Peeking Behind The Curtain: How You Think The Tricks Were Done

[sarthaz]

On 9/17/2016 at 4:10 PM, Amarsir said:

So Ivan Asmodai fooled them with the state cards.  As most of us know, Johnny Thompson is the judge and he's not likely to give away a win unless they specifically thought wrong. So, where?

I thought it was fairly obvious that he just needed to know 18 cards, 6 of which anchored 6 groups and the other 12 could be randomly split among those groups. The card Penn picked was not predicted, but does actually complicate the trick if it was pulled from the same pool. Which made me think it wasn't.

My guess was "deck switch when his back was turned". That makes Penn's card irrelevant and pre-sets the cards to hand out. It would be easy to do. P&T gave him more credit by suggesting he rearranged the same cards. Is it possible that's what it was? Saying "arrange" or "control a shuffle" or "add cards" when it's a deck switch? Because they're pretty close, but we saw magicians get wins that way in season 1.

This was the first time I've seen Penn visibly disenchanted by a performance and the performer. And Penn's the most over-the-top positive person in the world. Everything is the best version of that thing he has ever seen or heard or tasted. His Sunday School is a nonstop parade of greatest things ever. Even the most amateur recreation of a common trick draws huge praise from him, and this season alone he tells two separate performers doing basically the same trick that their version is the best he has ever seen!  So then Ivan comes up, and Penn's like *shrug*. I'd love more backstory on this.

[Amarsir]

22 hours ago, sarthaz said:

This was the first time I've seen Penn visibly disenchanted by a performance and the performer. And Penn's the most over-the-top positive person in the world. Everything is the best version of that thing he has ever seen or heard or tasted. His Sunday School is a nonstop parade of greatest things ever. Even the most amateur recreation of a common trick draws huge praise from him, and this season alone he tells two separate performers doing basically the same trick that their version is the best he has ever seen!  So then Ivan comes up, and Penn's like *shrug*. I'd love more backstory on this.

Did they ever talk about Ivan on PSS? I'm sure Matt did on his behind-the-scenes stuff, but I don't listen to Ice Cream Social let alone Patreon it. I know Penn talked about a lot of acts, especially foolers. But now that you mention it, I don't recall a discussion of him. And yes, that was an underwhelming congrats from P&T.

[sarthaz]

52 minutes ago, Amarsir said:

Did they ever talk about Ivan on PSS? I'm sure Matt did on his behind-the-scenes stuff, but I don't listen to Ice Cream Social let alone Patreon it. I know Penn talked about a lot of acts, especially foolers. But now that you mention it, I don't recall a discussion of him. And yes, that was an underwhelming congrats from P&T.

I don't recall them ever talking about it, but I'm not religious about my Sunday School. :) I probably only catch about 30% of the episodes.

[Kromm]

Shocked this topic has gone dead, since we just went through another season.  Some stuff in the past season I'd certainly love to hear people's theories on.

[Amarsir]

I was just figuring stuff would all wrap up in the season thread, but that's pretty quiet as well.

I can't recall the last trick that baffled me. In fact the last 2 episodes (one since you posted, @Kromm) haven't had a fooler at all. That's not to say I didn't like any of the tricks. Just that I didn't feel sufficiently fooled. 

BTW seeing that the prior conversation was about Ivan Asmodi, this video covers that performance with the audio of Penn's podcast response. My takeaway is that the trick wasn't impressive even without the "fool" controversy because he wasn't prepared for Teller to have taken a card as well.

[The Crazed Spruce]

Speaking of peeks behind the curtain....

 

[rmontro]

The trick where Teller cuts off his "carrot thumb" wasn't very mystifying, but it did make me laugh.

[Amarsir]

I was hoping for more than 3 "how to" bits, but it was nice seeing all the different magicians participating. Their YouTube channel had a similar thing a few weeks ago with The Ambitious Card. 

That last trick with the Fanning sisters: I imagine there was a cheat sheet off camera that would make this trick a lot harder to do live.

[Taeolas]

Came across this video where Wes Barker, who showed up on Season 2 Ep 5, explains his trick that fooled P&T

 

It's a nice explanation, both of how the trick was done and how and why P&T were fooled by it.  It dovetails nicely a bit with the discussion in the Season 7 thread about what a Force is. 

 

Spoiler

Though in this case, the Force is the wrong guess.

Basically instead of using a Force (like Penn guessed), he used a Gimmick to mark the picked page, then peeked so he knew what it was. And finally, he bluffed the reveal at the very end. As he says, at any point in Penn's explanation, he would've said "yup you got it", but Penn went a step or two too far in the guess, and got it wrong. Current P&T would probably have gone on stage to look for the pierced sheet to see if it matched, but the Season 2 P&T weren't savy enough to think of that I'm sure. 🙂

What he also doesn't say is that he probably had a slight index of pages behind the box. At the very least he'd have a yellow page and a white page, in case Jonathan picked a yellow page. Though more likely (since his gimmick is a white page), there was a bit of a force there to make sure it stayed in the white pages. 

 

 

[SVNBob]

On 7/8/2020 at 2:49 PM, Taeolas said:

Came across this video where Wes Barker, who showed up on Season 2 Ep 5, explains his trick that fooled P&T

That's great.  And as he went through it all, he also gave the explanation of the impossibility that most of us caught when we watched it (original discussion, including said impossibility starts here:)

 

[ketose]

On 7/8/2020 at 3:49 PM, Taeolas said:

Came across this video where Wes Barker, who showed up on Season 2 Ep 5, explains his trick that fooled P&T

 

It's a nice explanation, both of how the trick was done and how and why P&T were fooled by it.  It dovetails nicely a bit with the discussion in the Season 7 thread about what a Force is. 

 

  Reveal spoiler

Though in this case, the Force is the wrong guess.

Basically instead of using a Force (like Penn guessed), he used a Gimmick to mark the picked page, then peeked so he knew what it was. And finally, he bluffed the reveal at the very end. As he says, at any point in Penn's explanation, he would've said "yup you got it", but Penn went a step or two too far in the guess, and got it wrong. Current P&T would probably have gone on stage to look for the pierced sheet to see if it matched, but the Season 2 P&T weren't savy enough to think of that I'm sure. 🙂

What he also doesn't say is that he probably had a slight index of pages behind the box. At the very least he'd have a yellow page and a white page, in case Jonathan picked a yellow page. Though more likely (since his gimmick is a white page), there was a bit of a force there to make sure it stayed in the white pages. 

 

 

The good thing about that trick is that it wasn't bulletproofed to keep Penn and Teller from knowing what the trick was. It was basically a slight of hand surrounding the skill of ripping a phone book in half. I'm pretty sure Penn knew that he made the wrong guess, but multiple guesses and instant replays are not part of the show. Some of the tricks now have magicians making 52 videos of them holding up a card and indexing every possibility. This guy just literally held up any old page and lied about the numbers.

 

[SVNBob]

Also speaking of peeking behind the curtain:

The online video class website Masterclass has this course available.

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/penn-and-teller-teach-the-art-of-magic

With classes/tricks instructed verbally  by Teller!