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Hi there,

I attended a great lecture by Marc Cosby last night, during which he explained a few effects. One of them was a simple card transposition, where two spectators choose cards, they are both lost in the deck. The magician finds the first. He places this on the table. He then tries to find the second, but fails. He then eventually finds it, but that turns out to be the first spectators card. The second spectators card has swapped places with the one on the table!!

A very simple effect, with a very simple handling. However… as I was watching the first performance of this I was trying to jump ahead and work out what he was going to do. For some reason I had in my head a “2 Card Monte” style of routine and was expecting a top-change (don’t ask why). When the change didn’t occur, I couldn’t understand how the 2nd card had swapped onto the table. He performed the trick again, and I just couldn’t see how it was done. At that precise moment in time I was totally fooled (which felt great – because the more I learn and study magic – the less often I get to experience that feeling of bewilderment that initially attracted me to magic).

Now when he explained the handling I could have banged my head against a wall, and I’m sure that you don’t need me to tell you that the trick used DLs and nothing more! In fact, it was almost identical to a routine that I actually perform myself using two spectators cards and a hankie – which ends with a card transposition! But the presentation that Marc used, and the mis-information that he fed us (i.e. we’ll place your card onto the table in full view of everyone) were 100% effective and justified and therefore totally fooled me.

This made me realise the importance of not telling the spectators what we are going to do, until we have done it – or actually telling them something that we don’t do! Some of my favourite routines to perform are where you lead the spectators down a particular path and then end up with a big twist – like 2 Card Monte. A climax that they often don’t foresee.

Anyway, this is a bit of a ramble – I just wanted to bring a couple of points to the attention of those who are new to magic! Namely – not to tell the spectators what is about to happen. Marc didn’t tell us that he was going to swap the cards. He just said that he would try and find the cards. I do a book test where I flick the pages of a book, and get the spectators to say stop. They then look at a word, the book is closed and put to one side. Only then do I tell them to concentrate on the word and I’ll start to write letters that I can ‘see’ in their mind. If I had said – “right here is a book test. I am going to get you to select a word and I am going to try and guess it” before I even hand them the book – then I feel that the spectators and subject would become suspicious of everything and watch me like a hawk to see if I stop on a key page, or get a glimpse, or look to see if the book is gimmicked.

Anyway, let me know what you think if you have any thoughts!

Cheers,

Hi,

You've hit on a really important aspect of presentation; this is why practising routines and patter is critical to the final effect. If you don't mind I'd like to expand a little on your points. The techniques for misinformation I can think of are:

No Preconditioning: The first point you've made is about not preconditioning the audience to what is about to occur. This of course is to stop them from getting ahead of you. It is also the reason that you shouldn't perform the same effect more than once unless you have an alternative method. Even in these circumstances, I prefer to do it as a form of method cancelling.

Postconditioning: This is a form of time misdirection. Spectators will not grasp the order of the effect, especially if you have applied technique 1. As a result you can reorder the actions to fit a more impressive illusion. For example, before the point of revelation you state that you started by having the cards shuffled, even though this was not the first action that occurred. You are in essence rewriting history.... This can be extremely powerful.

As you can tell I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff. Misinformation is a fantastic term for this form of spectator management. Whats really interesting is that the information you convey can be as much about what you don't say as about what you do say. Thanks for your post, you've kicked off a whole line of thinking.