The Principle of Force

Now I still remember that I am supposed to write on the Principle of Force in performing magic. Before I begin, let me quote myself once again that “the principle of force as the word implies, forces the audience to make a selection that is predetermined by the magician himself”. Another way of saying that is that the magician forces the audience to choose what the magician wants while giving the audience the illusion that he (the audience) is the one who makes the choice. There are many ways to execute a “force”. No matter which way it is done, a force is always based on one of these principles: the use of gimmicks, sleight of hands and verbal manipulation.

For today’s article, I will begin by what is known as “The Magician’s Choice”. This is one of the most basic lessons a magician has to learn to perform magic tricks. The Magician’s Choice is done merely by verbal manipulation although not all verbal manipulation in the performing of a magic trick necessarily constitutes a force.

The Magician’s Choice

In executing a Magician’s Choice, the magician will ask the audience to choose between 2 choices. These choices could be in the form of objects, words, or anything imaginable. However it is easier to illustrate here by referring to these choices as objects.

Say for example, the magician divide a deck of cards into 2 piles which I will refer to them here as the first and the second pile. Let’s say that the magician knows that the card that he wants to reveal at the end of the magic trick is in the first pile. In order to show that everything is done randomly and the final outcome is magical, he allows the audience to choose one of the 2 piles. The simplest statement the magician could say to the audience would be, “Choose one of the two piles.” If the audience chooses the first pile (which is the desired pile), the magician will take the first pile as chosen by the audience and continue with his routine and finally reveals the desired card in the “chosen” pile eventually. On the other hand, if the audience has chosen the second pile, then the magician will take the second pile and discard it by putting it aside. After discarding the second pile that the audience had chosen, the magician now picks up the first pile (which is the desired pile) and continues as in the first scenario.

Notice that the secret lies in what the magician says. He merely asked the audience to choose a pile of cards. But he did not ask the audience what audience want to do with the chosen pile of cards nor did he commit himself to saying what he (the magician) is going to do with the chosen pile of cards. The idea here is being vague with what he says. The magician never commits himself to what he is going to do.

Nasty Audiences

Now can anything go wrong in performing this routine? Yes! Especially if you are performing magic tricks to your friends and it is not an official magic show. In a magic show where you are the professional magician and the audience are usually strangers, they will show more respect to the performer and will not so called, “try to be funny with you” and try to ‘spoil’ your show and embarrass you. Even so, some professional magicians do experience uncooperative audience who try to be funny in more informal settings such as a close-up magic in a bar. So when you are performing magic tricks informally to friends, they tend to have a mindset to sabotage you, spoil your show or do whatever they can to figure out how you do your magic trick.

So now, how do the audience sabotage the magician? I believe that you probably know how to do that too and probably will be very guilty as you have done that very often to friends who performed magic tricks to you. Nevertheless, let me mention 2 very common scenarios here.

Scenario 1: “I want to change my mind”

After either the audience has chosen the first pile or the magician has discarded the second pile that the audience has chosen, the audience will say,

“Oh wait! Can I change my mind?”

“What if I change my mind? Would it make a difference if I have chosen the other pile?”

The audience may not have said all that, but just one of those things or anything to that effect. So now what should the magician do. Do you supposed that the magician is supposed to say,

“No! You can’t change your mind. You have already made your choice and that is final.”

A tug-of-war will occur between the magician and the audience and the whole magic trick is destroyed. Let me tell you what. The magician will be very pissed if this happens. There is only one conclusion. The audience is trying to be nasty. He will vow to himself that he will never show another magic trick to this person ever again.

Scenario 2: “I will decide for you what you are to do.”

In this other scenario, after either the audience had chosen the first pile or the magician had discarded the second pile that the audience had chosen, the audience would insist on what he (the audience) wants to do with the pile of cards he had chosen. If the audience had chosen the second pile of cards and the magician discarded the chosen pile, he would insist that the magician take the second pile that he has chosen. If the audience had chosen the first pile and the magician picked up the first pile that the audience had chosen, the audience would insist that the magician discard away the first pile or the audience insist on holding on to the first pile that he had chosen instead of giving it to the magician. In short, the audience will insist on forcing the magician to do the opposite of what the magician wants do.

