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I'm developing a rope routine which contains a few variations upon the unequal ropes/professor's nightmare setup, and the finale of the second act involves tying 3 apparently equal sized ropes into a loop.

Anyone who knows the method knows that this actually means tying two genuine knots, and one sort of fake knot. Using square knots mean that the first thing I do is wrap the ends round each other, so I can follow the same script as it were for trying all 3 knots, but with the phony one, I can't bring the ropes together before I tie it.

What order would you tie the knots in? Because of what I'm doing afterwards, I have to tie a genuine one last, so that's set in stone. But I can't figure out if it would be more effective to:

1) Tie the fake knot to get it out of the way and use the more detailed slower genuine knot to direct attention away as it hangs there.

2) Tie the genuine knot first, showing it as nice and clean, then doing the second knot without calling attention to the technique so much, as the audience have already been shown what you're doing at a clean first knot will lower their suspicion of the second.

3) Do it either way, but make a show of neither, so in no case do you see the ropes come together.

Obviously the 3rd knot will have the ends coming together because it makes a loop after that.

This will probably develop into the routine I'm putting together in my head to audition for the Magic Circle so I want to get it as perfect as possible. I can see advantages to all 3 of these orders but there's probably some subtle benefit to one method, which you'd only know with years of experience of rope work.

I'm hoping someone here has years of experience in rope work.

-Stacy

It's funny I thought that this would stir up a few opinions but after lots of views no one has said anything.

I guess that just means that ultimately it doesn't make any difference which order I do the knots in...

-Stacy

Try not to take it personally. I looked because the topic looks interesting but I have no idea what you are on about as I have never done rope work (oo-er) so could not offer a suggestion even if I wanted to.

David Taylor aka dat8962 might be the one to ask, his rope work is utterly brilliant.

It's not really rope specific, it's a general misdirection by repetition question.

There are 3 supposedly identical actions, two clean, one dirty.

What order do you do them in to better hide the one dirty move?

-Stacy

Well there are actually only two orders you could do it in aren't there? because you mentioned the last one is set in stone with it being a real knot.

My short answer is it doesn't matter, because from the audience point of view you are just tying three knots - why would you be doing any different?

I think you are worrying too much, which happens to the best of us when we are doing something dirty. But they all must look identical anyway and if any of them look "dodgy" then you possibly need to practice more.

The best misdirection is to be talking whilst doing this, and not necessarily talking about the knots either. Just keep the focus off what you are doing and I am sure it will be fine whatever order you choose.

I assume you have tried both ways? If that is so - which way feels more relaxed to you?

Good advice from bananafish there, especially:

bananafish wrote:I think you are worrying too much, which happens to the best of us when we are doing something dirty. But they all must look identical anyway and if any of them look "dodgy" then you possibly need to practice more.

I agree that this must be something that you work out for yourself by trying it both ways.

However, if you have any concerns about it, logically you should do the iffy knot first. People won't have anything to compare it to. If you do the fake knot in the middle, they can compare it to the knot that came before and the one you tied after. I've seen this sort of thing happen in tricks - the performer does something "different" and you notice it, even if you don't know what they did. You spot it because it wasn't the same as the other times the "same" thing was done.

Do try it both ways and see which you think is better.

Part-Timer wrote:However, if you have any concerns about it, logically you should do the iffy knot first. People won't have anything to compare it to.

You could argue the other way -- people might be more likely to be watching closely the first time. Once they see you're only tying knots, interest will drop off for the second one.

But yeah, I'd agree with trying them both ways and seeing which feels better for you.

Robbie wrote:You could argue the other way -- people might be more likely to be watching closely the first time. Once they see you're only tying knots, interest will drop off for the second one.

Good point. My thinking was that, if the fake knot looks iffy in its own right, the trick is on a hiding to nothing (as bananafish suggested). If, however, the fake knot looks OK, but there could be a visual difference between tying it and the real ones, you might find it easier to get it past people before they know what's happening.

On the other hand, they might relax more and "switch off" a bit if they know it's "just" tying some knots (but then they might not notice the discrepancy whether the real now came first or second).

As is often the case, the answer might very well be that either solution has advantages and disadvantages!