pretty sure it's the latter, the cloches didn't totally cover the dishes, so having someone inside the tables swapping them out seems extremely unlikely to impossible. not to mention of course being way less practical and unnecessary.

yeah if he pulls the envelopes out of his jacket he could just have 6 different pockets.

p&t did a similar trick on their 'off the deep end' special about 5 years ago (which i highly recommend) where they had set up 52 different reveal methods for a 'pick a card' trick - which is how i was expecting that guy that did the 'penn and teller play darts and make words' trick to do his thing until he had the exact dart scores written on there

but the lady chose who got which envelopes and where they sat

how did the envelopes with the specific food get at the right table?

haha i am going to refrain from being horrible, but come on dude wtf. all three cards are identical. they all have 3 messages.

if the envelopes have all 3 lines on them (which seems to be the case since the pic shows table 1 with table 3's line on it), then it doesn't matter at all where they end up

yea, if that pic is real (it looks to be) then it's just a super lame trick and he got lucky P&T didn't ask the see the envelopes. I think P&T thought (like us) that the trick was more impressive than it was..

i took the pic

Why was that even allowed on the show, its a completely lame trick, i thought the trick was lame even before that pic.

ugh magic is disappointing when it's not magic

If I'm understanding correctly, not only was the trick not real magic, but it required absolutely no skill and could have been performed by absolutely anybody right off the street. Absolutely nothing impressive about it.

I don't get why the participants went along with it. If it was me, I would have been like, "Uhh WTF, this says to fill in the blank..."

We've established that they aren't plants, right?

Off topic, and I dont know if this is being discussed elsewhere but did anyone see that Dynamo show the other day.

Just no way he can do those tricks without having mad stooges / plants / camera tricks.

i feel like 95% of people who say this wouldn't actually do it. especially in a tv studio, with penn and teller present, a studio audience, and on a show that will be going out to 3 million people (obviously if you did do it, it wouldn't actually go out, but my point stands). yes they are not stooges.


i just think it's funny that on all the forums i've been reading (maybe not so much this one), everyone LOVED this trick. people thought it was awesome, clever, and it did seem to take a while to figure it out. now it's worked out a lot of people hate it. i don't really understand why. this seems to be a very common reaction to the reveal of how a trick is actually done, and not unique to this one. the only thing i'm annoyed about is that i didn't figure it out, the unimpressed faces of the guys was such a huge giveaway.



vbm, yeah that show obviously involves a ton of editing and some stooges (no idea how many). it sucks. there's a thread about it if you wanna bump.

I think there's a big difference between hating a trick when you learn it's not really magic and hating a trick when you learn the method is incredibly lame and basically a lie. If there had been some impressive sleight of hand or clever method I'd think this was a good trick but to learn it was just three random people playing along is disappointing. I consider this trick akin to a hypnotist's method and I'm pretty sure P&T wouldn't want someone like that on their show.

I was just about to post that. There are a ton of tricks where even after knowing the key I'm like wow that's impressive, pulling cards out of thin air is an easy example.

I realise elaborate stage tricks are rarely impressive once revealed, but a trick which anyone in the world could perform with 0 training doesnt deserve to be on the show.

100% agree, sometimes when I find out how a trick is done I am still really impressed. That trick is a load of crap

i of course hear what you're saying, but there was simply no other way that trick could be done! if anything you should be hating on the whole trick for being too perfect, not the method used.

I just think the trick was against the spirit of the show which is why P&T were fooled. This trick was about as close to having plants as you can get without actually having plants. Instead you just have three people that want to be on tv, not screw up the trick, and not look like *******s. The implication for all the other tricks on the show is that if a volunteer is involved they are equally as fooled as the rest of the audience. I wish the girl had picked Penn or Teller to be one of the three people. I assume he has some speech prepared to explain why they can't be selected however I think P&T would have realized something fishy was going on if that happened.

Well sure I might not actually do it. That's not the point, though. As everyone else has said, it's not a magic trick at all. It's just getting people to play along and pretend it's a magic trick.

The closest comparison to this trick so far, IMO, is the one with the darts, spelling a word, and roshambo. He somehow produced a card that had the results on it. I don't how he did it, and prior to seeing the images above I assumed that the food/envelope trick had been done a similar way (somehow secretly writing the messages and using sleight of hand to get it in the right location). To find out it's just fill-in-the-blank by audience members is super lame.

well watching it again, yeah, also just watch right when all three open the cards, look for the poker tells. on the two guys on the right, classic poker tell that a huge bluff is coming.

of course, no one is looking for that until after you've seen the picture of the card.

yeah, i've been thinking about the similarities with this trick.

but again, i don't dislike the darts trick because of the method used. i dislike it because it was so perfect that the method used becomes pretty obvious.

The darts had finely tuned magnetic tips that he directed to the spots he wanted by adjusting his wrist watch.

The letter boards that spelled housey and toilet were sprayed with a fresh perfume so that Penn and Teller would instinctively choose those tiles. You'll notice that no other words can be spelled with those letters.

Finally, the rock paper scissors was a 50-50 shot. Coinflip for a trip to Vegas.

I think the reason people were so impressed by the trick at first and are not now is that their logic went something like this:

i) Cool trick!
ii) Unless the cards just told them to read out their name. That would be super lame.
iii) It's so lame that that would never get on the show. Given that, amazing trick!
iv) Oh, that is how they did it. Lame.

I guessed that the method was that the guys had to read out the correct line filling in their names however I decided that wasn't the method as there was simply far too much chance one of them (like I would) would refuse to play along.

WTF, I'm just catching up on this. So the note says "say your name here"? That's beyond pathetic, and I can't believe they allowed that on the show if the method has to be shown in advance to the adjudicator. If I was 10 years older I'd probably complain to OFCOM. I hope they do this in the Vegas show and one of the audience members rats them out and they get booed off stage. Apparently there will be a Christmas special showing how the acts got on in Vegas, so we might even get to see it.