Amarsir

I had no idea on David Parr's trick either. It was great. No duds here. P&T's trick at the end was good too, although the Magic Circle tie-in seemed pretty extraneous to it. By the way, Alyson was really good as the subject. Her expressiveness really added to both tricks.

I assume they meant Jay from 2015. Who if I recall correctly, could present OK but couldn't cook worth a darn. I'd have forgotten him too, but he happened to show up on Cutthroat Kitchen 2-3 weeks ago. His cooking skills were about as I remember.

I couldn't help but notice that Marcus committed the sin that is so consistently criticized on (all versions of) Shark Tank. He said "This market is so big. If you could just get 1% of that, it's $2.6 million dollars." You can't justify a business venture just by observing that a market exists. I enjoyed watching Marcus learn. He was surprised for example that it's not a commodity business. I've never tried myself, but I certainly know that different strains exist.

Ignore

Episode 420. Someone at CNBC no doubt enjoyed themself with that one.

I'm pretty far from a dudebro myself, but if the first thing someone ever says to me is "butter my butt and call me a biscuit", I might be a little awkward around him too.

That reminds me: a prevailing theory on Matthew not knowing coq au vin and loco moco was that they asked him to play dumb, right? Well what if that was his idea? What if he was told he was coming off as a know-it-all and that was his "trick" for correcting it? It has that level of clumsiness to it, and that's much more in keeping with reality tv: producers don't tell people to lie so much as suggest what they want and look the other way when participants craft their own lies.

The same way she did a triathalon after being stabbed?

Unlikely as this is to say, I'm very glad they continue to pull Guy into this. It's really the best coaching anyone gets in the series now. Yes, in this cut we saw "rehearsed, not natural" too many times. But he knows how to make a show, from the basics of positioning to the subtleties of authenticity. I was impressed with his advice in past seasons and happy to see him here too. Matthew might as well have had a "villain" sign hanging around his neck the whole series. It was obvious why they brought him back, obvious why they kept him when he was interfering with others, and obvious why this is the point where he was cut. That's reality TV I guess. He is good presenter and a decent chef, and if he matures in a few years and I accidentally stumbled on him presenting somewhere, I might not mind. He brings to mind Marcel Vigneron, who was immature and annoyed all the others in his season of Top Chef but seems much more likable these days.

Well his big hit was opening a camping store and calling it "Camping World". I don't recall any story to it, and the mascot most people have never heard of unless they're regular customers already. So I don't know where he became the brand expert, but then I wouldn't say that to his face either.

I'd agree with that. If nothing else, you need a hook to get the first purchase.

Brilliant deduction! Me like an idiot, I thought "Penn took first but he put back first so it's the same position." Not until you pointed it out did I realize. It's a very clever trick. In hindsight when he did the half spread and asked P&T to figure out whose half it was, he was asking them to directly look at the Mnemonica order and I think that was the biggest risk of them catching him. But obviously it worked.

I liked Siegfried Tieber's act. I thought he was quirky and that worked for the trick: simple but not obvious. Having just made my guess in the "how the trick was done" thread, I will say I don't think it was any kind of force.

Sigfried Tieber's card trick: The deck wasn't shuffled. Not at the beginning and not after the card went back. I don't think it was a force because I don't think it needed to be. And the two red 8s were next to each other when he did the spread. We all should understand that any number of cuts is the same as 1 cut, and that 1 cut doesn't change the order of the deck other than the bottom/top division. So if the deck was secretly ordered at the beginning, and he knew the order, it remained so until he did the split. And if he got one card, he automatically had the other. So all he needed was a marker. And as it so happens, he flashed the card over them REALLY big. (6 of spades.) Now since he made a big deal of not peeking, I'll assume he didn't. But I think there's a number of things he could have done here. One would be to have an assistant see it and signal him via thumper. If he knows the order, he already knows both cards from that one. The rest is showmanship. Alternatively, without an assistant he needs a way to mark that card until he can find it later. I'm not an expert on marking mechanics, but I assume this isn't so hard. Then he finds the marker and knows the card after it was Penn's. Then Teller's is the one which used to be after that. This would explain why he flips both halves before selecting one, uses his eyes to find Penn's, and knows Teller's automatically. So I don't 100% have it, but I'm fairly confident this is how it was done.

I figured out how I might have fixed it. Demonstrate the computer in the theater earlier in the show, so the audience knows what to expect. Then have Penn "go outside". Modify his intro to show there's no hidden speakers in his ears so he can't be getting messages. While he's there, have something go wrong and the computer breaks. Teller now has no way to identify the card. Instead of signaling the 4 of clubs, he signals "???" or something. Then Penn guesses the card anyway.

