Jerxian Trick Shots

Look, no one is more disgusted than I am that I’m using the adjective “jerxian.” I just don’t quite know another way to succinctly describe something that is reminiscent of the ideas on this blog (other than “brilliant,” I mean).

Madison H., sent along this email recently…

I was on Facebook this morning and saw a video that I think does a good job of demonstrating your style outside of a magic context. 

It’s a guy who is acting like he’s cursed to nail every basketball shot he takes. 

Clearly, we all know it’s fiction, but he plays it as real. Clearly he doesn’t want us to REALLY believe in the fiction, but it doesn’t take a *wink wink* or *nudge nudge* for the audience to understand that he’s only saying that to make it entertaining. It’s impressive the shots he’s making, but it’s much more intriguing to watch than other “trick shot” videos because there’s a narrative of trying to miss woven in. This narrative allows him to get creative with his shots and do things that would never be considered the “normal” way to shoot a basketball, but we don’t bat an eye at it because it fits into the narrative.

I love that video. It’s genuinely both amazing and funny. I don’t know if he was the first person to hit on this framing for a trick-shot video, but it’s genius.

As a trick-shot artist he’s fairly limited in the number of contexts in which he can present his shots. In magic we have so many potential contexts for a trick but we so often limit it to, “I have this skill/power and now I’m gong to demonstrate it.” It’s funny to see someone shy away from that framing even when he’s legitimately demonstrating a skill.

---

I think I mentioned in a post or newsletter recently that I’ve been doing a long-form (month’s long) performance piece with a friend of mine where I can’t lose any game I play. This started with variations on the 10-Card Poker Deal but has evolved into all sorts of games where I can control the outcome. Instead of presenting this as, “I have magical powers that allow me to win any game I play,” I present it like I’m so bothered by the fact that I never lose anymore.

It’s like that Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place To Visit” where the guy “wins” at everything he tries and therefore can take no pleasure at anything he attempts anymore.

This is a great way to “batch” together a number of similar effects to create one ongoing story-line.

---

Many years ago I wrote a presentation for Paul Harris’ trick The Perfectionist (#4 in this post), where I talk about being cursed by an old gypsy woman to not be able to shuffle cards. This was some of my earliest writing about presentation.

I remember an email I got afterwards from a guy who wrote me and said he wasn’t a fan of that presentation because it was “too theatrical.”

But it’s not. It’s only as theatrical as you make it. You can tell such a story and play it up, or you can play it very low key. That’s up to you.

The bizarre thing to me is that a couple months later this same guy posted a video of a coin trick where he said, “The leader coin calls the other coins to join it. So whatever hand it’s in, the other coins will follow.”

It blows my mind how comfortable magicians are with bland patter like this. Like, they’re going to make up a story… and then they choose a totally boring one? What is that instinct? I think it might be that a lot of the standard, corny, meaningless magician’s patter doesn’t require the performer to actually invest any bit of themself into the performance. The patter is just dead on arrival. It’s completely perfunctory. It’s like the dialogue in a porno movie. Magicians just want to “get to the good stuff.”

But what real people enjoy most with social magic is the presentation. Don’t waste it. Do what the trick-shot kid does and embrace it. The more fun you have with the presentation, the more fun the people watching will have.

Mailbag: Thinking Like A Magician

If I had read your thoughts on Pro Caps before today [Sunday] it would have saved me $40 and some embarrassment. I got my Pro Caps on Friday and tried them out last night at a bonfire dinner we have in our neighborhood.

[…]

I did end up getting called out twice on the caps in the four times I performed it. I knew they wouldn’t pass inspection or anything like that and I knew they didn’t exactly match a normal bottle cap, but that seemed to be thinking like a magician. I wouldn’t say it was magician’s guilt because I hadn’t read your post yet so I was highly confident going into the night. My last performance of the trick got the strongest reaction of the night but afterwards I almost knocked the gimmick off the table and my neighbor’s aunt said, “Oops. Don’t lose your special cap.” I was very tempted to toss it in the fire and say “Oh there’s nothing special about it.” But I chickened out at the end.

It would be good if you could partner up with Murphy’s or whomever and you could get effects pre-release to give your comments to us. You’re one of the few voices in magic that I trust to give an honest opinion. —JS

I appreciate the thought, but you may be confused about how magic marketing/promotion works if you think Murphy’s would want to partner up with me because I would give an “honest” opinion about things…that’s not what they’re looking for.

