The 'Dumb Force' Explained

I do these consultancy calls over video with members. I enjoy them. It’s usually only TV magicians who work with consultants, so it’s a new arena. The other day I suggested using a ‘dumb force’ for something.

The magician had never heard the term ‘dumb force’ before. It got me thinking. How many magic principles are well-known by consultants and TV magicians but unknown by most of the community?

I often find it fascinating how money drives the industry. Something like a dumb force isn’t widely known or discussed, likely because it’s difficult to package up and sell to you. The same goes for principles like pre-show, instant-stooging and dual-reality.

The only way to learn such things are by working and learning from experienced magicians, as I have done or by reading about them in books. But books will never be quite so commercial. It’s why countless magicians know about Loops but do not know what an ITR is. They might know how to perform the Invisible Deck, but they’ve never heard about the classic force.

I suppose it’s a reminder of where the value of this newsletter lies. You give me the freedom to explore and tell niche magic industry stories, but I can also offer an insider perspective on open secrets often used by industry professionals.

The Dumb Force

I’ve also heard this force referred to as a pointless or pseudo-force. Regardless of how the consultant refers to the forcing technique, the method is always the same. The force tends to be used as a garnish or an additional convincer.

We’ll get into why later, but let’s begin with the method.

A Dumb Force is dumb because it does nothing for the magician. The selection is inconsequential for the performer. The secret is to make it seem very much consequential for the spectator.

In its simplest form, you might ask a spectator to choose any orange from an orange tree in a beautiful field. The spectator does not know that you spent seven hours carefully gimmicking every single orange for the trick. It does not matter which orange they choose — the trick will always work.

In many ways, this is not a force at all. The closest commercial variation is a One Way Deck. These are special decks you can buy in which every card is identical. The magician can fairly spread them face down, and whichever card the spectator chooses will be the force card.

Dumb forces can be more deceptive than one-way forces, though. You can add levels of deception that make the options seem more varied. We’ll look at these concepts later in this story.

There are often much more clever ways to force things than to use a dumb force. That’s part of the reason it got its name. It would be pretty dumb of us to gimmick one hundred oranges and glue them onto the tree. There are probably many more innovative ways to force the correct orange upon the spectator. But this works, and we can get started on it now, so let’s try it.

Part 2. Words Of Advice

You want to treat this force as a garnish. The force shouldn’t be the entire step. Perhaps it’s one additional earlier step in a more extensive routine. It’s a way to add impossibility.

There may be 1,000 decks on stage, so the spectator chooses one, and then you perform the invisible deck with it. All you’re doing is performing the invisible deck, but you’ve added the garnish of the dumb force.

There are a few ways to make the Dumb Force more fooling:

1. Scale up.

2. Differentiate.

3. Circle back.

Let’s say you are going to perform a Book Test. That’s a classic mentalism effect in which words are selected from a book, and the mentalist reads the spectator’s mind to divine the chosen words. You could just hand them the book for the trick, or you could use a dumb force and offer them the choice of several books.

You can enhance this by scaling up the options. Instead of one book, you have a shelf with fifty books to choose from. It’s not unreasonable to assume the magician might have specially printed one gimmicked book. But the idea that they have fifty gimmicked books to choose from is more implausible.

Differentiating the options enhances this further. All fifty books could be different shapes and sizes and even have different covers. But, inside all of the books is the same specially printed method. It doesn’t matter which book they choose; the trick will always work.

It would be weird to have fifty copies of the same book, so imagine you’re performing a trick in which a corner of a chosen card ends up inside a chocolate bar. You could have fifty of the same chocolate bar or fifty different types. There’s something about using the variety of options that blurs the line spectators could draw in their heads to the method.

Circling back on the options is a brilliant convincer. To do this, you might have one of the fifty chocolate bars totally normal. The odds are low that the spectator will choose the normal one, but you’ll be able to easily grab it and crack it open to dispel the idea that there was a playing card corner in every bar.

If you were performing on a zoom call, you might hold up three different CDs facing away from the viewer. One is red, one is blue, and the other is yellow. They name a colour, and you turn it around to reveal the album's name. As you do this, you switch the other two options off-screen for CDs with matching back cover colours but different album titles. This example differentiates the options and circles back to them as a convincer when you show the viewer the other two options they could have chosen.

If you decide not to use the Dumb Force as a garnish or enhancer, it must be combined with another method. Take the chocolate bar trick example. If you just said to someone, choose any chocolate bar — look, there's a corner of a playing card inside there — well, it wouldn’t be a good trick. But if the corner of the card belongs to one they just chose randomly, signed and watched you tear off and vanish its corner — suddenly, it’s a good trick.

Part 3. Some Use Cases

We’ve mentioned a few good use cases in this story so far. There’s the chocolate bar selection, the book selection and the One Way forcing deck.

You might get a random coin selected from a handful of loose change. The spectator does not realise that all of the coins have the same date on them, which will be used later for the trick.

You might ask someone to choose any soda from a menu before you make it appear inside a carton of milk on stage. The audience doesn’t know that all the soda options the hero spectator had to choose from were black in colour, like Pepsi and Dr Pepper.

You might perform the brilliant marketed CD prediction effect, in which the performer plays a pre-recorded message on a CD. Usually, the CD is mailed in advance to an important spectator at the event. What if, perhaps, you sent everyone in the audience CDs and performed the effect as if only one of them has the correct prediction and everyone else’s CD plays a recording of you saying ‘thanks for playing.’

When performing Healed & Sealed, you might ask the spectator to point at one of three different sodas discarded on the side of the road. You might do the same for a coin bite effect, holding a handful of gimmicked coins. That would be dumb, though, surely?

The best thing to do is to consider tricks you already perform and ask yourself, is there a dumb way I can add a dumb force to this routine? It isn’t always necessary, and it is almost always dumb to do, but it’s worth considering.