The Bubble: Part 1
/In the history of mankind, no one has been involved with asking more people to rate magic tricks on a scale of 1-10 than myself. “Who are you trying to impress with that?” you might ask. No one. It’s not a boast, just a sad fact.
The focus group testing I helped start in NYC has been going on for almost 15 years now. In the early years it was super informal and sporadic. These days it’s just mostly informal and somewhat less sporadic since this site has been around to fund it more regularly.
One of the tricks we used to include somewhat frequently in a set of magic tricks when testing was an ace assembly. We’d use it as kind of a “palate cleanser.” It’s a solid trick. It’s fairly simple to follow. It’s generally more impressive than the type of card trick your uncle might do between bridge hands. But it’s also not so flashy or spectacular that it’s just inherently going to WOW people by its nature. We would perform the trick “unembellished,” meaning, without any sort presentational touches or patter besides the most basic sort of thing. “I’m going to put these four aces in the in four separate locations and put three cards on top of each,” yadda, yadda, yadda.
In the early years of testing, the ace assembly was often performed by my friend, Eric. The assembly he used was a fairly standard, beginner friendly version that involved an ATFUS style switch of the aces and no display of the aces after the initial lay-down sequence (since they were already in the lead packet at that point.)
In 2013, Eric left NYC and moved to LA for work. The testing went on and continued to evolve over the next six years. Then in 2019, Eric returned to NY and started helping out with the testing again. We again had him performing an unembellished ace assembly as a sort of “baseline” standard magic trick occasionally in our testing.
But this version of the trick was totally different. It used the McDonald’s Aces gimmicks and some handling which allowed for incredible visual disappearances (well, technically transformations) of aces that were just there, only to be found in the leader packet moments later. It was so much more impressive than the basic handling he used to do.
Last year we decided to test the “simple” version of the ace assembly against the more complex gimmicked version of the same trick. I was wondering… what if the audiences just ended up rating them the same? Wouldn’t that be interesting or funny or sad, if we spend our time and energy working on more impressive sleights and cleverer gimmicks, and—in the end—it has no real effect on how people rate a trick?
Or, even more interesting, what if the simplified version scored better? The counterintuitive results we occasionally get in testing are the ones that I’m most interested in because it means there is some detective work to do. We need to go back and determine where the disconnect is between what we expected and what we got.
However, in this case, the expected result is what we got. The more visual, difficult, and seemingly more “impossible” version did, in fact, score significantly higher when we asked people to rate the tricks on a scale of 1-10, where a 5 would be considered a fine, average trick and a ten would be as good as any magic trick they’d ever seen.
On that scale, the “simple” version of the ace assemble averaged a 5.8, and the more complex version averaged an 8.5. (Different groups rated each trick. It wasn’t the same group viewing both.)
That seems pretty straightforward. We also looked at two other tricks, again, presented with only the most basic presentation. We did a two card transposition effect and a Twisting the Aces effect. For both we had a simpler “easy-to-master” version up against a version that required more advanced card handling and offered stronger, more convincing visuals. And each time the more advanced version scored significantly higher (around 40% higher) than the simple version.
“So… you’re saying more deceptive effects that require gimmicks or more expert handling will be rated higher as tricks than simpler versions? Ok. Pretty sure we could have figured that out on our own. I think you’re running out of stuff to test.”
Ah! But this is where it gets interesting. Or should I say, tomorrow is where it gets interesting. Because that simple graph above doesn’t tell the whole story. Tomorrow we’ll look at it from a different perspective and it will become clear why this testing was the impetus for the material in the next book.