A Hoy Book Test Tweak

I have five people in my life who I regularly test magic tricks on. Meaning, I’ll show them a trick with very little presentation, and then pick their brain about how it might be done in order to road-test the method.

These are people I would never perform for otherwise. They’re just so focused on method and not being fooled that there’s no point trying to show them anything more interesting or immersive. Are you surprised to hear they’re all men?

While I think their attitude towards magic is a little corny, I find it’s useful to have people like this in your life. This way I can test out tricks or ideas without having to burn them on someone whose reaction matters.

Here’s a tweak to the Hoy Book Test procedure that I tested on them recently.

After they say “stop” while I’m flipping through the pages of the second book, I say:

“Okay, one more choice. I can stay on this exact page, flip one page forward, or go one page back. What do you want?”

The reason I wanted to add this was because I thought it would add an extra element of choice to the page selection, which I felt was missing. Yes, they sort of “choose” where to say stop—but I don’t think that really feels like a “selection” on their part. Here they have a distinct choice. Of course, we know their choice doesn’t matter, but it feels like it should matter.

But I wasn’t sure it was a great idea. By slowing down here, am I just spotlighting a moment that’s better glossed over? Giving them a chance to think, “Hang on—I never actually saw that page number. He could’ve just been lying.”

So over the past few months I’ve been testing it out—including through my gauntlet of the five trick dissectors I mentioned earlier—and I’ve come to the conclusion that it does add to the impossibility and doesn’t draw attention to the force as I worried it might. As I broke down the effect with these guys and they tried to work out the method, two of the five actually mentioned that moment as a reason it couldn’t be one of the methods they were considering. As in, “If you somehow knew the page you’d stop on… wait, but you let me choose to go forward or backward from there.”

I just don’t think it occurs to people that you would make a big deal about what page exactly you were going to have them use… if your intention the whole time was to lie about the page number.

So from my personal testing, I think this is a tweak worth adding. Yes, in the trick’s reality, you knowing the word they’re thinking of from page 113 shouldn’t be any more impressive than you knowing the word they’re thinking of from page 111. It’s all technically the same trick. The benefit is just adding a distinct choice into the process, which I think helps trip them up if they try and unravel it in their mind.