What do you get?
It’s 70 minutes of affable explanation in his trademark style of speaking
to the camera as if you were across the table. I found it slow to really get started, but there is
substance and value as it proceeds. There is a bonus video and a pdf that explains the significance
the combinations that dice generate.
Carl is keen to avoid the magician or audience members
doing addition or other basic arithmetic operations. It’s about tilting the odds, not doing the
sums.
What is it about?
One theme is how to roll two dice apparently to freely
choose an item in an array of 12 items.
The goal is to force one item, but without obtrusive
restrictions or artificiality in the process.
The aim is to maximise the likelihood of plausibly
arriving at the force. The suggested scripting overall does this intelligently, but there’s
something I’d improve in the case where the number rolled is one short of the location of the force.
Scripting elegantly deflects unfavourable rolls.
Another theme is how to use dice rolls to
constrain the choice of two- or three-digit numbers to perform lottery, an ACAAN, and presumably
book (or word) tests. (Check out Irwin’s Pick Six, https://www.penguinmagic.com/p/16976)
We could work much of this out ourselves, but Carl guides us through, and offers good scripting
tips designed to restrict options while seeming to widen them.
Use and versatility
Potential advantages of such routines:
--familiar and genuinely innocent props
--built-in audience participation in freely choosing numbers, and
--there’s natural scope
for banter.
Compared to what?
Most would be familiar with rather lame effects
where a row of 6 options is presented and the participant invited to think of a number from 1 to 6.
“Five? F-I-V-E”, and indicating the fourth item, after counting from the right or left of the series
as required.
Carl Irwin’s thinking is vastly superior, if this is the main point of
comparison. Carl does not refer to anybody else’s comparable work on making selections using dice,
precedents that may or may not exist. However, dice certainly do things other methods can’t.
The Common Magician tends strongly to free us from our dependence on buying props and gimmicks.
It’s only $10, so if there’s even one idea that solves a problem you have with an otherwise
appealing routine in this broad genre, it’d be worth it.
Magic with numbers but without math
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