Knowing Who To Stay Away From

How do I know? As a hobbyist (a non-professional magician), I perform magic tricks to my friends frequently and I have experienced this many times. This is not meant to be a complaint here but to point out that it is useful to test out your performance first before you actually put on the real show. These annoying audiences will prepare you for the real thing and at the same time it teaches you who to avoid performing magic tricks to in real life. Don’t entertain these smart asses who are unappreciative. Talking about unappreciative audience, avoid such people at all cost. This kind of people who are all out to examine you as if they have set an examination for you to take or they are the police officers interrogating you as a suspect. They have forgotten that you are giving them a free entertainment. They will want to examine all your props and if possible strip search you. They will disrupt you in your routine and dictate to you how you should carry out your routine. And in the event that you manage to survive all the ordeals and still perform a miraculous ending, they will say things like, “I don’t believe that you can really read my mind. Surely there is a trick in it.” Of course there is a trick in it because it is a magic trick, not sorcery or witchcraft. And of course I am supposed to look like I can read your mind and not really read your mind. That’s why I am only a magician, not a wizard or sorcerer. If I am truly a mind reader, I would rather read somebody else’s mind who has more value and not yours. Some others might tell you that they have not seen such a magic trick before and therefore it is not a magic trick to them. They will insist that you should be pulling a rabbit out of a hat or saw a lady in half in order to call it a magic trick. Just tell yourself that these people are absolutely not worth your time and effort. They don’t deserve to be entertained as an audience. They should be abducted and chained up like monkeys by some aliens and made to perform like monkeys to the aliens. That is what I call ENTERTAINMENT!

Fine Tuning The Magician’s Choice

Alright! After that big side step, let’s get back to how to prevent those two nasty scenarios described above from occurring. A professional magician who is experienced will pre-empt something similar to the above two scenarios to happen. Therefore, he would qualify his words and actions a little more in order to seal off objections that may arise later. In using verbal manipulation, you need to gather enough experience to handle objections before they arise. How can this be done?

To avoid scenario 1, after the audience has chosen the first or second pile of cards, the magician could say, “Do you want to change your mind? Is that final? Now, notice that you could have changed your mind but you didn’t (or did). You could have chosen the other pile but you have decided to choose this pile.” All these are said so that the audience could no longer go back on his choice. At the same time, the magician elaborate at great length that the whole process was absolutely random and the audience was absolutely free in making his choice.

To avoid scenario 2, the magician could have chosen to be a little more specific in his instructions instead of being too vague. Let me elaborate on this point. When I first learned the Magician’s Force, I was taught to use the statement, “choose this or that”. More often than not, I encountered scenario 2. The open-endedness of the statement “… choose …” is left to too much interpretation and room for argument. So instead of just say, “choose”, it is better to instruct the audience to do something without any specification of what it is leading to. In our example of 2 piles of cards here, the magician could have said, “pick up a pile of cards”. If the audience pick up the first pile of card, then the magician will ask the audience to hand the pile of card to him (magician). If the audience picks up the second pile of card, then the magician will continue to instruct the audience to put that pile of cards aside elsewhere.

So now you may ask, which approach should I use then since I wouldn’t know which scenario will I encounter. I would suggest that you use the approach in scenario 2. And just in case the audience would say that he wants to change his mind after you have given the second instruction, it would be good to ask audience whether he wants to change his mind after he has picked up a pile of cards before giving him a second instruction such as “hand the pile of cards to me”.

Conclusion

That’s more than enough for today’s post on the Magician’s Choice. In my next post, I teach a simple magic trick that shows you how to apply the Magician’s Force.

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I have just concluded my series on misdirection and I was looking through my earlier postings, namely, “How To Do Magic Tricks #7 – Principles and Techniques Used in Performing Magic”. In that articles I mentioned about the four principles of how to do magic tricks, namely, “The Principle of Force”, “The Art of Misdirection”, “Verbal Manipulation” and “The Art of Sleight of Hands”. I have also submitted an article on that topic to Ezine Articles and upon comparison, I found that the article that was submitted to Ezine Articles was clearer and more concise. I am therefore re-posting my article here for reference.

How to Do Magic Tricks – Four Key Principles

Have you ever wondered how magic tricks work? As an ignorant child, I was told by my brother that magicians have very fast hands. The magician’s hands move so fast that you cannot see it. Otherwise, magic tricks are done by using camera tricks. To say that a magician uses camera tricks to perform his magic would have been one of the greatest insults directed at a magician. This is as good as saying that the magician is unskillful and uses the camera to deceive the audience. You do not need a magician to do that. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can perform magic using camera tricks.

