4 – Cheating & Forcing

In this chapter we will see how to create magic effects firstly by using information that our students are not aware that we have at our disposal, and then by using a concept known as forcing, where the volunteer believes he is given a free choice (but really isn’t).

      • Introduction to doing magic by cheating
        • How to use information at your disposal to create magical effects and develop tricks of your own.
      • Three Important People
        • One of the most complete and all-round tricks on this course (for teachers of foreign languages, anyway) which uses the concept of cheating to get an edge… with this trick, which is a great trick to use at the beginning of the school year as an ice-breaker, you’ll have your volunteers talking about different people who are important in their lives; describing their appearance and their personality, their age, their work… and- especially important- practicing the third person singular. This trick also allows you to engage and interact with all your students (not just your volunteer) so that everyone becomes involved in the trick and also gets the chance to participate and practice English.
      • Three Book Tests + Hollow
        • Book tests are a favourite among mentalists, and for a teacher they’re a great way of getting children into the library. Basically your student chooses a word on a page of a book and you guess what that word is. We will use three different “Book Test” effects to introduce the concept of forcing, which we will see in the next video, as well as the swap-box, which we will see how to make in the video “how to make your own swap-box”. But this chapter also includes the trick “Hollow” which is another “book test” effect, but which uses a completely different method to guess the word.
      • Forcing
        • Throughout this course we have seen many ways to force a student to choose whatever word, or number or card that you want. We have seen the concept of forcing in tricks like the Svengali Notepad (using the Svengali effect), Six Envelopes and VISA (using ambiguity or equivocation) and in tricks like Book Tests (which we saw in the video Three Book Tests + Hollow). In this video we will look at different ways of forcing your students to choose a particular element (a number, word or card), and we will look at what we can do with that forced information to create a magic trick.
      • How to make your own swap-box
        • In magic we use a swap-box for many kinds of tricks. We already saw how a swap-box can be used in the first book test as we saw in the video Three Book Tests + Hollow, we have also seen how to use a swap-box to force a number or a word (or even a series of numbers and words… or phrases… or questions) on a student, as we saw in the video on forcing. In this video you will learn how to make your own swap-box.
      • Hundreds and Thousands II
        • Hundreds and Thousands II- a trick for practicing numbers between 100 and 999 which uses the swap box concept that we have just seen- is more complicated than Hundreds and Thousands I (from the first chapter) but it’s much more spectacular.

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Next chapter: “Memory Tricks” >>