Sujetos del contrato de trabajo

[Reprinted from Bryn Renolds The Safwan Papers e-book 2008, pg. 37 – with permission]

The “which hand” effect is only a 50/50 proposition, but for some reason it plays extremely well., especially if performed multiple times…and perhaps ending with a prediction of what had just occurred. What follows is not a complete effect. It is a method, that when performed with complete confidence, enables the performer to appear to be able to divine in which hand a spectator has hidden an object.

I will tell you up front that BOHT requires the performer to appear that he has complete confidence in what he just accomplished. When first reading this you may think that it is just a scam and that it will never work. I assure you it does work, (and magnificently) and at the conclusion I am going to point out how a very famous mentalist uses a similar technique in a routine that most of you have at least seen, if not perform a variation of yourself. I have been performing BOHT long before I ever saw that said famous routine, and it was nice to see someone of such high regard using a similar principle.

Many will say “It is too bold!” Those that will try it out, with the confident air required, will drop the “too” from their description. This will not work perfectly for some of you the first few times you try it; for others it will work right away. I mean no disrespect to those whom I mention that it will not work well the first couple of tries. The only reason that it may not play as strongly as you may like is that you will be giving off an air of feeling guilty that may be picked up by the spectator. Let you inner, emotionless, psychopath out to play for a minute and this will be an out that will serve you well.

Before we begin, I am going to take a couple of pages to describe the genesis of this and describe one of my best performances of mentalism…and I wasn’t even aware of what I had just done! The reason I succeeded in the final phase of BOHT, described below, was due to me not KNOWING what I was doing so therefore had no guilt at all to telegraph.

I will try to be brief, but this is a great example of how other cultures view magic and those that perform it. I was also deployed with the Army to the Middle East during Operations Desert Shield & Storm in 1990/1. After the short ground war was over, we had taken literally tens of thousands of Iraqi prisoners. We set up prison camps in the middle of the desert by making “compounds” in the sand with several rolls of razor wire forming squares that would each contain several hundred prisoners. We divided our unit into shifts, and then spent the next few months simply sitting at the entrance to each compound to “guard” them. (Where were they going to go in the middle of the Arabian Desert?)

Most simply surrendered upon seeing us. While some were hardcore

Republican Guard soldiers, the vast majority were just regular citizens that were given a rifle and sent to the front lines. Many would come up to the wire and want to talk to us. Of course, most did not speak good English, but there is one universal language that everyone seems to understand: making a coin completely vanish before their eyes.

They would tell their fellow captives of what I could do, who would in turn come up and hand me a coin to vanish. (I had a whole bag of coins to bring home that were either sleeved, pocketed, or simply dropped into the sand!) I had some of the best reactions to a simple coin vanish that I had ever seen. I came to find out why the reactions were so strong: they thought what I was doing was real.

I truly believe that from their frame of reference regarding cultures, that they thought I would not pull an Ali-Baba and set up what I was doing as a trick. I told them I would make their coin vanish; it did indeed vanish according to their eyes, so therefore I used what inner-magic I had to accomplish this. Once one of our interpreters informed me of this I was dumbfounded. He also told me that many now referred to me with an Arabic word that loosely translated into “MagicMan.”

Being a 20 year old kid, the Gulf War taught me a lot of life’s lessons. This was a big one. My experience with what I refer to as BHAT (and no, not Khat, that leaf you chew that gets you high!) taught me even more. This beautiful experience I am about to describe truly left an indelible mark on my mind every bit as potent as some of the terrible things I had seen and done. It was what probably got me more into mentalism and further away from magic.

I worked the 6pm to 6am shift. Usually the prisoners were in their tents and sleeping around midnight, but during one of their holiday periods I recall them being up all night. I was asked by one of the English-speaking prisoners if I would come into the compound to watch some sort of ceremony. Grabbing “a ‘terp” (one of our interpreters,) we went inside.

There were about 60 prisoners sitting cross-legged on the ground. There were two rows of about 30 each, facing each other and creating an isle about three feet wide which one could walk down. The generator-powered floodlights lit up the place.

I watched as one of the prisoners I recognized as being more “senior in social stature” walked up and down the isle, stopping at each sitting person randomly and showing those he stopped at something wrapped in cloth. Each would reach in and come out with a closed fist. Keeping security in mind, I asked my terp what was happening. He told me it was a “game” and explained the significance of it. He also described it as being called, what sounded like to me, to the best of my recollection now: BOHT. If I had known what was about to transpire, I would have written it down!

The guy that had the cloth said something to the interpreter. “He wants you to try,” he told me. Try what?

Apparently, this game entailed him presenting a single stone from the cloth to quite a few of the people that were sitting. One would actually take it, but all had to pretend they did by coming out with closed fists.

Apparently the job to discern who actually had it was now mine, and since I was “The MagicMan” they wanted to see me do it. And I did…and how.

I didn’t want to spend all night guessing sixty guys, and I certainly did not want to get caught playing a game with the prisoners by someone higher ranking then me. This was well before Abu Ghraib, but we still had our concerns. Declining wasn’t an option from the uproar, so I decided to take a quick guess, apologize, and get back to my post.

I simply walked up to one of the guys sitting and pointed at him. I looked at the “terp” with a “can we go now?”

look, and his look back to me is one I will not forget. Ever. That guy stood up, and the cloth holding “elder” and he started dancing! Uh-oh...what just happened?

