Blind vs. Open Selections
/There are two recent releases I’ve really been enjoying performing, but I still haven’t found a way to push the reactions to the next level. I’m getting reactions in the 7 range, when I think the impossibility of these effects deserves something closer to a 9 or 10.
The first is Six Pro by Lloyd Barnes.
The other is Blox by David Jonathan.
[Note: For those unfamiliar with these tricks who can’t watch the videos right now, Six Pro is a lottery prediction effect where the spectator randomly selects numbers on a lottery website, and those numbers match a preprinted lottery ticket. Blox is a LEGO figure prediction where the spectator stops a website that randomly cycles through different heads, torsos, and legs, and the resulting figure matches a prediction made by the magician.]
I’m performing both pretty much as they’re explained in the instructions, so maybe I’m missing some element that could elevate the effects.
Any thoughts? —TD
I think you’re dealing with two strong effects that have pretty much the same two weaknesses.
The first is the involvement of the phone. Having the phone handle the selection process is going to put a ceiling on the reactions you can get. The non-tactile, non-physical nature of the selection is an inherent weakness of these types of effects. But it’s also a difficult one to get around. You’re not going to carry around a ping-pong ball hopper to generate lottery numbers or a box of LEGO pieces to assemble a random LEGO figure. The phone makes all of that incredibly convenient. But you're trading some of the impact of the trick for that convenience.
For the second weakness, I need to bring you back to something I wanted to tell you seven years ago.
From my post on August 28, 2019
So imagine this. I have a bag and in the bag are 100 slips of paper. On each piece of paper is a different animal. You pull out a slip of paper and it says, “Tiger.” I reveal my prediction and it reads, “Tiger.”
Okay, next scenario. There are 100 animal names on a list in front of you. I ask you to name any animal you see there. You say, “Tiger.” I open my prediction and it reads, “Tiger.”
Which is stronger?
I think most of us would agree that the second version is stronger, where the spectator is making a free (open) choice rather than the first one where the spectator is making a random (blind) selection.
Now let’s change the second scenario. Now they’re making a free choice between just two animals. Is that still more impressive than the random selection of 1 in 100 animals? Probably not.
So let’s start with that premise…
1 in 100 free choice vs 1 in 100 random selection
Free choice is more impressive.
1 in 2 free choice vs 1 in 100 random selection
Random selection is more impressive.
The question is, when do these cross over? How many objects need to be in play before the free choice is as impressive as the random selection? 50? 25? Even less?
We’ve been focus group testing this in multiple sessions all year and the results will be in the October X-Communication newsletter.
Now would be the point where I’d like to look back at what I wrote in that newsletter about the results of our testing on blind vs. open selections. And I would do that, except I just went back to find the article and discovered one small problem: I never wrote it.
Apparently, I’d intended to write it when I made that post, but then a month or two went by, and I forgot to write it for that newsletter. And looking back, I just always assumed I did because I’d written it half a dozen times in my mind while we were doing the testing.
Somewhere in the world, there’s a hard copy of the results from that testing, including feedback from the people who participated. But at this point, I have no idea where it is. And the people I reached out to who likely helped conduct those tests don’t know either.
Maybe I should be embarrassed by this. But I’ve convinced myself that part of the charm of this site—and my published work in general—is that you’re following along with an actual human being pursuing whatever happens to interest him at the moment, rather than someone working from a carefully planned editorial calendar. So the fact that I managed to forget to publish an entire article and not notice for seven years isn’t really a failure on my part. It's proof that I'm delivering exactly the kind of experience I want this site to provide. That’s what I’m going with.
But I do remember this: The impact of an open selection on the perceived impossibility of a trick was far greater than any of us expected, across every type of trick we tested.
Once an open selection reached somewhere around 15 or 20 options, it didn't seem to matter how many possibilities a blind selection had. None of them could beat the perceived impossibility of that relatively small free selection.
For example, if I had you freely select one of 20 names displayed in front of you, that would seem just as impossible as having you blindly select one of hundreds of names written on folded slips of paper.
Now, let’s look again at the two effects mentioned in the original question.
In Six Pro, you aren’t predicting someone’s consciously chosen lottery numbers. You’re predicting the random numbers they happen to poke out on the phone. I don’t currently own this, but it looks like Lloyd has built in some strong deceptions to help overcome that weakness, and it’s hard for me to imagine a much more impossible lottery prediction that uses a single, ungimmicked prediction that’s isolated from the start.
But even so, the reactions you can get are still going to be limited by the fact that you’re predicting blind, random selections rather than open, free choices.
The selection process in Blox feels even less like something the spectator has any control over. Essentially, it’s like telling someone to pull the arm on a slot machine and then saying, “Okay, you selected Lemon, Cherry, Watermelon.” No, they didn't. They pulled a lever. So predicting that outcome wouldn’t have much impact.
The strength of Blox is the novelty of the effect, not the selection procedure. No magician would bother doing the trick if it were a website where you “randomly” stopped on three characteristics of a playing card: color, suit, and value. And then you showed that you’d predicted the card. It’s the LEGO guy that makes it worthwhile.
You could always try adding other deceptive elements, such as having multiple people create LEGO figures and then using some kind of force to select the person who created the figure that matches your prediction. That could be a fun way to involve more people while further disguising the method.
But ultimately, this is just an inherent weakness of these types of effects. People will say, “Predictions just scream ‘force.’” Maybe. But I think that’s primarily true when you’re dealing with blind selections.
There are techniques you can use to make blind selections feel more open, and I’ll share some of those in the future (seven years from now, probably). But the important thing is to recognize the difference between blind and open selections so you can have a mix of both in your repertoire.
And keep in mind that a 7 out of 10 reaction isn’t a waste of anyone’s time. That’s still good! Don’t get caught up in judging a trick against some nonexistent ideal. “I want to do a trick where they hold a lottery ticket from the beginning, and it matches their freely named lottery numbers, and there’s no electronics or secret printers.” Well, that’s not a thing.
Strive to make the 7 effect as enjoyable as possible rather than lamenting the fact that it isn’t some mythical 10.