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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

OK, so you spend hours and days sealing threes of clubs into tea packets. But how do you make the volunteer pick the three of clubs during the show?

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That's an entire family of tricks called card forces. I used to have a whole routine based on them. Here's a blog post with three of them: https://conjuror.community/best-card-forces/

I had about a 50% hit rate on the natural force. You just fan through the cards and time it so they pick the one you want. Wouldn't work for the tea trick, but works fine if you have a fallback.

Thanks for the link. Of the three techniques mentioned, one (the entire deck is all the same card) obviously doesn't withstand any scrutiny; one (riffle through a deck and skip to your chosen card when they say stop) feels like it'd be too risky for a trick that took days to set up; and one (the "natural" force) says "please pay us to learn the secret."

I don't think the trick that's the show pony of this blog post has been revealed to us.

The too-risky one is another part of the trick where the magician is putting in a ridiculous amount of time, in that case practicing in front of a mirror.

Or maybe indeed the magician doesn't use any of those. Another aspect of magic I've read in profiles of Ricky Jay and Teller is that they hunt down and pore over old magic books, looking for less-common techniques and setups to adapt.

But still, Penn and Teller often used a rifle-stop force. I think it's because when a trick is explained by a force, you've given up on impressing magicians.

People use card tricks like these in poker games where real money is being bet and there's a good chance of physical violence if people catch you. What makes you think they can't get it good enough for a parlor trick?

Without divulging details, a riffle force has zero risk and can be easily mastered in a day.

The exact mechanics of a force are the point of the post. Also given your handle, I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not.

The article links to this Wikipedia page, looks like you can "force" the user to pick a specific card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(magic)

That's just trading one word for another! OK, how do you force the audience member to pick a specific card from a deck?

I have to ask - did you read the (quite short) link?

> An example of equivocation can be as follows: A performer deals two cards on a table and ask a spectator to select one. If the spectator chooses the card on the left, the performer will hand the card to the spectator. If they pick the card on the right, the performer will take that card as his own and have the other card be the spectator's. In either case, the spectator receives the intended card.

Or maybe you're asking more precisely exactly which forcing mechanism would be used, for the trick in TFA?

Two very easy ones that I’ve never had fail in practice:

1. Get them to tell you to stop as you flip through the cards vertically, and then sleight the card from the bottom of the deck instead.

2. A simple counting trick like this https://youtu.be/ekPbMhJGYmc

He has put in his article a link to the Wikipedia definition of 'Forcing' (and once there, there is a link to a book describing techniques).

edit: sorry, I hadn't refreshed and seen the other 2 replies before I replied myself.

I don't understand what you comment contributes to my knowledge. The author says that he will explain a magic trick. He says that step one is to XYZ. He does not say how to XYZ. He instead links to a Wikipedia page that says what XYZ is, but doesn't describe how to XYZ in a way that would work in the magic trick. Instead, it links to a book that might say more about XYZ. I am not about to buy that book.

Do you consider that trick to be sufficiently explained?

I came here with the same question. I couldn't help asking it, but we've both missed the point: "which I’ve further simplified here for clarity". The details of the magic trick aren't relevant, the analogy is about the grind, not the one little deceptive detail about the trick, which could be sleight of hand, suggestion, etc.

Yup, and I see what the author is doing there. That's great, whatever. But if he is illustrating his point by trying to explain a magic trick, and even including a "spoiler warning," I want him to actually explain the magic trick. Otherwise, it's a kind of a comical piece of rhetoric. "Some jobs are like this magic trick I'm about to explain. First, you do something cool that seems like magic. Now you see, magic and work share an element of extreme tedium!"

So you're not about to do the grind. Thank you for so neatly illustrating why it looked like magic to the author's teammates.

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