Yep. I got it right. He had the damn stone. I next heard sixty guys causing an uproar. This was one of the luckiest guesses of my life. I had to get out of there. Apparently there is a “Part II” to BOHT, though. “YEA! Now try the HAND!” is as close as I recall to what was said next. I didn’t have anywhere the experience in body language

“tells” that I have now. Hell, I hadn’t even started my career in law enforcement yet, let alone have attended The Reid School of Interview and Interrogation. From the result, it is probably better that I hadn’t. I didn’t over-think anything.

The stone-holder held out both hands. I simply grabbed one and covered his fist with my fingers. I cannot remember if this was his left or his right. I simply thought that was the hand with the stone. Honestly, I didn’t care…this was getting surreal, and I didn’t want to get in trouble. With me holding his one fist closed, he had no choice but to open the other hand. It contained the stone. Two for two. I had to get out NOW. Terp and I left, I recall more dancing and hollering, and my fondest memory from that episode is remembering my superior officers thinking “why does Reynolds never seem to have any discipline problems in his compound?” This was my once-in-a-lifetime version of walking on water.

For obvious sentimental reason, I am a huge fan of the impromptu “which hand” type of effects. Through

various courses in psychology, gambling, and Jack Bauer-like interrogation over the last 15 years I am in a better place research-wise to make an informed decision as to which hand presented to me holds a hidden object.

(However, I will never be more lucky than I was in 1991 – and to be lucky is better than to be good!)

While most of the time I can control a performance setting while setting up this “which hand” premise, and have time to get my much cherished and needed “tells,” there are others where honestly I cannot. It may be a very crowded bar where I cannot devote my full attention to the participant. Or, quite honestly, it may be a participant that I simply cannot read. Those that claim definite, 100%, accuracy rates with their purely psychological methods are lying to you…Humans are very individual creatures, and unless you have spent a lot of intimate time with a particular one, there will be times when your purely psychological tells are off, as much as I love these methods.

BOHT resurrects my lucky, ancient, Arabic method of old, and can pull your a** out of the gutter when one of the “pure” psychological methods fail…and they will (BOHT is a “pure” technique also: pure B.S.) A simple reread, above, of how I pulled this off accidentally will tell you what I base my “hand grab” technique on.

When presented both closed hands by the prisoner, I grabbed the one that I thought had the coin and thought that by grabbing his hand I was indicating such. However, to his mind, apparently, I was eliminating that hand,:

since he could not open it he had no choice but to open the one I was not holding. He brought the whole thing to a successful conclusion in his mind. WOW! I could either be indicating the closed fist I grabbed as being indicative of where I thought the coin was, or I could be eliminating it by not allowing it to open. Thinking about this later opened up a whole new way of thinking and structuring of effects for me. Again, as mentioned elsewhere in this book, we have two different paths to lead us to the same desired result. To the spectator, either path we take looks like it was the only logical choice.

The routine and famous mentalist I refer to at the beginning of this is Max Maven and his excellent Kurotsuke routine. He has a clever handling that allows him to narrow down who is holding the stone to two final spectators.

From there it is all audacity and bluff, similar to how I am going to describe my BOHT handling. I am certainly not going to tip it here, but most of you have seen the clever way in which he manages the ending. I was SO happy when I saw him perform this routine. To see a well-known mentalist perform something very similar to what I had been performing for quite some time made it feel “justified” in my mind.

In the above paragraphs I have sprinkled how I employ my BOHT handling. I am going to put it all together here now. We will assume that the spectator is holding an object in one of two closed outstretched fists. You simply are not confident that you got your tell(s) correctly and want to appear to bring this to a successful conclusion.

While I am all for the occasional miss in mentalism, this is a technique to employ when you simply have to appear to get it right.

I simply look back and forth at each hand while softly, but loud enough for the participant to hear, mutter to myself: “If I am going to figure out which hand the ****** is in I need to eliminate the one that it isn’t in….” I say this almost as if I am talking to myself and am giving myself direction and guidance on what I need to do to be successful.

I try to conjure up a look like a light just went on inside my mind & I immediately do two things simultaneously:

I grab hold of one of their fists with my hand, holding it shut, and with my other hand I point to their other fist and command “Open that hand!” No matter what I see I loudly give a self-congratulatory “YES!!”

OUTCOME #1

If the hand they open contains the object I immediately let go of their closed fist, gently pushing it down to their side, and take hold of their open hand, with the object on it, with one of my hands. I raise it up a little into the air, almost as if I am displaying the object on their open hand and using that hand as a “display tray” to proudly display my prize. I told them to open their hand, they did, and there is the object for all to see. Arguably the most desirable of the two possible outcomes, but here is how we still bring this to a very successful

conclusion when the object is not there.

OUTCOME #2

If the hand they open does not contain the object I still give the “YES!” verbally and do two things: I

nonchalantly, softly, brush their open hand down to their side while at the same time my fist that is holding their closed hand raises both of our hands high into the air, much like a referee does for a winning boxer after he has delivered the knockout punch! The combination of this gesture that symbolizes winning and success in our culture, coupled with a confident “YES!” on your part will ensure that in the mind of the participant that you succeeded what you were trying to accomplish. They don’t even need to open their hand to show the object to confirm this success!

This works because we implanted the suggestion of an elimination process, by seeding the idea of elimination in our mutterings to our self.

We successfully eliminated the hand NOT containing the object, just as we muttered to ourselves that we HAD to do that in order to locate the hand that DID have the object. We have primed the participant to accept either outcome as logical by our verbal utterances and, just as importantly, how we then react to the situation. Any reaction other than an air of complete success on your part, for either outcome, will result in less than stellar reactions.

Please give BOHT a few trial runs in real-world settings. I hope it is an effective “out” for you as it has been for me.

We, as performers, define what success is…I hope you go forth and always find the correctly colored stone in all aspects of your life.