How Pro Magicians Use Multiple-Outs

I was eleven years old when my Dad took my brother and me to a small magic shop in London called International Magic. It was a tiny hole-in-a-wall store packed with shelves and a small glass counter. The owners filled the shelves with strange props, boxes and envelopes. I bought two tricks with my pocket money.

The first trick the lovely man behind the counter showed me was an impossible prediction effect. I chose one of three colours, and the magician revealed he had predicted it perfectly with a written prediction. I bought it immediately, and unlike most magic tricks, I was delighted by the method.

The method employed was something called multiple-outs. It’s a principle that is often more impressive than the trick itself. Which is rare for magic—most methods are utterly disappointing. Multiple outs give you this gobsmacked feeling of wonder for the effort that goes on behind the scenes and admiration for just how simple the method truly is.

What are multiple-outs?

You can label any method with “multiple-outs” if the trick has more outcomes than the audience perceives. The most common application of multiple-outs might be for a prediction. You might keep a prediction in your wallet, and the audience has no idea you have multiple wallets on your person, with predictions for each possible outcome.

This principle isn’t limited to prediction and mentalism effects. You might use multiple-outs to enhance a magic appearance or change, perhaps. Making a car appear on stage is impressive. What if an audience member freely names a colour and a vehicle of a corresponding colour appears on stage? They’ll never know about the twelve cars of other colours parked backstage.

You can also use multiple-outs as a force, but we’ll discuss this in a future article. I would perhaps say certain forcing apps and colour match effects employ elements of the multiple-outs principle. I’m not sure most magicians would immediately label them the same. Think about it, and you’ll realise they both rely upon multiple-outs in their unique ways.

I will often employ multiple outs behind the scenes to enhance a trick. You might not want to rely on a printer and so instead, pre-print out all of the possible outcomes for your prediction. You place them into a folder for your assistant to flick through during the show. Maybe you prefer a handwritten prediction but do not want to rely on an assistant writing it down in a rush during the routine—so you choose to handwrite all of the possible outcomes before the show beautifully.

The tricks described in this article are not always the most practical and fooling of examples, but they do work well to illustrate the principles effectively. When writing magic for television, I think about multiple-outs in two categories.

Alluded-outs

Alluded-outs are perhaps the most clever version of multiple outs. The best way to tell if a trick uses eluded multiple-outs is to watch it twice. The outcomes of the trick are often wholly different while delivering the same effect when relying on eluded multiple-outs.

Say, for example, you ask a spectator to name a number between one and six. If they say number one, you unlock your phone and reveal a photo of a rolling die as your wallpaper with number one facing upwards—a miracle.

But then, if someone sees you perform the trick again and a different spectator names the number two, they’ll see you go into your wallet and open a prediction with the number two written upon it. A miracle for the new spectator, but not for the first.

Alluded outs will rely heavily upon the performer’s verbal and body language to allude that the outcome they witnessed was the intended one—that if they saw the trick again, they would see the same result. Without this, the trick falls apart. It’s a tricky balance of scripting and acting by the performer. You need to think carefully about how to place your multiple outs.

Locked-outs

You’ll know a trick employs locked multiple outs when you view it twice, and the routine appears identical. If a prediction effect uses multiple-outs, you’ll often see the prediction long before the end of the trick.

You might even hand the spectator an envelope and ask them to name a number between one and six. Depending on which number they call, you will take back the envelope and open it in one of six different ways. Heck, you don’t even need an envelope. Blake Vogt even sells paper that you can unfold in six different ways.

Locked multiple outs are an instead satisfying option, though you are often left in a non-examinable manner, unlike eluded multiple-outs. Unlike alluded outs, there’s usually much more method in play for locked outs. That might be a mechanism in which you unfold the paper, remove a prediction from an envelope or even spread a deck of cards to reveal only one card reversed within it.

How to enhance your multiple outs?

When it comes down to it, multiple-outs is an obvious method. Sometimes you’ll even hear a spectator suggest it as a joke to a lovely round of laughter from his friends. If someone names a chocolate bar, and you make that specific chocolate bar appear for them—it wouldn’t be mad to suggest the thought that you have 100 chocolate bars hidden on your person. Of course, they’d quickly dismiss that as being mental.

It isn’t that mad of a method. I know a magician who walks around with enough wallets so that the magician can show any named card to be inside his wallet.

To enhance multiple-outs, you need to make it so that the possibility of such a method feels impossible. If you do this well, the audience will not even consider it as a possible option. There are three simple ways to do this.

Acting

You need to be a good actor, and you need to commit to the selected outcome of the trick fully. Two performers can fail and succeed with the same multiple out method if one is a bad actor. We need to believe the outcome we get is always intended. If your locked-outs involve some clever sleight-of-hand, I’m counting that under the umbrella of acting.

Narrowing

A simple way to convince an audience of more possible outcomes is to narrow the selection either with a force or with equivoke. Perhaps you only have six outs, and you want to predict a card. It might be more impressive if the audience believes the spectator had a less limited number of cards to choose from and not only six. You could use a force or equivoke to narrow their options without them realising.

Ask them to reach into a deck and remove a batch of six cards as you spread through it, and then freely choose one of those six cards. They do not know that the deck of cards you spread for them only had the same six cards repeated throughout. This means that any six cards they pull out from the spread will be the same six cards matching your six outs, and it won't matter to you which one they choose next.

Broadening

This is the act of broadening the number of outs you can create as a performer. An audience might think it’s possible to hide a few outcomes inside an envelope, but they might not expect ten or twenty. They might expect multiple outs to be possible from an envelope, but never that a magician can unfold one card to reveal one of thirteen outcomes.

Broadening usually comes down to the method, but it might also come down to effort on your part—by physically preparing 100 possible outcomes. You might store every DVD ever produced starring Ryan Reynolds backstage for a prediction trick in which an audience member gets forced Ryan from a list of celebs. Then another freely names their favourite Reynolds movie (Just Friends).