Mark Elsdon - Strange Oblique

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1
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MARK ELSDON
1
Strange Oblique
Introduction
Many thanks for purchasing this booklet. The effect and method it explains falls
into the propless mentalism category which is currently (here in 2016) so popular
amongst mentalism fans. However, much like my
CAM
material and my other recent release
Tequila Hustler
, the different between this and most of the other propless material I ve seen is th
at
Strange Oblique
has an
actual
method, that
actually works
all of the time. That s not to say that there isn t a place for some of the riskier
, wing-it-and-hope-that-it-hits methodology, but for me personally, if I m going t
o perform just one effect for a group of people in a casual environment, I need
to know that it is definitely going to work.
Effect
The performer asks someone to remove a bunch of pocket change and then select fi
ve of the coins to use. The rest of the change is put away and the five chosen c
oins are dropped into the participant s empty pocket. One by one four other partic
ipants each remove a coin, leaving the final, random one for the person who volu
nteered the coins. And if they choose, some or all of them may swap coins at thi
s point. The performer s back is turned during this entire process (in fact, he ca
n be out of the room if so desired). The performer explains that the largest den
omination coin (the 2 coin) is the target coin and that the person who ended up hol
ding it will play the role of a truth-teller, whilst everyone else will play the
role of a liar. All of them are to keep their coin hidden inside their hand, so
that the performer can have no clue as to who has what. The performer now turns
back around and asks a bunch of random questions. One or two of them are about
lying and truth-telling, but most are about seemingly meaningless nonsense, albe
it absurd, funny nonsense! The performer doesn t need to ask questions of all the
participants, or maybe he

2
asks one or two of them to answer him just silently, inside their head. Despite
the confusing and contradictory answers he has heard, he is now able to immediat
ely identify who is lying, who is telling the truth and exactly who is holding t
he target coin!
Background
Let s talk about the effect first. The traditional method is to use a bag containi
ng five coloured balls (often four white balls and one black one), with the part
icipants secretly taking one each and the performer identifying who has the targe
t ball. The first version I ever saw (in the early 1980s, although it was created
and released at least a decade earlier) was Syd Bergson s
Sixth Sense
(hence the title of this booklet) which was a particularly ingenious method, ty
pical of the brilliant Mr Bergson. The effect didn t become popular though until M
ax Maven released his seminal handling Kurotsuke (Videomind Vol. 1. L&L, 1997) w
hich caught the attention of mentalists everywhere. It was a typically crafty Ma
ven creation, and ended up in the repertoires of countless performers. Subsequen
t versions were released by Marc Oberon, Mark Thorold, Charles Gauci, Christophe
r Taylor, Tony Chris and others. Although I really liked the effect, there were
always things about each of these methods I didn t like. Many of them use gaffs: g
affed bags, gaffed balls, magnets, electronics etc. Others require the performer
to hold the bag whilst the objects are chosen, or other handling procedures tha
t I didn t like. Shortly after re-visiting the coin-in-hand plot last year (
Tequila Hustler
), I decided to see if a similar simplified logic structure could be applied to
this effect.
Strange Oblique
is the outcome. Which brings me to the background of the method: Raymond Smully
an s wonderful book
What Is The Name Of This Book
(Prentice-Hall, 1978). It is a head-spinning examination of logic, puzzles, log
ic puzzles and the ways they can be extended and extrapolated into some incredib
le (and sometimes incredibly torturous!) configurations. Conditional statements
with causal modifiers anyone? No, I thought not!
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