I don’t really have any more thoughts on Pro Caps. I don’t own a set and don’t see myself getting one. Hopefully the people who pick it up end up enjoying it. That’s pretty much my only thought on it at this point.

But I do want to dive into something you mentioned in your email: Thinking Like A Magician.

In the magic world we’re frequently being told, “Don’t think like a magician.”

Do these bottle caps look a little off? Maybe. But only a magician would notice that. You have to stop thinking like a magician.

Is this a big, bulky weird looking wallet unlike anything anyone carries in the real world? Don’t worry about it. Stop thinking like a magician.

You’re worried that the deck can’t be examined after the color change? That’s “magician’s guilt.” Stop thinking like a magician.

I have important information for all of you. As someone who has been involved with more testing of magic tricks than any human who has ever lived on the planet, there is no such thing as “thinking like a magician.” You’re not concerned about the bottle cap looking not-quite-right because you’re thinking like a magician. It’s because you’re thinking like someone with a couple functioning brain cells.

In the early testing days, we looked at the Ambitious Card to see what spectator’s ideas were in regards to how the trick was done.

The vast majority of the time, they suggested the possibility of some kind of trick deck.

Maybe it’s our performance, we thought. So we showed people Bill Malone, Doc Eason, Tommy Wonder and others performing the Ambitious Card. It didn’t matter who the audience was. It didn’t matter which performer they saw. “Trick cards” or “Trick deck” was always one of the top guessed methods.

We would soon learn that unless you controlled for it in some way, audiences almost always assumed a “trick” something was involved. A pen went through a bill? Trick pen. Coins jumped from hand to hand? Trick coins. One sponge ball became two? Well, it must be some kind of trick sponge ball that pulls apart, of course!

Questioning how much an audience will accept the normalcy of an object used in an effect is not “thinking like a magician.” In fact, it suggests a foundational understanding of how laymen think.

Any props that play a primary role in your effect will be questioned. You can get around this by using borrowed objects, examinable objects, and switches to make it feel like everything is normal. But you can’t get around it with wishful thinking.

How important this is to you may be something that comes down to the professional/amateur divide as well. If you’re a professional magician (or are performing in a professional style) people expect you to have your magic props with you. Do they probably know there’s something funky about your bottle caps? Yes. People don’t just carry bottle caps with them. In the same way they probably know there’s something funky about the box Copperfield put the girl in on stage. They allow for that in the professional performance because a professional performance is all artifice. Is the bottle cap fake? Sure. And the joke the magician just made was something he’s said 1000 times before. It’s all fake.

Social magic is less forgiving in that way. The whole goal of it is that the magic moment feels like part of a casual interaction. “Normal” objects have to really ring true as normal objects. What you say shouldn’t feel scripted. The moment should seem unrehearsed.

For the social magician, you can’t underestimate your audience’s suspicions. You need to anticipate them and adjust for them.

You might hope, “If I’m a great enough magician, that will get them not to question the objects I use.” But you have it backwards. You can’t get people to see you as a “great magician” until they get past their innate suspicions about the objects you use.

Max Maven

I was sad to hear about the passing of Max Maven earlier this week. Max was a fixture in magic since before I learned my first double-lift.

While I don’t believe he followed this site at all (if he ever read it, I’m sure he would have called it something like, “A thing of terrifying stupidity”), he was someone I would reach out to from time to time when I needed a credit or history on something magic-related. It was amazing how much he knew about, and how generous he was with sharing that knowledge.

Here is a typical exchange of ours where he went above and beyond to answer a question for me.

He’ll be missed.

Today I’m going to repost something I wrote about Max back in 2016. It started with a video that was sent to me of Max screwing up a trick on television. But it’s how he handled it that I found funny and informative. I did ask Max once exactly what went wrong in the clip below, but he didn’t have a real answer beyond “I fucked up.” So let’s again watch how Max handles a fuck-up.

