others ive seen have successfully challenged penn and teller within reason.

i totally agree. its very odd, ambiguous criteria that they are using.. the actual contest of the show i find very poorly structured. the parts i enjoy of the show are the high quality magic, P&T, and ross aint bad. Wish the contest had more merit though.

i want to know how these tricks are done :/

That list trick was kind of lame, who is to say the one magician who could see the cards wasn't signalling to the other one? The French trick was impressive but incredibly dull. The food trick was very impressive.

what about near the end though when the guy rattled off like 4 famous people in a row, very fast? How could they signal that so well? Also the assistant isn't doing anything noticeable to me when I was watching :/

Hmmm, the Victorian guys were a bit annoying. The way he handled/hid the deck after it was shuffled is way too suspicious. You never let a deck go out of sight for even a moment unless you want to mess with it. Else, people will suspect you of messing with it. I think he did this on purpose to mislead P&T.

I think that some sort of signaling had to be used. Normally in a trick like this, you wouldn't have one of the magicians stand such that he could see the cards the other magician is guessing. If you do, then people will suspect signalling. However, given the above paragraph, I wouldn't doubt that this is another misdirection by them. How they could do it without messing with the deck or signaling I do not know, however.

The other problem with the trick is that it could have easily been done by messing with the deck. So much like the CD trick discussion, it shouldn't matter that they used an alternate method when there's a simple and plausible explanation P&T got.

Michael Vincent bores me. I fully believe that he has the mechanics down perfectly, but there's no real wow factor. If the cards in the end were blue, that would have been amazing. Especially since it was obvious they were going to be red (even if you didn't get the basics of how the trick would be done, there would be no other reason to sign the cards).

I agree that the French people were amazing but not so exciting. I've got no idea what they did, but I didn't enjoy it. I'm not sure why, either.

The food trick was interesting, and at least entertaining. It would be so easy to do with a plant, though, that if it weren't, I'm surprised he didn't go through some trouble of making her seem actually random.

I'm pretty sure the show wouldn't allow plants. Plus, you'd need four plants for it to work. Michael Vincent is amazing but creepy, the cards being red made his trick kind of lame, since all the stuff about shuffling the blue deck was irrelevant, clearly he just skilfully palmed the three cards and then did some shuffling/cutting sleight of hand to produce those three. The French act sucked because they were sooooo slow and pretentious. That thing went on way too long. The Penn/Teller trick at the end sucked too.

yeh, this.

there's obviously no plants on this show.

this ep was by far the best of the show's run.

that floating box trick was amazing.

They made the box seem weightless even though there was someone inside it.

The woman would be the only plant necessary. We don't even know where the envelopes are until long after we know the names of the guys.

agree with that spoiler. complete bs to do that fake move though (and it was obviously intentional no matter what they say). i don't think p&t were that impressed, they didn't even get up to shake their hands.

none of the tricks last night really wowed me, the trick with the meals was kinda meh but i can see how its impressive. Its just getting the right people to sit at the right tables though isnt it because before we even see the cards someone has obviously asked for the names of the people and they already know which dish is sitting at which table so its just getting those cards in their hands and at the right table which makes me think the girl is a plant because that makes the whole thing super easy. Are plants an accepted form of trickery?

there's basically a 0% chance she's a plant.

from the people being picked to being on stage with nametags took a while and we didn't see any of it, nor where the envelopes came from. it was long-winded but very impressive i thought.

why is this the case?

she's told to make sure the guy with the (Whatever) color envelope will match up with the table with that food, that's why she switched the one time.

johnny thompson (highly respected magic guy who works w/ penn and teller in vegas) is backstage as an adjudicator and knows how every trick is done. i guess that doesn't make it impossible, but i just simply can't imagine a trick that involves a stooge being allowed on the show.

fwiw i just read on a forum some guy saying there are abs no stooges used and it's a variation of some method that is in print, but he doesn't name it.

thats a good point. They probably wouldnt allow it because its just not that impressive.

It would have been a lot better if the girl had thrown something to pick out the 3 people rather than just randomly selecting them. I don't understand why they didn't do this

michael vincent just comes off as a guy doing sleight of hand exhibitions instead of a stage show magician. technically proficient, just no wow factor to it - and knowing that makes every awkward hand position and extraneous movement stick out like a sore thumb

editing out the point of origin for the envelopes in the food trick takes a lot away from it, imo

the floating box was good, and i think it has the potential to be a really amazing performance piece if done on a stage designed for it

the trick with the 1800s guys was just not impressive - having a partner that both handles the cards and can see the cards just takes so much out of it, no matter how they actually did it. i do believe that they didn't do a deck switch though, because then a viewing partner making clear-as-day hand gestures on his vest wouldn't have been needed (the gestures were hidden from p&t's angle by hiding his hand behind ross, but the camera angle made it lolobv). there was also a strange editing cut done around when the fat one said "lift your chin up a bit"

i'd already seen the nail gun bit and how it's done, so i skipped over that

read a few things from people at the show that said penn was pretty angry at the victorians and said something like 'hold on a minute, something ain't right here'. teller said something on twitter like 'there was a fakey, move, yes'. they definitely added cards to the deck at some point, i don't know if it was during the 'fakey move' part or later.

some more twitter stuff :

Question: 'Did you tell Penn & Teller how you did the trick afterwards or not?'
Morgan: 'yes, pretty much straight away. Teller was delighted with how clever it was.'

Question: 'Will we ever get to see the act that didnt fool penn and teller that was cut from the first episode?'
Morgan: 'afraid not. We perform it regularly at cabaret nights though and if you bum into us in the street will do it too!'

Morgan (in reply to speculation): 'We all have to send the method to the off stage adjudicator weeks before so they'd know lying.'

Question: 'hand signals from the hand in the pocket? '
Morgan: ''fraid not. Legitimate magical powers

chicken, if you know for sure, plz PM me (or use spoilers?) how the nailgun trick is done. i have read a lot of theories, but don't know which to believe. because of how safety-oriented they are, i suspect the gun does not actually contain any nails, but that seems pretty tough to do and impressive.


re : the envelopes trick

you've very likely seen this nailgun theory then - i do not know for absolute sure, but the video i originally saw of it definitely seemed to me like

Agree about spoiler-izing the nail gun trick if you can.

stereodan owning everyone with the exact nail method at the end of this thread :

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/76...l-gun-1004594/

Thanks for directing me to this thread.

1) Piff was ****ing hilarious;
2) That article mentioned before said something that I completely agree with and was thinking since episode one, and is worth repeating:
3) Did anyone ever come to a conclusion of how that guy did the envelope trick from episode 1?