- Yo! What is up, guys?
Chris Ramsay here, and
welcome back. (coughs)
Today, I'm gonna teach you
something really, really cool.
This is a mentalism effect,
basically a mind reading effect,
how you can predict, correctly
predict, the name of a city,
the name someone is thinking of,
a number, playing card, anything at all.
This is a very old magic
principle, the mentalism principle,
and it is something that you're going to
be able to perform
straight out of the gate
and you won't need a
million props to do this.
A lot of you guys are really intrigued
by the mentalism that I do
with playing cards especially,
when I get them to think of
something and then divine it.
So this is gonna be a very basic way
to get that information
and to be able to reveal it
in a very cool and magical way.
So if you're just getting into mentalism,
a really good resource, by the way,
before I get into the performance,
'cause I did perform
this, and the explanation,
I'm just going to show you guys this here.
This is 13 Steps to Mentalism by Corinda.
I'll leave the link below.
I'm not teaching really
anything out of this
because this is really heavy stuff,
although this principle
that I am teaching today
is found in Corinda.
You'll be able to pick that up if you like
and if you really wanna take
some mentalism more seriously,
'cause a lot of,
literally, every mentalism
principle that's ever existed
is pretty much in here.
So 13 Steps to Mentalism,
the Bible, the Holy Grail, for mentalism.
But enough of that.
Let's get into the performance.
I sat down here.
I didn't have a spectator here
at hand, so you know what?
I reached out to a
friend of mine on Skype,
a friend of mine, Jeremy,
who owns a hockey channel,
a few hockey channels, on YouTube.
He'll talk a little bit
about that as you'll see.
Again, I'm gonna stress this in the video,
but nothing was set up.
And when we get into the explanation,
I'll show you basically how I
got away with doing all this.
So enjoy.
All right, guys.
So I called my buddy here, Jeremy,
who also has a YouTube
channel, who's a big YouTuber,
and he teaches hockey.
Jeremy, say hi.
- Hey, Chris.
How is it going?
- I'm good.
You wanna tell my viewers a
little bit about your channel?
Maybe they can go check it
out if they're interested.
- Yeah, sure.
So I basically teach people
how to play hockey online,
so that channel is How To Hockey.
Did that for a few years and
built a pretty good following.
And I've taken a little
break from that channel
and started The Hockey Movement,
which is also teaching a bit of hockey,
but also doing some fun stuff.
We went to a cave recently
and played hockey in a cave.
- I saw that.
- Did a road trip to California
to try to find a pond to
skate on in California.
- So I met Jeremy at the, what was it?
The NextUp YouTube thing
when I went down to Toronto.
And we were actually roommates down there.
But just to be sure,
we've not set anything up.
There's nothing set up.
I didn't preempt you.
I just told you to get
a deck of cards, right?
- Yeah, he said that I
need a deck of cards.
Actually, I want to test one
of my own magic tricks on you.
- Oh, really?
- Everyone dabbles, right?
- Sure.
I'm all about it.
- So this one is pretty amazing.
You said that we're gonna
do some mind reading.
- Yeah.
- The start of every
magic trick, pick a card.
On the count of three, I want
you to say your card out loud,
and I'm gonna pull up your
card and show it to the camera.
- All right, all right.
Here we go.
- So one, two, three.
- Three of spades.
Ugh.
- (mumbles)
Two of hearts.
- Close enough.
It works one in every 52
times I try it, just by odds.
When it does work, it works great.
- That would've been an amazing trick.
All right, so let's try this out.
First of all, I'm gonna
pull the camera down here
so the camera can see,
this is for my viewers,
so the camera can see what I'm doing here,
that I'm not doing anything fishy,
that everything that I'm
gonna be doing down here
is in plain view.
You're obviously not gonna
see what I'm gonna be doing,
but rest assured that
if you watch the video,
this will be in sync
and this will be live.
So, this is a bit of a mentalism trick.
First of all, can you just
show me all the cards?
That's fine.
Can you just show me all the cards?
- Yeah. Shuffle them?
- Yeah, yeah, shuffle them if you like.
And just show them to me,
the faces of the cards.
- Oh, show you this?
- Yeah.
So spread them out completely.
Okay, spread ...
Okay.
All right.
Close them up, close them up,
and leave them on a table.
Do you have a table there?
- Yeah, I'll just put them
on my laptop right here.
- Yeah, perfect.
