Beyond tricks and illusions, magicians have often entertained with bar bets and magic challenges.
We have a collection for you. How many can you do?
Four coins here. Four coins here. Can you take a quarter place it
somewhere on the table here and have five here and five here? Here's how you do it.
Five here. Five there.
Here's a sequence for you.
Can you, right here, find the next letter in the segment without using the letter "e"?
Here's how. We're going to write the letter "f,"
which makes the sequence work.
Four matches. Can you move a single match and create a square? Here's how.
Right there, you have a square.
Here's a "do as I do." And your friends can never win at this. So here's the sequence.
You're going to bring out your three mugs and you ask your spectators to try and follow a sequence.
So we're going to move these two, these two and then these two. So watch how I do it. I go one.
Two. Three. And you notice that all of the cups are mouth up. Now you ask your friend to do this
and your friend can try. If they've been watching, they'll remember the sequence. It's these,
these and these. Your friends try it and they go one,
two, three and you'll notice that even though the mugs align, they're all
mouth down. So what happened? Here's the secret. When you demonstrate how to do this
you start the mugs in this configuration. The outer two mugs are mouth down and the middle mug
is mouth up. But at the end, after you demo, these are all mouth up. When your friends start you turn
this one down. You'll notice that now. Now that you know the secret the outer two are mouth up,
the middle one is mouth down and then in that case, no matter how many times they
try - how many times they try and study - you they will always end up mouth down.
And never mouth up. And this is a classic bar magic kind of bet or "do as I do."
Can you use one stroke of your marker and make sense of this equation? Here's how. One stroke.
950 is equal to 10 to 10.