The Contents of the Empty Purse

I was sent a video of Max Maven performing on television in Taiwan by someone who wants to remain anonymous. Apparently there is a bit of a cult following surrounding this video, and I can understand why. First, the Taiwanese people are a trip. Their reactions to things -- even things that aren't magical in the slightest -- are fantastic. I'm not quite smart enough to understand the relationship between Taiwan and China, but there definitely seems to be a noticeable difference in the spirit of the two countries. Perhaps I'm just being overly influenced by Western views of the Chinese government which is often seen as oppressively cruel and brutally Orwellian. Which is in distinct contrast with the Taiwanese magic audience which is aggressively cool and practically L&L'ian

I went a long way for that one. I'm going to enjoy it for a moment.

Okay, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to talk about screwing up. Let's watch Max screw up (part of) a trick and see what we can learn from it. (I've cued it up to the start of the trick for you.)

Let's take a real detailed look at this web of bullshit that Max weaves.

Maven: At this moment... this purse is empty. I know this purse is empty. Can you open that purse please? Is it empty?

Woman: No, it’s not empty.

Maven: Because inside is one piece of evidence. But do you know why it feels empty? Because nobody knows what’s inside. Only you do, right? So for everyone else and for me also, it’s nothing. It’s a mystery.

Seriously, that is an amazing pivot by Max. His original statement was about whether a piece of paper was in the purse, and when that didn't work out he turned it into a proclamation on the nature of existence and the persistence of object permanence and some type of Schrodinger's Doodle or something.

And at worst it comes across as a hiccup, but nothing much more than that. He just keeps rolling. There isn't time for the audience to really consider if he screwed up or not. 

This should be empowering to you. Your fear of screwing up is directly related to the derision you feel you might incur from it. But the truth is, everyone is taking their cues from you to see how much your mistake should matter, and no one will care about your screw-up any more than you care about it. (This is as much a life lesson as it is a magic lesson.)

How to Bed Women With Magic

It was announced that Sam Raimi is going to remake the 1976 classic (in my opinion) film, Magic.

The original starred Anthony Hopkins, who was supposed to be this brilliant ventriloquist and magician. Yet this is what his French drop looked like.

He goes on to seduce Ann Margret with a Do as I Do routine. I’m not kidding. For you younger readers (and you don’t have to be that young—she was before my time too) this is Ann Margret.

She’s an all-time, easy 10 out of 10.

And here’s Anthony Hopkins.

Like you, he’s a generous 4.

And yes, he really beds Ann-Margret’s character by doing a Do as I Do routine.

Not something that looks like a Do as I Do routine. He’s doing the actual beginner’s book method for a Do as I Do routine with a key card and all of that.

I’m going to go through this scene and tell you what he’s doing that makes it believable that he could seduce one of cinema’s hottest women with one of the simplest card tricks there is.

Now, to be clear, Hopkins’ character is fucking insane in this movie. And in this scene as well. You shouldn’t really take things as far as he does in this scene. You shouldn’t be trying to manipulate people into having sex with you with something Mac King taught you after a commercial break on World’s Greatest Magic.

But you can still take some of the techniques he’s using here to give tricks more weight and resonance. These are things I’ve written about on this site frequently.

Here is that part of the movie. The clip is 9:30 long. There’s some set-up to the trick. Then there’s the performance of the trick. Then the clip of him balling her brains out. If you’re unfamiliar with this movie/scene, it’s legitimately worth your time to give it a watch.

1:00-1:50 - Techniques: Hook & Cast - Long before the two of them are ever seated at the table, Hopkins sets a Hook for the trick by talking about his mentor Merlin and his wife. Merlin and his wife used to do fake telepathy with cards. But as she was dying they tried it for real, and Merlin was able to read her mind.

I often write about expanding magic beyond the limits of the trick itself. That’s what he’s doing here. He’s giving the trick a history. The “story” of the effect exists outside of the few minutes the trick takes place.

I’ve also written (more in my books than on the site) about creating a “Cast” of people to populate the fiction of the trick. That too is what he’s doing with Merlin and his wife.