And now what I wanna
to do is cut anywhere,
cut the deck anywhere.
- Yeah.
- All right.
And take the bottom half.
- Yep.
- And put it on top, but laterally.
So we know where you cut
to, yeah, exactly, yeah,
and leave it on top.
And we'll get back to that in a second.
So first off, what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna write down a prediction.
I won't even show this to the camera.
I have three papers here.
And I'm gonna write down a
prediction before we begin.
Let's see here.
All right.
I think this is what
you're going to go with.
So I'll leave the first prediction
right there in plain view.
For the first time, I'm
done writing my prediction.
I want you to just say a random number,
any random number at all.
- Three.
- Three, okay.
A lot of people actually say three.
Three or seven are very common.
So let's make it--
- I was gonna say eight,
but because we spent time,
I thought you might know that
my jersey number is eight,
so I--
- That, I didn't know that,
but I should've. (laughs)
Okay, let's make it a
little bit more intricate.
Think of a three digit number.
Just name it out loud for the viewers.
A three digit number,
any three digit number.
- Three digit number?
- Yep.
- 128.
- 128, okay.
So I've got my prediction here.
That's already been done.
Next thing I'm going to ask you is,
before I ask you, I'm gonna write down,
look at me, look in the
camera for a second.
Okay.
I'm gonna write this down.
I think this'll ...
Yeah, I think we'll go with that.
Okay, perfect.
I'll set this one aside.
I'd like you just to give
me the name of someone
that's really close to you.
Maybe not your wife,
because I might know that.
Just someone I might not know.
Just the first name.
- We'll say Mason.
- Mason, which is?
- My little guy.
- Mason is your son.
Yeah, okay.
- We didn't spend that much
time together at YouTube.
- Right. (laughs)
So okay, perfect.
So lastly, let's ...
Let's do this.
Maybe we can do ...
Okay, I'll do this now.
Okay.
So lastly, what we're gonna do,
I just wrote down the last
prediction, by the way,
show it to the camera,
and the last prediction predicts
the card that you cut to.
- Okay.
I don't know what card--
- Right, and I have no idea, either.
None of this was set up.
So I want you to lift off the top packet,
lift the top packet off.
- Yeah.
- And look at the first card that's there.
No, not that one.
So put that one aside.
- Oh, yeah.
- And the card you cut to,
just lift off the top
card of the bottom packet.
- And look at it?
- Look at it, and for the
first time, don't show me.
This was my prediction.
See if the camera can see that.
What was the card?
What was it?
- The right time to show you now?
- Yep.
- King of diamonds.
What? (laughs)
- That's pretty good, right?
But hold on, hold on, wait, wait.
'cause I have two other cards here.
- Yeah.
- I also had the word Mason.
- No way.
- And I got one last card here.
And the number you said was what?
- Three.
- Yeah, but after that, you said--
- Oh, 128.
- Yeah, 'cause I have that, too.
I crossed out three
and then I had the 128.
And that's one, two, three.
The camera can see that I
only have three papers here,
and those are the three
papers that we started with.
- Wow (mumbles)
That's impressive.
I wanna know how you do it, man.
(mumbles) the whole time
that we were doing this,
you just kept (mumbles)
crazy, mind blowing thing.
- Well, if you stay tuned to the channel,
you'll be able to find out
how I did this one at least.
You can impress your friends.
All right, Jeremy, I'll let you go.
Thanks so much.
- Mason is practicing his version.
- Oh, look at that.
Throw it at the camera, Mason.
Throw it at the camera.
- [Jeremy] One, two, three.
- Hey!
All right, guys.
So for this tutorial, you're
going to need a deck of cards,
a pen, and some pieces of paper.
Now, what I've used in this
particular presentation
was these little stock business cards.
They're like little gift card things
that I got off of Amazon.
I leave the link below
if you're interested.
They're pretty cheap.
I think this was like five dollars.
Sort of little business cards here.
And these are perfect
because they're opaque.
You can't see through them,
so if I write down on them you can't,
and they're very sturdy.
If you wanna put them in your
wallet for a peak or anything,
these are perfect little billets,
and that's what they're called
in mentalism is billets.
If you don't have these,
you can use Post-It notes,
you can use a piece of paper,
or you can use blank
cards, anything you like.
I like using this.
It just looks a little
bit more professional
for when I'm performing.
