Me and The Unnamed Magician and Mr. X and The Uncircumcised Magician

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Okay, I just want to close the loop on this. Wait... don't sue me, Yigal. What I mean is I want to wrap this story up.

Here's where things stood last time I wrote.

Cast of Characters

Me: Andy. I write this blog. You're familiar with me.

The Unnamed Magician: A guy who releases mostly magician-fooler style effects, primarily on Lybrary.com. He had started a pre-order for an effect he claimed was The Ultimate Open Prediction.

Mr. X: A guy who presented evidence to me he was an associate of The Unnamed Magician and had information about the trick he was selling.

The Uncircumcised Magician: A reader of this site who presented a potential method for the effect.

You know the story. Unnamed starts a pre-sale selling an effect for $100 that may not come out if he doesn't reach some unspecified number of sales.

I call him out and say I don't believe the effect looks the way it's demonstrated, and I question that the effect even exists given the manner in which he's selling it.

I offer him $20,000 to sell the first 200 copies for him. He just needs to demonstrate the trick is legitimate.

Apparently, I'm outbid for this.

Okay, I say, I'll give you $5,000 on top of anyone's highest bid. I'm told that I'm still outbid, somehow.

While this is going on, Mr. X writes me. He's friends with Unnamed and is trying to protect him from digging too deep of a hole for himself, and he tells me that no, the effect doesn't quite do what Unnamed is suggesting.

Next, Uncircumcised writes me and gives me an "almost, sort-of, maybe technically true" method for the trick that meets the conditions if you're incredibly generous.

So what is Uncircumcised's method? I'll include it at the bottom of this post. Essentially it involves secretly knowing a value the spectator is thinking of (using a force or a marked deck), then you tell the person to stop at any card of that value in a second deck. (The normal, ungimmicked, shuffled deck in the video.) It’s at that point the recording starts.

So the spectator isn't free to stop anywhere, really. But they could have stopped "anywhere" in the grand scheme of things because they supposedly have a value only they know and there's no way of knowing where that value would be in the deck. So it's kind of like they could have stopped "anywhere." (This phrasing works better on 8-year-old kids.)

I send that along to Mr. X and he confirms it's the general idea.

Since my last post, I've gone back and forth with Unnamed a lot over email. He tells me he thinks he knows who Mr. X is, and that Mr. X doesn't know the method used.

Unfortunately for him, he can't prove that to me without sharing the method with me or another third party, which he's unwilling to do.

Fortunately, for me, I no longer give a shit one way or the other.

Here's what I know: I know the video performances didn't show the whole effect. I know the spectator is waiting to be cued in some manner. And I know that, at best, as I wrote in a previous post, this was more of an exercise in technically meeting conditions rather than a trick people were actually going to go out and perform. I know this because Unnamed told me that.

Here's what I think: I think Unnamed is not a scam artist, and I'd have no problem picking up a trick from him in the future. (I mean, not a $100, sight-unseen, "maybe this trick will never be released" trick. But something that comes out at a normal price through typical channels.) I think he probably felt competing pressures and that's what made the rollout of this trick such a mess.

There you go. All's well that ends well. Or, all's well that ends, at least. And this ends with this post (but I've thought that before).

Here is Uncircumcised’s original email to me:

You said:

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.”

Here's my thought - You force a value of a card from your own deck and although you supposedly don't know what it is you ask them to remember just the value not the suit.

You then explain that they will deal through their deck and stop at a matching value to the one they are thinking of.  You will predict the card immediately after where they stop.  

They shuffle their deck and show you.  First time you do it openly predict the card immediately after the first instance of the force value.  Spectator will assume you mean them to stop at the first instance of their value appearing as they deal and your prediction will be correct. 

If you repeat this, predict the card which appears immediately after the second instance the force value appears in their deck.  They have a completely free choice where to stop in the deck but they are unlikely to go to the 3rd of 4th instance.  Like he says in the video "you could have gone to the next one" - people have assumed this to mean the next card but really it could mean next value.

In the video, to do 3 in a row before the video starts I would have them remember 3 forced values - easy enough for them to remember.