1:50-4:30 - Technique: Buy-In - Here he performs the trick for the first time and it fails. Asking someone to take the time to watch you do an effect and have it not work is something many magicians aren’t comfortable with, but it’s very powerful

I frequently like to incorporate some element of failure into my presentation for a trick. (See November 2019 for a series of posts on this.) Not because it makes the trick seem “more real” but because it confuses people into just exactly how the thing they’re seeing is fake. For example, if I do the movements of a coin vanish but without vanishing the coin and I’m like, “Can you see it?” You say you can. That’s a failure, so I’m frustrated. I try it again and this time I actually vanish the coin. “How about now?” I ask. Now the coin is really gone, but I act as if I don’t know if you can see it or not. This makes you less likely to think I ditched the coin somewhere. Because if that’s all the deception was, why would I have thought it worked the first time when the coin was clearly visible? “Failure” is a red-herring clue to methodology that spectators are usually not prepared to handle.

There’s other Buy-In elements here as well…

• Hopkins’ character is yelling at her to take it seriously. You don’t want to genuinely berate someone like this. But asking someone to buy into the effect by changing their attitude is a powerful technique.

• He also utilizes time so well here. In the second go-around of the trick it takes him 50 seconds to tell her what her card is, even though we know that he knows it immediately. Rushing your magic is the death of suspense and mystery, but it’s also something that 95+% of magicians do. Slow down.

7:20-7:40 - Technique: Reps - What does he do when he gets her card right? Does he say, “Ta-daa”? Does he make a joke? No, he slumps in his chair and mumbles to himself, “I didn’t fail. I didn’t fail.”

The idea of Reps is to blur the ending of an effect. What might you do afterwards if you had really just done what you pretended to do? Would you excitedly call your mentor to let her know the trick worked? Would you take an aspirin because your head was aching? Or would you slump in your chair and mutter, “I didn’t fail,” because you’re a sad-sack, piece-of-shit who nothing goes right for?

Any of these things will give the effect more resonance than just moving on to another trick or making a joke.

---

Now, here’s the part where I have to fucking spell shit out for the people who will inevitably write me because they’re misinterpreting this post.

The title of this post, “How to Bed Women With Magic,” is a joke about the clip I’m using. Not actual advice.

I don’t think you should scream at your spectators.

I don’t think you should manipulate them into fucking you while your ventriloquist dummy simmers in the other room.

I do think it’s okay to sometimes “blame” the spectator for something not working, if your goal is to get them to engage more deeply with the experience. (Not if your goal is—as I said—to stick your dick in them.)

The purpose of this post is not to get you laid. It’s to give an example of the power or some of the extra-presentational techniques I’ve written about, and how they can be used to make some of the simplest tricks feel un-trivial. Too often magic feels like a throwaway thing. And you can’t get around that with stronger tricks or faster tricks or more jokes (these are techniques most often used by magicians when they’re worried about how their tricks are going over).

But you can generate less trivial interactions by making the experience of the trick more engaging, which is what these techniques do. The “magic” demonstrated in the clip above is not that these techniques will allow you to bang Ann Margret. It’s that these techniques can be used to make one of the first tricks you learned interesting enough that it was presented in five-minutes of real time in a major motion picture.

Mailbag: Uncanny Valley Props

Have you seen Lloyd Barnes new release, ProCaps? It’s like the old nickels to dimes but done with soda bottle caps.

Am I crazy in thinking this is a step backwards? —JR

I don’t know too much about this other than what I can see in that demo. I haven’t followed any of the pre-release talk on this, so my assumptions might be a little off.

Let me start by saying that I love the instinct behind this. Taking a weird magic prop and turning it into something that looks like an everyday object is almost always a good idea.

But here’s the thing. If your goal is to make a magic prop look like an everyday object, you have to nail it. You can’t get most of the way there. A bottle cap that looks 92% like a normal bottle cap is an 8% odd looking bottle cap.

And a 8% odd-looking bottle cap is a 100% odd bottle cap.

If you came home and your wife was 8% different from what she normally was, you wouldn’t think your wife was a “little off.” You’d think something was completely wrong with her.

Sadly, they weren’t able to nail the look of these caps. It’s what I call an “uncanny valley” prop. It looks almost right. But the small differences are actually what make it stand out so much for a lay audience.

An unbranded cap with the recycling logo on it is something I’ve never seen in my area. More importantly, the inside looks pretty questionable after the cap has picked up the shell.

“Okay, Andy, but certainly it’s better to have something that looks ALMOST like a normal object than something that looks unlike anything anyone has seen before.”

No.

Look, the old style brass caps were an oddity. But they were an oddity that could be examined. And if your presentation contextualizes that oddity, then you have something that isn’t inherently questionable.

