talkmagic.co.uk

Just realised the bingo in the title, but can't be bothered to rephrase it.

Anyway, I was sat in the pub last night and was just messing around doing a few Ace tricks for some mates. One of my friends is one of those "I know how thats done" types, though he is still a really good spec (he never knows how they are done, so he reacts great).

Id done about three, maybe four tricks, just producing the aces, changing their colours, nothing overly fancy or anything. Anyway, I have him stick the aces into a spread, "shuffle" the deck and just put it down, saying I can't remember what trick I was going to do. They ask for one more, but I said "Oh, we've shuffled the aces away now, I can't be bothered to find them", knowing all too well my mate will say something along the lines of "Oh well a real magician could just pull them out of the deck!"

Of course, I bet him the next round, which was going to be mine, that I could pull at least two out. He accepts. So I just focus for ages on the deck, staring intently at it. After about a minute, I just laugh and take the top four cards, all the aces off, and send him off to buy the beer

A cheap trick, I know, but its a favorite sucker trick of mine to play on friends.

Does anybody else have a favorite like that? Im not talking about swindling or anything, just a cheap trick they use on their friends to get a laugh and/or beer?

The only sucker effects I like are ones where the audience actually win also.


Generally I think the magicians who say...it alienates the audience etc are the ones who don't have a clue about performing.

Saying that, the closest to a sucker effect I perform it a Just Chance routine by Barrie Richardson. Not so much a sucker effect as the audience win and it's incredible, but then you show the extra something and with a cheeky smile you've suckered them...

I don't do this one for audiences, not performed that fashion anyway.

I mean something to just get one of your mates or, preferably a sibling (smart a**e brothers work well).

I had another one for getting pool players, putting a fifty pence on top of the black ball and saying "You have to get the black in the pocket, without the 50p falling off"

Obviously they will try and try, but it wont work. Think about it though, I never said they had to POT the ball, just get it in the pocket.

Thats the sort of thing I mean, a little prank trick or something. Im sure magicians must have a few funny ones

Haha, these sound like fun. I don't know too many sucker tricks, but I do like sucker presentations where the spec(s) think you have messed up the trick, but you really haven't. Case in point would be Design for Laughter from RRTCM or Annihilation Deck. Always looking for more of those!

I've never tried Design for Laughter, don't even remember it from RRTCM. Might have to look that one up!

My two favorite ”sucker tricks“ at the moment, are Paul Gordon's ”The World's Best Card Trick“ and Dai Vernon's ”Matching the Cards“. In both cases the spectator thinks you have messed up the trick, but the joke is reversed in the final revelation.

Matthius88 wrote:I've never tried Design for Laughter, don't even remember it from RRTCM. Might have to look that one up!

I believe it's on page 67.

For me, when I did childrens shows it used to be the Sucker Dye box until a cheap £3.99 one flooded the shops enabling every child under the age of 3 to know the Method. Kind of spoilt it then.......

As has been said sucker tricks aren't really the beast way to endear yourself to an audience. Just chance would be the closest I'd go to a sucker trick and I'd always include a prize of some sort for participants. Mr E's version and Max Maven's both give other options to making a fool of the participants. I think it was Geofrey Durham who I saw with a good method for this as well.

Jobasha wrote:As has been said sucker tricks aren't really the beast way to endear yourself to an audience.

'Oh no, that Magician lied to me, he cheated, he fooled me! Dispicable'
hmm...

Sucker tricks are inherently astonishing/ funny, because they are unexpected- the reaction is better. It is about the atitude with which it is done, as long as you steer well clear of the ' Well actually, I tricked you- I'm better than you' you'll be fine, but this attitude applies to all of magic, not just sucker tricks... we are openly fooling people after all.

Sucker tricks have several other uses too. Methodologically, they are perfect misdirection: what better way to throw them off scent than to have them looking for a method which does not even exist?
Another value they have, I shall explain with an example. I did a routine in which an audience member thinks of a word or something, and then everyone else through a game of word association, generates an entirley random word- the idea being that the audience's collective conciousness will hopefully generate the thought of word of the spectator. Obviously, it failed and I divined the thought of word to revive the failure. Later on in the routine, I showed that I had in actual fact predicted the randomly generated word from the game of word association. All the while, the suggestion is that I could have done the origional effect in which the audience divined the spectator's word, but I chose not to. The neglegence and indifference about the origional effect makes the effect I ended up actually doing seem much more impressive, because the origional effect would have been incredible..

The best one I know of was actually done on me be a nine year old.

He had me select a card, put it back then began dealing them out one at a time in a face up ribbon spread, while counting under his breath.
About halfway through the deck he stopped and bet me a quid that the next card he'd turn over would be mine.
I agreed as I had already seen my card in the ribbon spread, so I knew he'd made a mistake, but to my horror he reached over to my card in the spread and turned it over, the cheeky git!

Jean Eugene Roberts wrote:The best one I know of was actually done on me be a nine year old.

He had me select a card, put it back then began dealing them out one at a time in a face up ribbon spread, while counting under his breath.
About halfway through the deck he stopped and bet me a quid that the next card he'd turn over would be mine.
I agreed as I had already seen my card in the ribbon spread, so I knew he'd made a mistake, but to my horror he reached over to my card in the spread and turned it over, the cheeky git!

*cough* Tarbell *cough*
Indeed though, I have probably earned about 20 quid from this trick

SamGurney wrote:

Jobasha wrote:As has been said sucker tricks aren't really the beast way to endear yourself to an audience.

'Oh no, that Magician lied to me, he cheated, he fooled me! Dispicable'
hmm...

Should have been clearer. When people say sucker trick it brings to mind card magicians using the trick to shoot down hecklers. I don't mind if done with a proper sense of humour. Sucker tricks just aren't something that suit me.

Jobasha wrote:
Should have been clearer. When people say sucker trick it brings to mind card magicians using the trick to shoot down hecklers. I don't mind if done with a proper sense of humour. Sucker tricks just aren't something that suit me.

That is was I meant, a humorous sucker trick, not something intended to single somebody out and make them feel like an idiot, but a trick where when they see the result their reaction is like "You cheeky bu**er!"

Jean Eugene Roberts wrote:The best one I know of was actually done on me be a nine year old.

He had me select a card, put it back then began dealing them out one at a time in a face up ribbon spread, while counting under his breath.
About halfway through the deck he stopped and bet me a quid that the next card he'd turn over would be mine.
I agreed as I had already seen my card in the ribbon spread, so I knew he'd made a mistake, but to my horror he reached over to my card in the spread and turned it over, the cheeky git!

Haha, I actually use this trick occasionally, but not in the same way. I do it more like a psuedo "I am reading your expression/body language/brain implant" sort of way. It is very simple, but you can get pretty good reactions from it.

gunnarkr wrote:
I believe it's on page 67.

Found it, thanks



Phew, long post!

Sucker tricks work well if the final ta-dah is done with a sense of innocence - as if the whole trek down the garden path was all unintentional and, as far as you're concerned, the magic was there all along.

Take the sucker silk to egg routine - after demonstrating the hollow egg method, just leave it at that, but casually add that if anyone really wants to look at the egg, just peel off the silk spot.

As if it's the most normal and natural thing in the world.

No one-upmanship, no competition... just a little step into your slightly unhinged world, where the laws of reality simply don't apply.

Pete