What do great magicians perform when they’re feeling lazy?
A trick so easy, my 11-year-old sister used it to fool her middle school teacher…
“Jacob, you won’t believe what I did!”
I opened the door to see my little sister with the widest smile on her face.
YEARS ago I’d taught her a very simple card trick and her knowledge had finally been tested.
See, she’d been asked by her friends and consequently her teacher to prove she was ‘magic.’
(They hadn’t believed her.)
Yet, despite how long it had been since she learned the trick and despite her young age, she’d pulled it out of the bag and completely shocked the class—even fooling her teacher.
I was proud of her and delighted the method had been powerful enough to fool everyone, but easy enough that even an 8-year-old would remember it for 3 whole years.
Imagine there’s a Venn diagram…
One side of the Venn diagram is full of ‘tricks that are so ridiculously easy you could teach a 5-year-old to do them’.
The other side is ‘tricks that are actually deceptive and impactful for audiences’.
As you can imagine, the intersection is very slim…
…but THIS trick makes the cut.
Imagine this:
You borrow a shuffled deck of cards and spread them messily on the table. You name cards at random and ask a spectator to select the cards they believe match the ones named. It seems utterly impossible, yet you turn the cards over to show that they perfectly match!
This is an old plot that we first discovered in a magic book dating back to 1909—but it’s just as strong today as it was a century ago.
(By the way, this is genuinely THE trick we perform when we we’re feeling lazy but still want something strong.)
It’s called ‘Forcing by Telepathy’, and in this product, we teach 5+ variations on the routine.
NEW: Here's a recent performance Benji captured of Forcing by Telepathy with a few friends. Before they started recording, the deck had been shuffled and Benji had asked someone to touch the 2 of Diamonds. That's the card that's already set aside. Next, this happened..
