also famous for doing tricks with the secret in full view, and they're often more impressive than the trick done normally.

Jasper_ 4y ago
The routines in that case are designed to be entertaining, they don't give away secrets that aren't theirs to begin with, and there's often a double bluff where they purport to give away secrets, but there's still an element they don't disclose, or the supposed secret is just misdirection (e.g. the phone inside fish trick) A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. They don't reveal those tricks.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. This is the mindset I don't understand. Unless the secret is something the spectator might reasonably consider "cheating" (like, if it turns out that a video production that's ostensibly of a live performance actually used post-production visual effects), I don't see in what sense knowing the secret ruins the trick. Perhaps for some people it might, but as long as the "secret revelation" content is separate from the "trick performance" content, I trust people to identify for themselves which content they want to watch.
  - zbuf 4y ago
    All magic tricks are cheating. It's just sometimes the cheat is just something you didn't think of and not a lot more. Sometimes it's a gadget or gimmick; not something that requires a lot of practice. Of course there's amazing sleight of hand -- you are correct. But a lot of magic is creativity & performance, not necessarily skill. The lines are blurred and that's the fun.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      > All magic tricks are cheating. It's just sometimes the cheat is just something you didn't think of and not a lot more. I think we're using different terminology here. I think there's a pretty big distinction between, for instance, the widely known variants of the sawing a woman in half trick where there are two people in the two halves of the box, and watching a video broadcast of a magic show where it turns out they just used visual effects to accomplish the effect. Perhaps the lines are blurry and different spectators might disagree in some cases, but I think there's a set of explanations that would be considered "cheating" in the negative sense.
      - vanviegen 4y ago
        Exactly. When the audience needs to observe the trick by proxy, because it's not practical to have everybody touching the object, standing on stage, or being in the TV studio, that proxy must be honest. If I can't trust that to be the case, I'd only be interested in a trick if I can be the one on stage touching the object. No more global audience for you, cheating magician.
mrandish 4y ago
> a lot of good slight of hand also falls into the category of the method being amazing. That's true but when slight of hand is amazing it's usually amazing in a different way than the OP's method. At the highest conceptual level, the "secret method" of most sleight of hand can be boiled down to "You hid something in your hand." At least to other magicians, uniquely good sleight of hand is amazing due to the insane level of skill and years of rigorous practice required to "hide something in your hand" in a way that appears impossible. While developing the OP's method did require amazing effort and serious engineering skill, someone else could then perform with that method without the same unique level of technical skill.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > At the highest conceptual level, the "secret method" of most sleight of hand can be boiled down to "You hid something in your hand." I'm not sure if I agree with that. There are certainly some clever and skillful methods for how an item is literally stored and retrieved, but what's more interesting and impressive to me is the overall choreography. The way all the moves are sequenced and how one move provides misdirection for another move is where the magic happens.
  - mrandish 4y ago
    > what's more interesting and impressive to me is the overall choreography. Yes, I agree. You've described appreciating a magical performance like a magician would appreciate the work of another magician. The general public usually focuses on what they perceive as the "trick" part of creating the illusion (such as an object hidden in the hand they are unaware of). Advanced magical skill involves understanding and then perfecting the often subtle surrounding elements that make the effect so deceptive. In the past I've taught sleight of hand magic to relatively novice students and in the beginning they are always puzzled that even when they've learned "the move", a spectator will often just say "it's in your other hand." Yet when I perform the exact same move to similar spectators it never even occurs to anyone that something might be in the other hand. The difference is a dozen subtle things from where my eyes are looking, to the position of my body, to the pacing of my speech. I had to learn these techniques from my mentors and then rigorously practice them until perfected. In a lot of sleight of hand magic, any "move" by itself is not all that deceptive. The context and choreography around the move are what elevate the performance to what seems like real magic.

tshaddox 4y ago

> This is a stellar example of a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect. The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. I don't know much about magic, but I've always felt that the method is almost always more amazing than the effect. I am vastly more interested in the methods, skills, and preparation that goes into a trick than I am in just watching a final performance.

