Magic Lessons #18 – Penetrating Matches Trick
The Penetrating Matches Trick focuses on the important subject of convincers.
A convincer is a subtle thing you say or an action you take that gently helps convince the audience that what you say and do is actually what is happening when, in fact, you are lying through your teeth. As long as it is in the name of fun, I enjoy lying through my teeth.
If you use convincers well, they will often be the things that your audience uses to recount the magic trick to their friends. Things like ‘his hands were completely empty’ or ‘she never went anywhere near the deck of cards’.
In this magic lesson we use the penetrating matches.
The penetrating matches trick comes from the clever mind of Martin Gardner. He died at age 95 in 2010 which was a loss for anyone who values the importance of a curious mind.
Martin Gardner loved magic, puzzles, philosophy and even Alice in Wonderland. He wrote over 70 books and had a regular column in the Scientific American magazine for nearly a quarter of a century. Do yourself a favour and chase up a collection of his puzzles and illusions. They are always simple but striking, as is the penetrating matches trick we will learn today.
The penetrating matches is a great little magic demonstration of solid through solid, wood through wood. As it is fast and mysterious, there is little point in adding any presentation when doing this. I simply use it as a demonstration of how I warm up before the real magic tricks begin.
This is not a hard magic trick to do. You could say that you need a little bit of sleight of hand to perform it. That said, it will only take you 30 seconds to be able to perform it in an ok manner then another 5 minutes to master the moves. Then you will have a great little mystery to do any time, any place.
Remember:
We talked about impromptu magic back in Magic Lessons #4 – Halloween Magic Trick.
Right now in the penetrating match trick pay attention to the subtle convincers that we will use before the penetration occurs. These are important to convince the audience that it is impossible to release your grip on the matches without them falling from between your fingertips.
Make a bit of a deal about this as I do in the video. We are also setting conditions that the fingers must never be moved apart (of course, this is a lie) but in the audience’s mind, they will sub consciously accept this.
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