Name: 手品師が映画の「すり・マジックシーン」の矛盾点を解説【Part2】| WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-02-24T08:51:24.000Z
Duration: 15 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is, uh, this is from my physical therapist.

I'm a magician, pickpocket, and sleight of hand artist.

This is my second Vanity Fair video breaking down magic and sleight of hand in film and TV.

Slowly, magically, but distinctly, a black blob becomes a spade.

Fingers quivering, he picks up the card and turns it over.

And I love that Roald Dahl based the character off a real person, Kuda Bux, the man with X-ray eyes.

In this great movie, Benedict Cumberbatch's character learns a skill which allows him to do this effect without trickery.

If you're gonna fake this effect, the easiest way to do it would be with a gambler's deck of marked cards.

Think of it as a deck of cards that's face up and face down at the same time.

Marked cards were developed to cheat at card games, but magicians tend to avoid them, and here's why.

One, if you get caught, you lose all your credibility.

Two, sometimes someone hands me a deck of cards and asks to see magic, and I can't just be like, oh yeah, I'd love to do a magic trick for you.

Let me just use my special deck of cards instead.

And three, a really good magician could take any trick that they would do with a marked deck of cards and do it with a normal deck of cards.

So it's just not worth the hassle for any of us.

Oh, and why else do we not use marked cards?

The back of the next card to be dealt lay clearly visible.

The two of clubs landed neatly in front of Henry alongside the 10 and the nine.

His black eyes glanced up again into Henry's face and rested there, silent, watchful.

There are different types of card marking that have existed in the world of gambling.

Daub is a chemical or kinda oily substance that you put a little on your thumb, and as you're playing, you can mark the back of certain cards.

There are also printed gimmick decks where you shift your depth of focus to read the marks, like a magic eye poster.

This is what one of those decks looks like.

Gambling cheats can use this to punch little divots in cards.

So like Braille, they can feel specific playing cards as they're playing and identify them.

And if you see someone playing cards wearing a green visor, that could be allowing them to see a mark on one of the cards that is otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

Cards can also be naturally marked due to anomalies in the printing process.

Phil Ivey famously took advantage of an observed error within the printing and used them for a process known as edge sorting, keeping track of high and low cards in most cases.

Looking back, I have to say I love Benedict's commitment to what the superpower would actually look like.

And I think Wes Anderson was the perfect director to give this story justice.

Indeed, many of you may be familiar with this technique, but for those of you who aren't, do not be alarmed.

What you're about to see is considered safe.

In this movie, the trick is called the transported man.

It's a translocation effect, which is one of my favorite plots in magic.

One of my mentors, Armando Lucero, was once performing a translocation effect with a coin and two cards.

He would place the cards on the table, put the coin underneath one of the cards, and it would travel to underneath the other card.

After he performed it, a man in the audience stepped forward and asked if he could sign his name on the coin.

By signing his name on the coin, the man was confirming for himself that there was only one coin being used because he would be able to verify his own signature.

Signing the coin closes a door very deliberately.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, that's pretty close to a perfect miracle, but the man who had signed his name on the coin said, oh, now I know how it doesn't work.

For that man, proving that there was only one coin being used was the tipping point, and the feeling of wonder had decreased instead of increased.

As always, kudos to Christopher Nolan and deceptive practices.

One of the producers said to me, hey, that thing on Stallone's arm, that isn't real, is it?

Using one of these in a game is known as playing the joint.

These were actually used by crooked gamblers back in the day, but the Kaplinger, it became antiquated shortly after its invention.

If you get caught with one of these things in a poker game, that's a death sentence.

It would be very difficult to explain your way out of this.

No, no, no, no, this is not for cheating at cards.

But the engineering is really cool, and there are certainly card cheats who have used these things, and devices like it when it comes to switching cards in and out of play.

I should also mention that this is worn under a jacket.

You don't just walk into the card game like, hey guys, who wants to play a friendly game?

Seconds, centers, bottoms, stacking the deck, mucking cards.

In the first few frames of that clip, we saw Expert at the Card Table, which is a book from 1902 that teaches anything and everything cheating at cards.

Interestingly enough, the author of this book has remained a mystery for over a century, but it has plenty of switching techniques designed for the cheat.

Now, gamblers and magicians switch cards in very different ways, but there's a huge similarity.

Both need to appear natural, but within the context of the situation.

When I'm performing, I create my own context, which gives me so much more leeway than someone cheating at cards.

A gambler, for example, would never switch cards like this.

No, if you want to risk your life cheating at cards, you would need a method that fits within the natural movements of gameplay.

This is a deep, deep rabbit hole, but I find it frustrating because I keep trying to get a card game going, and no one returns my calls.

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手品師が映画の「すり・マジックシーン」の矛盾点を解説【Part2】| WIRED Japan

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