This whole principle is basically called
the one ahead principle,
where you have a piece of information
and you're one ahead of the spectator.
I'll give you a quick
rundown of how this works,
and then we'll go into detail.
What I did was a little cheeky.
I had him have a deck of cards over Skype,
and I had him show me all the cards
to make sure it was a full deck.
All I did was peak the top card.
So I peaked that.
In his case, it was the king of diamonds.
This case, the 10 of spades.
And so he shuffled,
and then I peaked that,
and I was like, "Perfect,"
and so he cut it,
and put the bottom half on
top laterally like that,
and we'll get back to it in a second.
Now, what that is right now is
called the crisscross force.
And the way that the
crisscross force works is
I'm forcing a card, so
in a couple of minutes,
I'll tell him to remove the top pack
and peak at this card that he cut to,
which is actually the
top card of the pack.
Very, very smart.
The crisscross force is highly underused,
but it's a very, very smart thing
when put into a routine properly.
I don't advise you just straight up
do a crisscross force and reveal the card.
The way this trick works
is with time misdirection.
So the brain forgets useless information
after a few seconds, so
even after a few minutes,
he's not gonna remember
that this was the top card.
I just asked him to cut anywhere he liked
and to complete the cut like this,
and we'll get back to that in a second.
And then when I came back to it, I said,
"Do you remember you cut the cards?
"Remove the top half and
show me the card you cut to."
For this routine, you can
use any force you want.
You can force a name or a
number or anything else.
Any type of force would work.
This is a very, very easy force to do,
and obviously something
you can do over Skype,
which I found out today,
which was pretty interesting.
10 of spades is there.
We know that information already.
That's the information that's
gonna give us a one ahead.
Now what you're gonna do is
you're gonna take the first
piece and you're gonna tell him,
"I'm gonna write a piece
of information down
"and then see if I can get it right."
All I'm going to write down here is,
you guessed it, 10 of spades.
But he doesn't know that.
He thinks I'm writing
a different thing down.
So I'm gonna say, "Okay,
I wrote this down.
"I'm gonna set it aside.
"This is my prediction
for the first question."
And I'm gonna say, "Just name a number."
Now usually, they'll
name like three or seven,
and then once you do, you
could say, "You know what?
"Make it a more random number,
"something I wouldn't be able to guess,
"maybe a three digit number."
In this case, they're
gonna say something else.
Jeremy said, "128."
I said, "Perfect, all right.
"So I've got my prediction there.
"Next question.
"Before I ask the question,
"I'm gonna write down my prediction."
Now, because I'm one ahead,
I'm gonna write down what
he just said, which was 128.
But here's a little
bit of a cheeky reveal.
Because I asked him to name any number
and he named the number three,
I'm gonna write three down secretly
and I'm gonna cross it out.
And then I'm gonna write 128.
So when I reveal it, I could say,
"What was the number you said?"
And he said, "Three."
I said, "No, but we chose another number."
He said, "128."
And now we have 128, three
crossed out, and then 128.
I don't know if you guys can see that
because I'm writing with a pen.
I don't advise you use
Sharpies for this routine
because you can hear the
sound of the pen much clearer,
so they might be able to guess
what you're writing down.
So again, here, let me just double check
just to make sure you guys
are seeing it on camera.
That was asking him to think of a number.
Here, I'm going to ask him,
after I'm done writing it,
so I write, "3, X, 128."
I put my prediction aside,
but now I'm gonna ask him,
"Okay, I've predicted something else.
"Can you give me the name of someone
"that's close to you
that I wouldn't know?"
Maybe the initials or the first
name or anything you like.
And at this point, you could even say,
"Think of just a word.
"What's a word that comes to mind?"
Because that's what you're gonna
be writing on the next card.
You're already one ahead here.
In this case, he said, "Mason,"
which is his son's name.
So I say, "Perfect, all right.
"That's my second prediction."
And for the last prediction,
I'm gonna write down the
card that you cut to.
And so I'm pretending to
write down the name of a card,
and all I'm doing now, obviously,
is writing the word or the name Mason.
But I do that secretly,
and I turn that around,
and then I put all of these cards together
because we don't want him remembering
the order of these cards.
Now, in this particular routine,
I revealed the playing card first.
That was a bit of a
mistake, I'll be honest.
I usually keep the force for last
because it's very, very clean.
But it didn't really change much.
As you saw, the reaction was great.
I started revealing the force.