For example, imagine we’re sitting at a table in a cafe. I’m looking through my bag for something and I say, “Oh, check this out.” And I toss a brass cap out on the table. “I bet you haven’t seen anything like that before.”

“Hmm… I don’t think so,” you say.

“I can’t remember if I told you I was doing some consulting for Chase Bank. You know how you can deposit checks online now? They’re working on something like that for cash. We’re in the earliest testing phase at the moment. We’re only working with coins for liability sake. We don’t want to be losing 1000s of dollars if something goes wrong. But it’s kind of cool.”

I fiddle around on my phone for a bit.

“Okay, so I have $500 in my checking account.” I show you my screen with $500 listed in the account.

“Now, let’s see,” I dig around in my pockets for some change. “We’ll use a few nickels I guess.”

I stack four nickels on the table and cover them with the brass cap. Then I place my phone on top of the cap.

“It just takes a few seconds when you’re using such a small amount of money.”

After a few second I pick up my phone and look at my account. I show you the screen and it now has $500.20 in the account.

“And the cash itself just goes to the bank.” I gesture to the brass cap on the table. You turn it over and the coins are gone.

“They’re still a couple years away from creating the adapter for bills and mass distributing these. But it’s fun to play around with. I’ve been sending all my pocket change to my bank account just for the hell of it.”

Now, that’s a version of the trick using the classic gimmick and a couple screenshots of your checking account.

If you’re a friend of mine and know me well, you’ll probably understand that this is just some fun nonsense.

There’s a chance—especially if you don’t know me too well (and you’re not super bright)—that you think it’s maybe possible.

But what you’re absolutely not thinking is, “That’s bullshit. That’s not what a brass coin deposit adapter for cell phones looks like.” Because it’s just a made-up thing. You have nothing to compare it to.

But if instead I use something that’s supposed to be something you’re familiar, and it doesn’t quite look like that, that’s all you’ll think about. You won’t think, “Ah, perfectly ordinary bottle caps.” You’ll think, “Those are weird bottle caps. Oh, and you just happen to be able to do something magical with them?”

Yes, you can still fool and entertain people with these. But a good portion of the audience who sees this will realize that they’re being fooled by your special fake-o bottle caps. The caps aren’t ancillary to the effect. They’re a primary focus. If they weren’t important, you’d just cover the coins with your hands. You wouldn’t be carrying around bottle caps with you.

That’s the other thing. You have these two bottle caps that don’t really look like anything else nearby. So… you’re just carrying around bottle caps with you? Is that the look you’re going for?

Using the “weird” brass cap may not be the ideal solution, but to me it’s the better option than a not-quite-normal looking cap that can’t be examined.

Here is the hierarchy of magic props as I see it.

1. Normal, borrowed objects.

2. Apparently normal objects that can be examined.

3. Unusual objects that can be examined. (You can use a story to justify its existence.)

4. Apparently normal objects that can’t be examined.

5. Unusual objects that can’t be examined.

6. Normal-ish objects that don’t quite ring 100% true to the audience and can’t be examined.

It looks to me like ProCaps falls into that final category. (I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.)

The thing is, it’s really hard to put time and money into manufacturing a prop that maybe falls a little short of your expectations and then just give up on it. So I can understand why this is being pushed, even though it’s maybe not what the people behind it hoped it would be originally. Would they have bothered manufacturing this if they knew the best they could get was a cap that looked like something was nested inside of it? Probably not.

That being said, I’m sure Lloyd, Murphy’s and Craig Petty have done their best to come up with routines that de-emphasize the caps and draw people’s attention elsewhere. I’m just not sure that’s what I want with this particular gimmick. The beauty of the original is that people could focus all their attention on the cap and coins and were left able to freely examine everything.

Happy Halloween! - Posting Will Restart Nov. 2nd

I have to delay new posting until the 2nd. We’ll go a day later in the month to make up for it.

If you ordered a deck in the charity deck sale it will be going out in the next few days (it took longer than expected for the shipping supplies to get to me).

See you soon!

Charity Deck Sale - Update: All Gone

[Update: These are all gone. If you missed out and you’re desperate to get your hands on one of these for some reason, let me know. Once everything gets sent out I’ll know if there’s an extra of any given deck hanging around and I can set you up with that.

