"He was not my uncle, it is just part of the script"

September 12, 2022 11:27 AM

It's Monday, and we are at work, at school, at home mastering our arts and becoming more polished under the scrutinizing light of the world. But what if you were unpolished and still a master? That would be subversive and funny, one reason why Markobi recently won the FISM (International Federation of Magic Societies) 2022 Gold Medal for Card Magic with this performance.
posted by storybored (23 comments total)

Wow. That was some amazing work. (Yes, yes, I was that school kid who had books of card tricks - and yet, still cannot shuffle a deck for the life of me)
posted by rozcakj at 11:43 AM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I like that his 'style' is clumsiness. He shuffles cards and they go everywhere. He grabs loose disorganized bunches of cards haphazardly in a clumsy attempt to get them gathered together, while looking off like he's not really paying proper attention to what he's doing. But then when he flips a card around with one hand, he's showing great skill and precision, and then you begin to realize you're being played.
posted by eye of newt at 11:48 AM on September 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

I kept expecting the card to show up in the Kit-Kat packet!
posted by mittens at 11:50 AM on September 12, 2022 [15 favorites]

It seemed like: you're performing for an audience of pros, so you go against type, being "sloppy", and also putting red herrings like the Kit-Kat and the Chips bag where pros know its easy to slip a card, etc. and then lastly do what looks like a really obvious palm and then the final ah ha moment, well, you can tell by the roar of the audience what utter perfection the last trick was. Wow!
posted by gwint at 11:59 AM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is like Andy Kaufman's foreign man bit, except with cards, where finally he goes, "and now, I do for you, the Elvis Presley..." and he does.
posted by Naberius at 12:01 PM on September 12, 2022 [8 favorites]

Yeah, that was great work. My youngest was into magic for a bit, so I can see some of the manipulations going on. But that is a great trick.
posted by Windopaene at 12:02 PM on September 12, 2022

I laughed when I saw the No Name bag of chips. MUST BE CANADA keh heh heh
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:18 PM on September 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Seriously though those chips are greasy as hell.
To put your hands on greasy chips and then do card manipulation after just shows how good he is.
Also how good he is: i have no idea what the fuck happened there.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:19 PM on September 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

I think I caught maybe one palm and one counting trick out of that whole mess of scattered cards. So so good.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:00 PM on September 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Reminded me of this guy.
posted by dobbs at 1:10 PM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

"It's the cheaper one [brand] because I don't have any money, anymore" (after paying $2,000 in travel expenses). Yup, that's a Canadian experience.
posted by sardonyx at 1:13 PM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

Very impressive and very funny. Not really "a" trick so much as a series of them. Though I have to make a complaint about the video quality; the producers should've just used a wide-angle camera right there at the table. The video would be much better quality, and you want that for close-up magic.
posted by zardoz at 1:20 PM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

excellent routine. here's his web page.
posted by bruceo at 2:29 PM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Came to echo Dobbs' "this guy" is Lennart Green, who was disqualified at FISM 1988 for being too good but won in 1991. [MetaPrev]
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:07 PM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

Sometimes you need to take a risk in life
DEREK

This is PHENOMENAL
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 3:32 PM on September 12, 2022

That was fantastic. I expected it to be in the Kit Kat or the chips bag too - I forgot that when you're playing to a crowd of magicians, putting it there would actually be a less impressive trick. And I was so busy being discomfited by watching him eat chips in the middle of a card trick knowing it would make the cards all greasy, that I forgot to realize that that would make any trick significantly harder to do. So reading the comments here just made this even better.

Thanks for posting this!
posted by Mchelly at 5:31 PM on September 12, 2022

I laughed when I saw the No Name bag of chips. MUST BE CANADA keh heh heh

Oh yeah for sure!!! No Name chips on sale for .99c a bag, no joke.
posted by storybored at 7:34 PM on September 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

At the end, I feel like he's trying to keep a poker face, but subtly breaking around the time he says "do you want to change?".

My theory is he had a plan to continue the trick if she picked the wrong card out of the five he left nearby, but got lucky when she picked the correct one. And he's just barely concealing his elation that the trick turned out better than odds.
posted by MetaGolem at 10:55 PM on September 12, 2022

Preposterous!

That was an exceptional ten minutes of care handling. I have no idea how any of it happened and the elaborate sloppiness was *chef's kiss.* Magnifique!
posted by From Bklyn at 3:37 AM on September 13, 2022

I keep watching the last bit. The setup -- the false palm -- and then the audience reaction when he shows his hand to be empty, and the reaction to showing the last card is absolutely electrifying. Incredible work.
posted by gc at 6:58 AM on September 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

What he's doing when he's mixing up the cards on the table is meant to look like a 'wash' shuffle, generally agreed to be the most effective way to properly randomise a deck. But if you watch it again he's absolutely in control of which cards are where. It's brilliant.
posted by Hogshead at 7:14 AM on September 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

That force at the end, to put the card on top of the pile but not nearest to the chooser, knowing how people tend to "randomly" pick things. Watching it a dozen times now I'm getting some of the nuances but I still have no idea what's really going on. Truly magical.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:18 AM on September 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I had a patient who was a retired magician. He always carried a deck of cards and would always want to show me a trick. He was pretty old, frail, and had a tremor. Every time I would say to myself mid-trick "Oh no, he's not going to pull this off." And every time he pulled it off. All part of the show.
posted by neuron at 9:07 AM on September 13, 2022 [3 favorites]