My guess is camera trickery. White spheres with numbers on are fantastically easy to render with CG. These are then spliced in digitally, or projected. It’s possible that the studio audience was too far away to see the actual set of balls, which could have shown any set of numbers or other ambiguous symbols. I also like the hypothesis that they were drawn on using a clever system involving photosensitive balls and UV light.

On the mouse game, I imagine that he had four blank cards, bent slightly convex, over mouse symbols drawn in black ink on the black table. Thus, any card will have a mouse on it as long as he pushes down before picking it up.

On the knife game, it’s likely that he palmed both the mouse and the cheque with the numbers written on it.

A surface that blackens if exposed to a laser, say. Or lit from within in a pattern. All you see are six white things which are on something which is later rotated.

But writing on something (‘predicting’) that is in full view of the audience is a basic trick.

The alternative is filming 55k-ish times to be sure of getting five numbers right. He said it took a year… Getting six would be a bonus.

If I could predict lottery numbers, a) I’d be rich and b) I’d do so in a way that was clear it was done before. If – and it’s a big ‘if’, you can’t opine what the numbers are going to be prior to the draw (even after sales stop? come off it!) then you could, for example, announce what their sum / product / difference between pairs of numbers is going to be.

Fixing the balls via an insider will not have happened. The legal issues alone make it a no go. Channel 4′s legal team would have had collective appoplexy at even the possibility of exposing the station to that degree of grief. Remember ITV and the phone in scandals?

Like the Russian Roulette stunt he pulled a few years ago, this is a well engineered trick. Not having watched either of the two shows, I can’t say whether it made for entertaining viewing, the way that one did. It would be interesting to find out what his aim was – whether it is still just self publicity, or whether it’s part of the whole ‘encouraging scepticism and thinking for yourself’ thing he sometimes pushes.

I hope he did fix the balls. That would have been awesome

Steven

I think perhaps one thing I didn’t mention in the post is that I think he crossed another line, which is that while it’s probably best for a whole number of reasons for magicians to stay silent as to how they did a trick, if they say they are going to explain how they did it, then they should do just that.

Saying you’re going to explain how you did it, getting paid to explain how you did it, getting people to watch for an entire hour waiting for you to explain how you did it… and then not explaining how you did it.

I think that just a bit crap.

Unless he really did fix the balls… in which case, he is indeed the man.

Anyway, as a magician, I kind of agree with you. It’s cheating if its not what you would see if you were standing there.

The bottom line is, this was a VERY good publicity stunt. Controversy makes careers. Uri Geller became famous because people spent so long arguing about whether or not its real. Derren has done the same thing here, he’s creating controversy, controversy creates discussion, discussion gets your name known. Everyone who sees Derren live KNOWS he’s a genius, which is why not that many people actually get annoyed if he cheated this time.

What you think?

Steven