Generally, magicians design and perform their magic tricks by operating according to a few principles. They are the principles of force, misdirection and verbal manipulation. Besides these, magicians spend a great amount of time practicing what is known as the sleight of hands. These are skillful hand movements used to conceal, deceive and confuse what the hands are actually doing. It is not true like what my brother told me that magicians have hands that move so fast to a point that the movement is invisible to the audience. Although certain sleight of hands do require the hand movements to be quick but most other sleights do not necessarily require quick hand movements. Sleights done skillfully can be performed before your very eyes and you will not notice what has been done. Some master magicians who possessed such skills are Tony Slydini and Dai Vernon.

The principle of force as the word implies, forces the audience to make a selection that is predetermined by the magician himself. This can be done in many ways. Where counting and mathematics is involved, the magician is using some mathematical formula that work out to a unique answer. Otherwise, it can be done using a gimmick such as a trick deck. Most of the time, it is pure sleight of hands where playing cards are involved. A force is used particularly in magic tricks where the magician tells you what you have selected such as a card or a word from certain pages of a book.

The principle of misdirection aims at directing the audience attention away from what the magician is actually doing. Simply said, it is misleading you to look away in another direction from where the magician is doing his stuff. The master of misdirection is the late Tony Slydini, possibly the only person who could still fool the late Dai Vernon (master of sleight of hands). One of the way where misdirection operates is to use big hand movement and looking at the movement of the hand intently. This is a body language that will naturally lead the audience to look in the same direction as you (the magician) are looking. At this moment, you (the magician) will be able to do what you need to do quickly with the other hand where the audience is not looking. I have noticed that Tony Slydini often confused his audience by making repeated hand movements. While the audience suspected him to do something with a certain hand movement, he had not done anything absolutely. However, during one of those times when he repeated the same movement, he would have done something sneaky when the audience had dropped their guard after seeing the same movement several times. Tony Slydini is known not to use any gimmicks in performing his magic tricks. He relies purely on misdirection and his sleight of hands.

Finally, magicians use verbal manipulation to talk you into doing what he wants you to do as well as convincing you of what he has done and predicted. It is like saying nothing and yet seems like having said everything at the same time. The use of verbal manipulation is also another way to operate the principle of force. Fortune tellers and spiritual mediums often use such skills to deceive people who seek guidance from them. Witches back in the dark ages who were burned may not necessarily truly know the art of black magic but merely convinces people of their power by using verbal manipulation as well as a combination of the above principles.

In my next posting, I will cover on the “Principle of Force” in how to do magic tricks.

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In the first video below, you will see Slydini performed his “Paper Balls in the Hat” magic trick. Slydini crushed and rolled up 3 to 4 pieces of paper into a ball each time and make them appear and disappear in his hand. He then put the ball held in his left hand invisibly into the hat with his right hand. As Slydini opened his left hand, the paper ball had disappeared. This routine is repeated 3 to 4 times and never once do you see him putting the ball into the hat. At the end of the performance, the hat which was shown to be empty at the beginning of the performance is then filled with paper balls.

The secret to the The Paper Balls in the Hat magic trick:

This is done by a combination of lapping, sleight of hands and misdirection.

Lapping is a skill where you use your lap (that is covered by the table) to serve as a platform where you use to drop items onto from your hands or from the table if you want to make the items vanish. You can also pick these items up again into your hands when you make them reappear. Slydini used this technique very often and Dai Vernon (a.k.a. Professor) commented that the powerful technique of lapping had not been utilized enough nor developed further beyond what Slydini had done with lapping.

Note that Slydini repeats his action over and over again. There are times when you taught that he was up to some trick but nothing actually happened. When he first opened his left hand, you expect to see the paper ball disappear but instead the paper ball is still there. The next time he repeated his action, the paper ball actually disappeared. Slydini used repeated actions to confuse the audience. When the audience see the same actions repeated many times without anything actually happening, they will lose their alertness when they see the same actions again and that is when he actually do something sneaky. I must really salute Slydini for his dexterity because even though I have already know his secret moves, I still can’t catch him doing his move at that exact moment when I’m watching out for it a hundred and one percent. Not only is his action so fast, but more admirably the action is so natural.

