Mailbag #91

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Curious to hear your thoughts on this:

Feels like your wheelhouse-ish. —MJ

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I’m really interested in Chris Rawlin’s new effect Predictable. […]

Were you a part of this release? I assume so. But I don’t want to support it if he didn’t get your okay first. —NL

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Another one for the “Jerx Did It First” list. I’m sure you’re hearing this a lot but Chris Rawlins has ripped off your trick and produced it as a stand alone item. […] I do your version all the time and this feels like a step backwards to me. (Sorry if you were involved in this or if you’re actually Chris Rawlins.) —EV

These are representative of a bunch of emails I received over the break. Emails that fell into one of three categories:

  1. “This looks like something you would like.”

  2. “Are you involved with this release?”

  3. “You got ripped off.”

In my most recent book which came out in 2022, I had a trick called, “Kill 100 Strangers or Kill 1 Loved One.” The trick reframed Out of This World as a demonstration not of the spectator’s ability to separate red and black cards but of your ability to anticipate or know your spectator’s preferences through a series of either/or questions.

So to answer these questions:

  1. Yes, it does look like something I’d like.

  2. No, I wasn’t involved with the release.

  3. No, I don’t think it’s a rip-off. Chris emailed me after the last book came out to tell me he had a similar idea in the works and showed me some of his early prototypes. And I told him at the time I had no issue with him moving forward with the idea.

While the tricks are quite similar in the story that they tell, his is different enough in prop and method that even if he had come to me saying he was directly inspired to produce this after reading my effect, I still wouldn’t have had an issue with it. So I certainly have no problem with anyone supporting this release and I’m sure I’ll get one myself

I bought the Chronoforce app last week[…]

primarily because I liked the idea of having a Lotto Prediction trick that I could have on me at all times.

However, the first two times I performed the trick (which were also the ONLY two times I performed the trick) they guessed the method. Once was for a group of people at work and another time for people in my church group.

What do you think of this app? Is there a way to disguise it better do you think? —BP

I am very intrigued by this app. I’ll definitely be picking it up and trying out some ideas I have with it (which, if they work out, I’ll include in a future newsletter).

I can sort of see why the lotto prediction effect could be a bit transparent to some audiences for the following reasons:

  1. There is a disconnect between their actions and the “chosen” numbers. They’re tapping the screen and then seeing a number in the milliseconds place. This is not going to give the same level of conviction as a lotto routine where they are openly choosing numbers themselves. It’s even less conviction than if they were rolling dice to get a number or pulling ping-pong balls. Because at least those actions are in the physical world. So some spectators are going to inherently “feel” this disconnect.

  2. You’re repeating that same thing (“stop the stopwatch and we’ll look at the numbers in the millisecond position”) multiple times. And when you do anything multiple times, you magnify the weaknesses. Here you’re magnifying the fact that the stopwatch itself is doing a lot of the heavy lifting insofar as picking these “random” numbers goes. You’re focusing more attention on that than you would be if you only used it once.

  3. You’re performing for groups. I don’t think this lotto prediction is a great trick for a group of people. The secret to the trick (that the stopwatch is doing the work) is not a secret that you can really disguise via the strength of your performance. The stopwatch is clearly essential to the effect. So you’re really just hoping that the concept of “trick stopwatch” doesn’t occur to them. But let’s say 10% of people come to that conclusion. When performed one-on-one, you have a 90% success rate. But when performed for a group of six people, the likelihood that at least one of them has this idea is about 50%. And that one person will possibly (perhaps likely) spoil it for the rest of the group. So your 90% success rate one-on-one becomes a 50% success rate when performed for a group.

Again, I’m not saying it’s a bad app. I think it looks great and I plan on testing out some ideas with it. I’m just pointing out some of the potential weaknesses of the lotto prediction effect.

I think those particular issues are more specific to this usage of the app (the lotto prediction) than other tricks you could do with it that place less of a repeated focus on the app. So I would steer towards the effects with this that didn’t use the same feature over and over. And I would be more likely to use the feature that allows all the digits to add up to the force number, rather than just the numbers in the milliseconds place. Then at least they know that a direct result of their choice (“I intentionally stopped at 13 seconds”) is playing a part in final number. That would be less transparent, in my opinion.