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What do you do if you drop a break?

What do you mean by that...Like, you have their card under a pinky break and you let go by mistake, losing their card? If thats what you mean, just practice until you dont do that anymore. If you want an instant solution, make a joke about how you are going to guess their card. Then say something like "okay, now i will be serious, pick a card"

Hope it helps,

Dream

Dreamw0rks wrote:What do you mean by that...Like, you have their card under a pinky break and you let go by mistake, losing their card? If thats what you mean, just practice until you dont do that anymore.

That really doesn't help.

Dreamw0rks wrote:If you want an instant solution, make a joke about how you are going to guess their card. Then say something like "okay, now i will be serious, pick a card"

That'll do

smarvell wrote:What do you do if you drop a break?

a glimpse at some point before hand can be useful for this.
if you know what it is, loosing break will not matter.

If not feasible, with good patter you can continue regardless...get someone else to pick card, laughing all the way almost admitting to getting it wrong. After finishing trick on 2nd spec, put cards back to pocket as after thought, get cards back out (in realitity, now switched for ID)asking "oops, nearly forgot, what was the card you picked?" (to 1st spec). Being off guard, they will more often than not tell you without hesitation. This way, ID becomes more of a prediction used as an out rather than a "magically turns over the card" trick.
hope this helps....very similar to this happened at one of the first gigs i did with the very first trick of the night....quick thinking, good patter and remembering I had the ID tucked away saved the day and in fact increased the effect ten fold

hope this helps

Good call on using the ID or trying to take a glimpse........if all else fails, act like you are "winging it a bit"....hand them the deck, say, "you know what? I changed my mind......you take the deck, and remove your card." You then can move into a back up effect and really start over again. The key to this is the excitement in your voice....as in....HEY I just thought of an even better effect for you! They will not notice or care for that matter......when completely fubar, make a joke, shuffle the deck a bunch, cut to a card and ask them if it is theirs.....

If you happen to (1/52 chance) you look like a star, if you are wrong, laugh and say....I know, but would have been impressive if it worked though eh? Everyone will laugh and assume you planned to add the humor in....move on from there.

Look through the deck and admit you can't find their card. Apologise, and ask what their card was. After they tell you, look again. Still no luck. This is ridiculous! Spread the deck on the table and scan through. Where is that card? Ask the spec to help. He can't find it. Oh well, the 7 clubs always is a tricky card, that's why you always carry a spare of that card in your wallet. Take out your wallet and remove the card. Put it back in the deck and move on to the next effect.

If only I was experienced enough to know how to do that with such scrutiny

smarvell wrote:What do you do if you drop a break?

Whip out the ID?

moodini wrote:if all else fails, act like you are "winging it a bit"....hand them the deck, say, "you know what? I changed my mind......you take the deck, and remove your card." You then can move into a back up effect and really start over again. The key to this is the excitement in your voice....as in....HEY I just thought of an even better effect for you!

Ditto. I do this kind of thing all the time - seeming to have a sudden thought and being all, 'Ah, never mind that; now I think about it - let me show you this.' Your basic problem, Smarvell, as I see it, (and I hope you don't think me witheringly superior-sounding for pointing this out) is that you appear to be amateurishly limited to only screwing up holding a break. If you had my repertoire of clumsiness and/or sudden, blanking brain death, then the experience of screwing up almost anything, and screwing it up regularly, would give you a solid grounding in the 'No - I've changed my mind! Abruptly!' technique that'd make it almost second nature.

It was, in fact, this evening, that I encountered my anti-trickster. There was nothing I could do that he couldn't screw up. However ... after all that ... I managed to throw in a "magician has made another mistake" type trick and get the next two beers on someone else, so, it wasn't ll bad.

It was a hidious evening:

There's my key card on the bottom of his shuffle
He mixed up odd and even numbers
He cut three cards off the top of the deck

It's not as if he wanted to make me look bad ... he just managed to screw the whole lot up.

Amazing

You can stop a lot of the usual awkward spec shenanigans if you don't tell him what you're doing. The knock-on is that it encourages meaning to form naturally in his mind rather than you trying to shoehorn it in, but you have to be artfully nondescript.

"I'd now like you to cut the deck in the middle," for instance, is an open invitation to cut it anywhere but the middle if he's being an awkward sod. "Cut the deck," is a better choice of words. There's no "middle" to deliberately disobey.

If you've got, say, 3 piles of cards and need to force one, "choose one of these piles" can draw attention to the one you might actually need to discard - especially if he chooses it by picking it up and making it his own - but the command "point to a pile" gives nothing away about the why of the situation.

Similarly, "can you feel the coin vanishing in your hand?" is actually less effective than "can you feel something happening?" If you then direct him to simply open his hand, when he sees the coin gone, meaning starts to form spontaneously.

As Lady of Mystery said in another thread, "there's more to performing a trick than just knowing how it's done" It's what Brown calls "resonance" in "Absolute Magic".

i think it's fine just to say "actually...no, we wont attempt that...we'll try this...just as an experiment between you and i..."

then just start afresh...if i mess up, i usually just mix the whole deck up on the table in a little card mountain, and ask them to just go for it and pick one up, then ask them to not look at it just yet...

then i gather up the deck, prepare for a pass and then say "ok, you have by pure intuition picked up a card..." and go from there...

If the worst comes to the worst. GAG. Say, " Your card will now jump out of the pack into your hands.Hold them both out ready" He does, "Now". Then you thumb off the cards at him one at a time as fast as possible. OR Just throw the pack straight into his hands. Some will fall. Ask then what his card was. Retrieve it saying" Ah the so and so is the most difficult card in the deck. It just won't do what it is told" DL it, or top change and show it's gone again and finish your trick.
Check out 'Outs, Precautions & Challenges' by C. Hopkins, price £5:50p (79 pages) There is also George B. Anderson's little booklet( 17 pages of info) Overcoming Magic Hazards, price £5:60
If you're using several cards say " Do you want them one at a time or altogether". Which ever answer, a. You pitch the cards at him b. throw the entire deck at him. An old gag I first saw Judi Dench play on Edward Woodward, backstage in the Green Room at Nottingham Playhouse in the mid1960's. The next night she cut his head, through his hairpiece, after hitting him in Private Lives with a 78 gramophone record, which shouldn't have broken. I think someone had substituted the real thing for a fake one.!!
Allen Tipton

I've got a nice little reserve trick kept aside in case something like this happens that I switch to. Only needed it once, but it's good to have it there. I like to try and look at all my tricks and work out things that could go wrong and then think of ways around them, could be a reserve trick, a way to recover and just a plain bluff. I think I've just about got all my possible errors covered now (now I've said that, something unexpected is bound to come up in a performance tonight ).

Tomo wrote:"I'd now like you to cut the deck in the middle," for instance, is an open invitation to cut it anywhere but the middle if he's being an awkward sod. "Cut the deck," is a better choice of words. There's no "middle" to deliberately disobey.

The reason I said "cut the deck in half", which I normally wouldn't, is because when doing a trick that morning, I asked someone to cut the deck and they did a triple cut and restack before I even noticed.

I'm going to put that day down to experience.