Dumb Tricks: Ascrabbological Sign

Sure, the trick might be dumb, but that name is…

This is an astrology sign reveal using Scrabble tiles. It’s more of a proof-of-concept idea than anything else. You could likely come up with something similar for another group of words, I just chose astrological signs because I was inspired by a reader who was doing something similar.

I don’t really do astrology sign reveals much. It wouldn’t make too much sense with the people I perform for.

“I’ve consulted my psychic powers, and I believe your astrological sign is… Virgo”

“No shit. We celebrated my birthday together just the other month.”

The way it would work is you would have a bunch of scrabble tiles in a bag and have the spectator shake the bag to mix them up. You’d dump some in their hand and tell them to keep any letters in their zodiac sign and put them in their pocket and to set the other letters aside face-down. You don’t see the letters they keep or discard at any point.

Then you do another round of this. After which you know their sign.

You need to deliver them a certain group of letters each round. You could do that with a force bag or change bag. It wouldn’t even need to have multiple chambers for each round. You could just have the second round’s letters in your pocket and set them up in the bag while the person is looking through the first round’s letters.

Or you could have the necessary letters finger-palmed and reach in and pretend to just grab a small handful of letters from the mixed bag.

Or you could do something like this, where the force letters are in your right fingers holding the top edge of the bag and you’re shaking the bag mixing the loose letters at the bottom of the bag. Then you grab the bag in a way that isolates the loose letters and drop the tiles from your right hand into the bag. They wouldn’t intermingle with the other letters due to the way your left hand would lock off that part of the bag. Then you apparently dump out a few random letters out of the bag. (Here my friend is demonstrating with coins, because he doesn’t have Scrabble.)

Either way, in the first round they get these letters: B, C, P, S, T, U

You don’t have to know what letters they keep, just how many letters they keep. You do this just by looking at how many they discard.

In round 2 they get these letters: B, I, M, O, P, V

In each round you can also include letters that don’t appear in any signs, like D,K,W,X,Y,Z.

By consulting this chart and seeing how many letters they kept each round, you’d know their sign

Now, does it make a lot of sense to do this with astrological signs? No, not really. Not if you don’t have a larger-scale premise for the whole interaction. But, as I said, I’m just using this as an example.

You could perhaps come up with a similar system to determine what word they’re thinking of from the top of this Scrabble box (you’d probably have to eliminate the 2-letter words).

I have to say that it was much more difficult coming up with the groupings of letters than I had anticipated. Every time you change one letter around, it potentially changes everything else as well.

If I was going to use this technique, what I would probably do is first come up with my two groupings of letters, then create my list of words (if they keep 0, 1, 2, or 3 letters in each round, that would give you 16 possible words total). And then I’d put those words onto a Scrabble board and take a picture of some friends around the board like they just finished a game. Then I’d have that picture in my house and I’d be able to use that as a Hook to go into the trick. “Hey, think of any word you see on that Scrabble board.” This way there would be some correlation between what they’re thinking of and the “tool” being used to divine their word.

If you end up doing anything interesting with this idea, let me know.