talkmagic.co.uk

Hello to all!

I recently attended a street magician's act and was blown away by a trick which goes as follows:

The magician put a white stone in the hands of a volunteer. He told him that he was gonna ask her a question and that she was required to reply with "yes". He told her to put her two hands in front and asked her "Do you hold the stone in this hand?" for each hand. She answered "Yes" indistinguishable. The magician chose the right hand.

In the next part, he told her to put only one hand in front of her, asked the same question and to make the story shorter he guessed right again.

In the final part he chose five volunteers and gave them four black stones and the white one in order to choose (picking one after the other from a black bag). He performed the same ritual (volunteers should always answer his question with "yes") and managed to find which person had the white stone at the end.


Is that a "known" trick in the magic community and if so, what is the "official" name of it? Is there a product (book/DVD) which includes a description of the specific act or other acts similar to that? The act couldn't have been staged and I strongly doubt it was just a "body language reading".


PS: This act was really excellent and it kind of put on my mind tthe idea to start practicing that kind of mentalist tricks.

oooh please dont say mentalism and trick in the same sentence...you'll invoke something very painful...

yes - its available, in many different methods and ways...the orginal is
kurotsoke by max maven...

then there's "body language" by charles gauci...

and many more, some very expensive...

The first has a probability of 1/2 as does the second. probability of getting both right = 1/4.
the third has a probability of 1/5.
probability of getting all of them right = 1/20.

You probably came across the one time in twenty that the performer gets it right. The other 19 performances are probably really boring.

probably.

or they probably used a stooge. most magic tricks use stooges.

probably.

Joking aside, you should check out the works of Banachek and, as mentioned, Max Maven.

Karl Fulves's Self-Working Mental Magic contains the stone in hand trick, and I believe the latter one would be Oddball (or at least a variant on it)

yeah, the fulves one isnt 100% though...

he said stones - so maybe its one of the Gauci editions, or Christopher Taylor's version...

Doug segal has a nice version involving chess pieces,but the bit of kit he uses is very expensive.

I have this, i got it from here.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Mentalism-Stones-of-Divinity-Magic-trick-FREEPOST_W0QQitemZ220492688783QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Collectables_MagicTricks_RL?hash=item3356636d8f

This routine has many names and sadly, most of the handling stems from the "Logic Puzzle" course of presentation or what some call "Sinner & Saint" or "Truth Teller vs. Liar".

Probably the most affordable and accessible variants are going to be found in Rick Maue's "Book of Haunted Magick" and Patrick Redford's "Prevaricator" though the most complete treatise was penned by Jerome Finley at "Thought Channel" (very limited distribution and quite highly priced), which includes some amazing contributions from Colin McCleod and Paolo Cavalli; methods that simplify the entire system while giving the performer a greater sense of "insurance" (in that the routine can sometimes fail, using the more traditional tells).

When worked properly the routine is 100% impromptu as well as mind boggling

Actually the first version of this effect was published by Jonathan Pendragon in Stephen Minch's Spectacle (1990) as The Hand that Speaks:

8 white and 1 black marble, spectators choose one each unseen, a puppet hand finds out who has the black one.

The description is taken from Denis Behr web site.

Yaniv Deautsch
www.yanivd.co.il