Watch the video again.

At 0:22, Slydini put his left hand down below the table for the first time. The first time he put his left hand down, there was absolutely no trick.

At 0:29, Slydini showed the ball was still in his left hand.

At 0:31, Slydini transferred the ball from the left hand to the right hand while the right hand was covering the left hand. He then dropped the ball from the right hand onto his lap.

From 0:47 to 0:51, Slydini put his left hand down below the table for the second time. This time he picked up the first ball dropped on his lap and transferred it to his right hand. This ball was held in the right hand and subsequently dropped into the hat while he repeated his previous actions. Even though the second ball remained in the left hand, the first ball which was in the right hand had been dropped into the hat. You may think that nothing was dropped into the hat because the ball was still in the left hand. Moreover, this series of action happened in the beginning and your memory reinforced you to think that the right hand is empty and nothing is put into the hat. You thought that it was nothing but some theatrical gesturing.

At 1:38, you will find that there is no more paper on the table to be rolled into paper ball nor are there any more balls in his hands. Nevertheless he repeated his routine again because he still has one more ball on his lap. This magic trick can never be completed with the same number of balls rolled up appearing in the hat unless he carries out his routine for one last time.

The second video shows 2 magic tricks by Slydini. This is of a much later date than the previous video. Slydini addressed the gentleman as Professor which is possibly Dai Vernon in his younger days. The first 4 minutes is again the “Hat and Paper Balls” magic trick. Note that at 2:04, when Slydini was transferring the previous paper ball in his left hand to his right hand, the ball was not crushed properly and some edges of the paper were visible during the transfer. At 3:17, when Slydini was putting the transferred paper ball in his right hand into the red box, you can notice some trace of yellow paper at the top of the red box while he dropped it into the box. From where Dai Vernon was sitting, he could actually see what was happening. Nevertheless, he pretended to be ignorant and amazed by the trick which helped to reinforce the audience’s amazement. The second magic trick entitled, “The Impossible Dream”, Slydini restored a handful of tobacco and paper into a cigarette. There is actually a third magic trick but it is rather short.

Notice how Slydini involves his audience in his performance. In this way, the audience’s attention is directed to what he has to do away from what he is doing in a split moment. It is also an important way to hold the audience’s attention and interest, another important aspect of performing magic. Obviously, Slydini could have done all those things himself instead of asking the audience to do so but still he chose to get the audience involved. At 5:09, Slydini picked up a cigarette on his lap and held it in his right hand as he rested his right hand at the edge of the table. At 5:14, Slydini dropped all the tobacco and paper on his left hand onto his lap as he turned his left hand to face downward while he pushed the cigarette held in his right hand to emerge from his left hand, giving the illusion that the torn cigarette had been restored. At 5:18, you can see Slydini dusting off the tobacco on his lap.

For the third magic trick where Slydini stretches two halves of a cigarette into two complete cigarettes, just watch when did Slydini put his hands below the table. Once you understand the principle of lapping, you will understand how he did this magic trick. And notice how he directed the audience’s attention away with his hand and eyes while the other hand made his sneaky move. This is the essence of misdirection. Nevertheless Slydini did it so well that even you are aware of the technique, you cannot help but follow his lead and his crucial sleight of hands are simply too fast and natural.

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photo credit: trialsanderrors

Start with some gimmicks. You can get a variety of magical gimmicks either from your local magic shops or purchase them from online magic shops. From gimmicks, you may want to progress on to self-working magic tricks using playing cards. Self-working tricks as the name implies are magic tricks where their effects happen naturally when you follow the procedures of the performance routines accordingly. Self-working magic tricks require little or no sleight of hands at all and are therefore relatively manageable.

Generally, professional magic tricks using playing cards or coins require many sleights that take a lifetime to master. Mentalism magic (mind reading) generally require relatively less sleights (or in fact none at all) as compared to card magic and coin magic. So you may want to begin with mentalism first instead of other types of magic such as card magic or coin magic.

For your personal education in magic, I would recommend that you watch the World’s Greatest Magic DVD series. Each World’s Greatest Magic DVD series features a particular magic trick performed by different magicians with their individual style of presentation. From watching these different presentations, they would enrich your experience with magic. That is the basis of how we learn and become an expert in any subject in any field – with continued exposure to the same thing, experiencing them again in a variety of ways.

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