- 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)