Until April...
/This is the final post of March. Regular posting resumes Monday, April 6th.
The next issue of Keepers will come out on Sunday, April 5th.
Regarding the open prediction trick mentioned earlier this week (here and here). I have now received confirmation from someone in the know that this is complete horseshit.
My $20,000 offer and endorsement still stand though.
In fact, I’ll open the offer to anyone who wants to take me up on it. Create a trick that looks like that, and meets the requirements set forth in the advertisement:
1. Uses a borrowed, shuffled deck.
2. The deck is never touched by the magician.
3. The prediction is made verbally before the dealing begins.
4. Works 95%+ of the time.
5. Uses no dual reality or stooging and “if you were the participant, you would experience the effect exactly as you do while watching the video.”
And I will buy the rights to sell the first 200 copies of the effect off you for $20,000. After which the rights will revert to you .
This offer is completely genuine (as is any offer I make on this site).
I got a lot of positive feedback regarding Thursday's Zero Carry post. Thanks for those messages.
Ultimately this is just an extension of the most basic ideas I wrote about amateur/social magic years ago: that its power is directly correlated to how much it doesn't feel like a professional performance.
Carrying around unusual props and objects for the purpose of showing people magic tricks is what the professional performer does.
Or, as I put it five years ago…
"This is a general concept in amateur magic. When you're a professional, you bring your props to the show. When you're an amateur, you bring your show to the props."
First Banksy was identified. And then this guy gets “unmasked.’
Are you worried you’re next? —GM
Not really. First off, nobody really cares.
I'm not someone making millions of dollars anonymously, like Banksy.
And I’m not someone exposing magic tricks online because no one will pay attention to me otherwise.
So there’s not much incentive for people to want to “expose” me.
Second, the way I’ve set things up from the beginning is that there’s a disconnect between me as the person creating the content and the way that content gets to you. In the next year or so, I’ll probably explain what that “disconnect” is and you’ll realize why it would be essentially impossible to “discover” who I am without interviewing people in the real world. And then the only people who would give you a name would be trying to mislead you.
Third, okay, I confess. I’m that guy in the video. Mamma mia! It’s a-me, Mago Dominik. You already figured me out. You can move on with your life.
Chris Rawlins sent me an extra copy of his effect Fair Play, which is a version of Miraskill but disguised as a color-matching card game. The design is excellent and could certainly pass as a simple game you picked up at some bookstore or game store.
I will be giving away this extra copy via a contest I call:
Who Can Name the Most Average Number?
To enter, fill out the form below with your email and your guess for the most average number.
On April 2nd, I will determine the median number from the entries and whoever submitted that number will win.
I don’t hang onto your email addresses, they’re just so I can contact the winner. (If you think I’d ever do something to harvest email addresses for… like…marketing or something, you genuinely have no idea how I run this site.)
Peace out. See you back here in April.