1123581321 4y ago
That’s fine. I think the next step is to also appreciate the live performative element and to perhaps integrate it all into your own routine. If not, recognize that people with other hobbies would rather appreciate a performance and then study what interests them with the remaining time.

bena 4y ago

Penn likes to say that a lot of magic boils down to no one really believing anyone is going to spend the time and resources to do the obvious thing. Magicians are people who are willing to spend the time and resources to do the obvious thing. Like people who seem to swallow things and then reproduce them later. The easiest method to do that is to swallow the thing and then regurgitate it. And you can train yourself to do this. But it takes time and effort. And is a little gross and if you're working with live animals, you are also on a time limit.

happimess 4y ago
My favorite example he gave: Buy 52 decks of cards. Put all the 7s of diamonds together in one deck. Let your audience member pick a card. It's the 7 of diamonds.

orlp 4y ago

One of my favorite magic tricks is one I've learnt. You have 31 cards prepared in an order determined by a linear shift register. The audience is allowed to cut the deck as often as they want (thus maintaining cyclic order) after which they draw 5 cards. Simply by asking which audience members hold red cards you can compute which cards they're holding. I've also performed this trick by combining two decks with different patterns on the back, allowing you to 'divine' their cards without ever asking a question. See here for details: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/01/mathematics_and_magic_the_de_b.html https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/01/mathematics_and...

bombcar 4y ago
It's amazing what you can do if you can memorize an (apparently) random order of 52 cards. It's not that hard to do (even for an actual random ordering) and it enables a decent number of tricks.

Agamus 4y ago

I too have a passion for complex magic tricks. And while what you say may be true for tricks which rely on gimmicks, with sleight of hand, the opposite is often true. I was a stage illusionist in a 'former life', and started practicing sleight of hand at age 6. The thing that kept me interested is that the methods of producing the effect were almost always far more interesting than the effect they produce. In my own art, I focused on vintage effects that were complex. I recreated dozens of effects from Dunninger's book, and relied on technological principles from that era - lots of clockwork and curious mechanisms. I could have produced the same effect in much easier ways, but what would be the fun in that? Many methods require inconceivable practice to master. One example is an obscure method of the "front to back palm" with a coin, which thereafter goes back to front - the most complex sleight of hand I worked on, which produces a completely mundane effect (showing the hands empty). In my experience, if you see someone doing sleight of hand - making cards, balls, coins, cigarettes appear and disappear - watching how they do it is much more interesting than watching the effect!

mrandish 4y ago
I too had Dunninger's book when I was a kid. You may already know this but it was subsequently shown by magic historians that Dunninger actually never used some of the methods described in the book and never even performed some of the effects shown by any method. He just made some of the effects up along with their supposed methods to have more fodder to fill the book. It's a pretty fascinating story and perhaps his 'best' trick.

turtlebits 4y ago

The method is interesting, but magic entertains because of the performance/mystery. If you use this tool without providing any of that, it's boring, and people will probably assume you're some form of camera/tool/cheat/hidden helpers and leave unimpressed.

MattGrommes 4y ago

> a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect I once heard this described as when you hear the method of a trick, a great trick is one where you go "Ah!" with amazement instead of "Oh", disappointed.

HWR_14 4y ago

Penn (of Penn and Teller) says that there are two kinds of magic tricks. Ones that are so unbelievably easy you cannot imagine the method, and the ones that involve so much work you cannot imagine the method. One time, he saw a magician perform a trick and guessed he had been in prison, because the amount of work it takes to prep it is so long there's no way anyone else would have the time.

hgsgm 4y ago
and Teller says that the secret to a good trick is to put in more effort than the audience thinks any same person would. The Prestige has tricks like this (some totally fictional, some based on real magicians).

feintruled 4y ago

Nice analysis! As James Randi said of Uri Geller “[he] may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.”

moralestapia 4y ago

I like this one a lot as it is amazing on both method + effect. Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCFXV6o7cro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCFXV6o7cro I won't reveal the method but here it is in Penn's words (from 1:20): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuKail7Jwwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuKail7Jwwg