Oh that's right, I forgot about the acrobats. I meant the former. Found a clip of the old bit on NBC's site.

Minor bit of a relevant spoiler:

Regarding "Extravagant", the on-the-street trick from August 3: It actually is a trick. The problem is that the lie isn't actually all that impressive these days. You could indeed program a computer to identify cards from an image and deduce which is missing. But A) it actually would be expensive to hire custom code, especially to then include the animation they showed, and B) it requires a perfect fan, which is really hard to do on the fly. So in reality, the whole thing was fake. The couple were actors, the card was pre-selected, and the card fan was glued in place. In fact the whole street bit was pre-recorded, and only Teller's bit was live for the audience. It's the crudest of trickery, which is why they "give away" a fake method. If you were unimpressed by a computer detection, how much less impressive is it with stooges and camera tricks? As I said in the main thread, it was probably better in 1987 when it still wouldn't have seemed like a trick, but at least people were going "Wow, I didn't know computers could do that." But the behind-the-scenes is more interesting: For Saturday Night Live they really did need to shoot in Times Square, at night, renting the Jumbotron. But it turned out for technical reasons they actually had to redo the shoot a total of 3 times. This alone meant it legitimately was the most expensive trick they'd done and not just a lie. But then it got worse. The FCC had someone on hand during rehearsal and live broadcast, to require standards. And he would not allow them to show a pre-recorded clip and say it was live. Doing that would, in his bureaucratic judgment, violate the standards and get NBC something between a giant fine and a loss of license. Possibly even an immediate shutdown, meaning the network would go dead in the middle of SNL. So trying to figure out what to do in a short period, they came up with a plan and talked to host Steve Gutenberg. And he changed his intro slightly so it included the phrase "prerecorded elements". But like magic, it was doing the trickery before anyone knew there was trickery they were supposed to watch for. So it qualified for the FCC standards without giving anything away. And if you know that while watching the intro, it's a lot more fun. (And the punchline on all this was sometime later when Penn was having a conversation with execs at CBS. He told this story. And one said "Penn, I speak on behalf of both ourselves and ABC. You blew it. If you had made NBC lose their license, we'd have made you the richest man alive.") Anyway, none of that really fixes the unimpressiveness of the trick this time. For which I think they should have changed the "computer answer" a bit or been way more over the top on what they were spending to make this happen. But the backstory does improve my enjoyment of it.

I'm one of the ones who has been concerned about this before. Yes Penn talked about prepping the closing tricks. Yes he talked about this one. No, he hasn't to my knowledge expressed concern that they're getting thin. This trick (I'll call it "Extravagant") was performed 30 years ago on Saturday Night Live as "The most expensive card trick ever." If you picture the technology then, it was more impressive. I'll go into more in the "how the tricks were done" thread. But also you might want to search youtube for that SNL clip. (I'd link but on mobile atm.) I will say this: some of their tricks are not to fool you, but to watch them fool someone else. P&T were on The Tonight Show last week and they did a trick which in hindsight - and possibly to the audience at the time - was completely obvious. But it was fun and it seemed to fool Jimmy in the moment. So that was the enjoyment of it. Similarly, you could appreciate this trick from the pov of his two volunteers who picked a card, told Penn nothing about it, and were told what it was. That said, especially knowing what I know, I think it could have been better presented.

Yeah that was a weird thing when he brought them in for Zoe's. They needed to be taught how to do idea boards. Using them to teach someone else might have been a reinforce-by-teaching lesson, but it felt like he just wanted air time for the company.

Amazing Grapes closed its doors. http://www.theprofitupdates.com/2017/07/amazing-grapes-from-profit-has-closed.html

It has to be appreciated as a tribute to their mentor. Absent that element, I would say that it's a little slow and repetitive for a modern act. Birds from handkerchiefs is fine, but (especially from P&T) it has to be jazzed up.

I'll agree with the core of that. I feel like he's doing a lot of stuff spread over a whole routine, with no single big "tah-da!" And so they don't feel like going over it with a fine-tooth comb to call out each bit. I do think making serious magic work is harder these days than comedic. Continued over a whole show I don't know if it would work for me, but as an isolated act I thought his tone was fine. On another note, I thought Teller did a great job with the Thomsoni bit. Did Alyson not introduce Georgie or was she mentioned and I missed it?

Except for Kraft Mac & Cheese. :)