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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Someone mentioned Penn & Teller's "Fool Us" show. You won't learn any trade secrets, but you'll sure discover that they know them.

A magician does a trick, then they come up and whisper to him what they think he or she did. You don't get to listen in on that.

If they can't figure out the trick, then the magician gets to be the opening act for them at some show. Occasionally someone does fool them. Not often, though.

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Amateur magician here. On more than one occasion I've felt that P&T have thrown the game and pretended to be fooled when the method was obvious to me, and therefore almost certainly obvious to them.

This is one example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufpoQmsvJEg

If they can’t see when the sleight of hand occurs or when a swap happens then they might have an idea of how to perform the trick but not exactly sure when the person performed it. That’s them being fooled.

I’ve watched many of the acts on YouTube and you can slow them down to see when it occured.

There’s one with a ring where he appears to move the ring from finger to finger. Then at the very end he appears to pull the ring off his finger. When you slow it down you can see his finger bend down at a very unnatural position that is borderline dislocated. But he then hands the ring over. Now we know he’s using a retractable ring. But he swapped it prior to the end of the act so it appears that he used a solid ring the whole time. P&T don’t know when he swapped it. Slowing it down you can see when he pockets it tho.

So in that one, with the hand motions and the emphasis on "thread" and "well lit" and the motion across (where the Christmas lights connected the two lamps) they were implying that a thread was hanging from the Christmas lights. But since he said he "tried that" and he had to come up with something else, I assume it's some sort of front facing edifice that allowed him to circle the whole thing with a pencil (at about 85% depth) to sell it. Maybe he technically fooled them since the Christmas lights had nothing to do with it and it was something between the two lamp arms themselves.

I'm not going to tell you because that would be breaking the magicians code. But I will tell you this: there is a general principle of magic that the details matter. If there's something that gets your attention, like the Christmas lights, it's almost certainly there for a reason.

I'm sure they had other methods in mind - the general format of the show is they have to pick which they think was used and if wrong then it's a "fool".

Good to know.

Las Vegas: Why do you think they call it "Lost Wages"?

Because the expected return on a dollar is less than a dollar, but the variance is high. Nothing to do with any magician's sleight-of-hand.

True about gambling in general, but OP's comment was that the "game" itself was dishonest, according to its own rules.

Part of the fun with that show is that Penn speaks out loud and slips in key words the performer will understand, they don't often move on to whispering.

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