Re-Tweak: Sort of Psychic Part Two

More thoughts on John Bannon’s, Sort of Psychic.

I enjoyed your thoughts about Sort of Psychic -- especially because I completely skipped over the trick when I first watched the DVD. John is very clever (I loved his early books) but tbh, he's a rather dull performer. I'm curious to know what jumped out at you when you saw the trick, and more generally about your thought process when you read/watch new material. —DK

What stood out to me originally when I saw the trick was the simplicity and the straightforwardness of the effect. In essence you test the spectator’s ability to find which pile holds their card a few times. Then they’re able to cut to their card from a shuffled deck. It’s such a pure concept.

Compare that to a trick where…say… the spectator cuts off a small packet of cards. They count the cards secretly in their packet. Now you deal out 12 cards in the shape of a clock face. The spectator thinks of the card at the hour of the number of cards in their hand. Now the cards are assembled and dealt into three columns. The spectator answers three questions—they can lie or tell the truth—and their responses are spelled. At the end, the card they’re on is the card they thought of.

In the broadest of strokes, that trick is like Sort of Psychic; the card is somewhere in the deck and the spectator finds it. But the two processes are polar opposites. One is convoluted. One is pure.

When I read/watch new material, I’m generally not looking for a trick that I’m going to be able to take and pop right into my repertoire as is. There’s not many magicians creating the types of presentations that I enjoy performing.

What I get most excited about is a strong bland effect. Strong, because I want the trick to be fooling, of course. And bland because that means I can dress it up in numerous ways. I call these Blank Slate effects. I talked about them when I wrote this post on the Vanishing Inc blog.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion about “Sort of psychic” and love the idea of using acupuncture as the “cause” of the magic, that I might explore to use on other effects.

Personally, I’ve found, “Sort of psychic” plays well to a certain sort of crowd, but if you have a mathematician present they tend to pick up on part of the winnowing technique. Nothing wrong with that, but you might need to give the maths types a knowing smile. The sort that says "I know you know how this is done". They will get a kick out of feeling they know how its done.

I really have no desire to give people the kick of knowing how things are done (unless they’re playing a wingman role in the presentation).

I will agree that there are some tricks you don’t want to do around mathematically minded people. But this is actually not one of them. You can very much take math out of the equation with a couple more tweaks.

Here’s how.

The spectator is thinking of one of sixteen cards. Either you start this way as Bannon does, or you get to this point as I do in the original Tweak post from Sept. 4th.

You shuffle the cards and deal them into two piles (back and forth). They attempt to intuit where their card is.

After this round you assemble the cards and give them a real shuffle. Well, real enough. You give them a red/black shuffle (aka Ireland shuffle). Now you deal out two piles again.

They intuit. Again the packets are assembled and you give them another real shuffle. Pretty much real, at least. You actually run the top four cards singly and then shuffle off on top.

Deal two piles of 8 for a final round of intuition. Now all the cards are assembled and the full deck is shuffled for real (minus the control of two cards). And you finish as in Bannon’s original.

Notice how unmathematical the process is now. You’re shuffling the cards for real and dealing them in a standard manner throughout the effect. There’s clearly real mixing going on. There’s no questionable anti-faro. You’re just mixing the cards and dealing them into two piles in a way that is similar to what they’ve done themselves in numerous card games.

All the genuine mixing throughout the effect will take it out of the realm of a mathematical solution. Unless they are not only familiar with the underlying mathematics, but also the concept of a red/black shuffle, card controls, cross-cut forces, etc. There’s too much to untangle there. And keep in mind you’re never mentioning the number of cards. It’s just 1/3rd of the deck. Hell, you can use 15 cards if you want to throw them off a little. But it’s not necessary.

Add into that whatever presentational impetus/motivation you’re using for the effect, and you should have a pretty impenetrable effect, and not something that looks like a mathematical effect, regardless of the spectators familiarity with mathematics.

[Update: Some of the changes here (the addition of dealing and shuffling) are similar to ideas that John added to a rewrite of this trick that was published in MAGIC Magazine in August, 2016. Now, I could come here and say it was my own independent invention of these ideas—that they were semi-obvious improvements to be made to the original. But that’s not true. In fact, I totally fucking stole the ideas. I wanted the glory to be gained from mentioning some small tweaks to an old effect. And I wanted that glory to be all MINE, MINE, MINE! My apologies to John Bannon. Am I really sorry? No! I’m just sorry I got caught, you sons of bitches!]