How does magic work? Know any little tricks?

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Most use misdirection — for example, getting the audience to look the other way while the magician does something. There’s a reason magicians’ assistants are often scantily clad beautiful women — it gets the audience members (at least the males) to look at the girl rather than what the magician is actually doing. Other things a magician can do are quick hand gestures; "accidentally" knocking something over; etc. to get people looking the other way.

Another sort of misdirection is getting the audience to think about something other than what’s really going on — in other words, the audience might be looking right at whatever the magician is doing, but the magician gets them to think about it the wrong way and to miss the trick. For example, in a card trick I know, at one point I have to force the person I’m doing the trick for to pick a certain card (let’s say it’s an ace) which is already at the top of the deck — but I’ve also gotta make that person think they’ve chosen it freely and haven’t been forced into anything. That’s actually easy. I ask her to pick a number between 1 and 10 and tell me what it is — let’s say she picks 7. I then say, "I need you to count down to the seventh card from the top, like this" — then I demonstrate by quickly dealing seven cards into a face down pile. I then pick up that pile, place it back on top of the deck, hand the deck to the person, and say "now you do it." Notice that the ace was at the *bottom* of that pile, and so when she deals seven cards, she’ll get the ace … and I make her think this is completely under her control by stressing that *she* got to pick the number and that I didn’t influence her choice in any way (when in reality, the number she picked didn’t matter — she’d get the ace no matter what). 99% of the people I’ve done that trick for never catch that. Anyway, that’s another example of misdirection.