Usually, you would start with
the first thing you predicted,
which was the number.
I kept that for last in this case.
So in this case, I said, "All right.
"So first we're gonna reveal
"my prediction of your playing card,"
which was, if you wanna have a look at it.
So he removed this.
He removed the top card.
10 of spades matches my
prediction perfectly.
"Next, what was the name of the person?"
And he says, "Mason."
I say, "That's exactly
what I wrote down, Mason."
And then lastly, "Oh, I
asked you to say a number.
"What was that number again?"
He said, "Three."
And I said, "No, but
there was another number."
He said, "128."
And I said, "Yeah, that's what I got."
So I crossed out three
and I wrote 128 when I was sure of that.
That always makes for
a really good reaction,
and in this case, you
can do whatever you want.
If you like, this doesn't
have to be crossed.
I love adding the crossed out thing,
'cause it makes it more real.
But you can say, "All right, well, listen.
"Think of a city."
And they name a city.
And you say, "You know what?
"Think of a different city.
"That's something everybody names."
And again, you write that city down.
You cross it out.
You write the other one.
All you need is a force,
or a piece of information
that you have that they don't know,
and once you have that, so
in this case, queen of clubs,
you ask them to cut,
and to complete the cut,
we'll get back to that.
Now this whole routine is
dependent on time misdirection.
We're only gonna get
back to that at the end,
so he's completely forgotten
about why he did this,
what he did.
He's gonna follow
instructions when you say,
"What did you cut to?
"The queen of clubs."
So that works perfectly in this routine.
So to start off once again,
you're gonna write down a prediction.
All you're writing down is,
in this case, the queen of clubs.
You're gonna write, "Queen of clubs,"
but you're gonna say, "Give
me a number, a random number.
"Three?
"More random.
"128, perfect.
"Next question."
On this card, I'm writing three, 128,
and I'm saying, "Boom, boom, boom."
Put that aside.
All right.
"And somebody you're close to.
"Mason, perfect, all right.
"Last question, last
thing we're gonna do is
"write down the prediction
of the playing card."
I'm writing, "Mason."
Put that down, mix them
all up, get those together,
and now you're able to reveal
all three pieces of information.
So use this wisely.
This is a very, very
old principle in magic
to get one ahead.
There are many variations
of the one ahead or one behind principle.
This probably for me is
the easiest, most organic.
If you can force anything at all,
even if it's, some people
like to force a word.
So you say, "Think of a vegetable."
And most people will think of a carrot.
So you can just try, be ballsy,
and write down, "Carrot."
That way, you're eliminating
the deck of cards
and you're completely doing
some prop-less, impromptu mentalism.
Well, prop-less.
All you need is a paper and pen,
and you can reveal it that way.
Or have him think of
a color, which is red,
or a shape, which is usually
a triangle or a circle.
So you can be ballsy with that,
and those things are found
in Psychological Subtleties by Banachek.
So hope you enjoyed that.
All right, guys.
So that was the tutorial
for this little mind reading effect.
I hope you enjoyed it
and I hope you use this
principle in different ways.
There are many things you can do
to many types of information
that you can have revealed,
whether it's a birthdate, a star sign.
And if you, as I mentioned,
if you have a piece of information,
like in this tutorial,
we forced a card on them.
So if you can force
or if you have some insider information,
let's say, you know their birthday.
You don't know who they are,
but you found their birthday somehow,
then that could also be
part of their prediction,
so you won't have to use a deck of cards.
I used a deck of cards
'cause it was fooling
in this sort of scenario
where he was on Skype, which
was really interesting.
I felt like trying that out.
Or force any type of information.
So anything you can force
is also good for this,
and the rest of the information
can be freely named and thought of.
So again, if you wanna pick
up 13 Steps to Mentalism,
the link is below.
And I wanna say thank you to
everybody watching these videos
and learning magic as I'm teaching them.
This is really fun for me to do.
And that's it.
I'll drop a few videos this week,
and then I'm off to Italy,
and I can't wait for that.
So stay tuned.
Stay tuned to next Monday's tutorial,
which will be a good one.
We're gonna do a color change,
a really cool color change
that you guys can learn.
I would really appreciate it
if you give this video some love.
Like, comment, sub, share, all that stuff,
and I'll see you guys on the next video.
Thanks for tuning in, and
we'll see you next time.
Peace.
(hip hop music)