Thanks to everyone who purchased a deck or decks.]

This is the final post of October. New posts will return on November 1st. That same day the next issue of the Love Letters monthly will be in subscriber’s emails. If you’re a subscriber at the family tier and have an ad for the next issue, try to get it to me by the 25th or so.

---

I’ve decided to get rid of the extra decks I have from previous support years. I haven’t really known what to do with these in the past. The decks were a reward for people who supported at a mid-level tier that was $60 more than the tier below. So those people paid, essentially, $60 for the deck.

Now, one thing I won’t do is sell something at a discount to get rid of it. I’d rather just toss it out. I don’t like screwing over people who supported the site early on by offering stuff for cheaper later on. I realize that’s how things are done. But I still find it to be a bummer when it happens to me, so I don’t want to do that to others.

That being said, I don’t just want to sell these decks for $60 either. These were intended to be bonuses for supporters at the time. Not some way to make money later on.

So now the decks are being made available for $60 each, but proceeds will be split between two charities: Save the Children (the highest rated children’s charity I could find) and a local food bank near me (because I want to do something for my specific area as well).

There are links to purchase the decks below along with a brief description of each deck.

I will ship the decks early next month. So you will have the perfect gift to show your wife how loved she is, well in time for Christmas.

Jerx Deck #1

This was the deck that was included with the very first book I released. Features custom jokers and Ace of Spades.

This deck was printed by Expert Playing Card Company.

Jerx Deck #2: Squishers

Based on the Bulldog Squeezers back design.

This deck also includes a fake advertising card that’s used for a reveal in a trick of mine called Shitshow. I’ll include a pdf with instructions for that trick with any orders for this deck.

Jerx Deck #3 - Fannies

This is probably the dumbest idea for a Jerx deck, and hence, one of my favorites.

The idea started as a joke in this post, and became a reality a few years later.

Instead of red and black pips, this deck uses brown and pink pips which allow a new equivocal statement (as explained in the post above).

The back design continues the butt/vagina duality of the equivoque.

Jerx Deck #4 - Mushroom Sprites

The viral sensation. Millions of views on TikTok can now be yours.

The Goodfriends Greeting Company (a Christian greeting cards and other paper goods company based in the midwest U.S.) put out this deck in 1974. The card backs were intended to be delicate fairies dancing around the head of a mushroom. That’s… not what other people saw in the back. (It’s still unknown if the designer intended this.) The deck was pulled from the shelves weeks after its release. They sat in storage for decades until 2020 when the remaining decks were finally made available. Or so you tell people.

Jerx Deck #5 - Empoisonneurs

I wrote years ago about why it’s good to have a “bad marked deck.” My idea there is basically this… People already know about the concept of “marked decks,” but most people have never seen one. So if you show them a bad marked deck, but you just act as if it’s a normal marked deck. Then they will assume marked decks are much less useful than they really are.

It’s similar to the concept in magic where you talk about “palming” a card and openly expose a bad palm. If people assume palming involves a stiff, cramped hand, with part of the card peeking out, they’ll be less apt to think of palming when you use it later and your hand looks normal.

With the Empoisonneurs, I made a professionally printed “bad marked deck.”

As I write in the instructions for this marked deck, what makes it bad is:

1. It's labelled on the card case as a marked deck. ("The first thing you can do to check for a marked deck is look at the card case. By law all of them need to indicate it's a marked deck. So if you don't see that, you're probably safe.")

2. The markings are easy to spot.

3. But the markings require a lot of work to decode.

4. You need to see the full back of the card to know the markings.

5. The markings only work in one orientation of the card, and it's very difficult to know the orientation of the card.

If you purchase this deck, I’ll send you a pdf explaining the general ways of how I introduce it into an interaction with the people I perform for.

---

I’ll try to update this page if/when any of the decks sell out. It shouldn’t allow you to buy one if they’re sold out. But I’ll keep this page updated regardless. There aren’t a lot of any of these decks to go around. The only reason I have any extras is because I sometimes had to round up my order 15 or 20 units in order to get a price break when they were originally printed. So while I don’t think these will sell out immediately—like the books do—don’t wait too long if there’s one you want.

---

Enjoy the rest of the month! See you all back here on the first.