Ask the Slot Expert: When good magic tricks go bad

Let's take a detour from the casino this week to look at how a magic trick on America's Got Talent didn't go according to plan.

Former football player and current magician Jon Dorenbos gave a master class on how to gracefully deal with a trick that went wrong on the August 17, 2022 episode of America's Got Talent. Dorenbos was the special guest on the episode. He performed a long trick so the producers could stretch out five minutes of announcing results into an hour of airtime.

Before we look at where the trick went wrong and what caused it to go wrong, let's look at how the trick was supposed to go.

Dorenbos begins by showing four lockerroom lockers that are set up on the stage. Each locker has a judge's name on it.

He then goes down to the judge's table. He reaches into the box he is holding and pulls out a number of slips of paper. We can see that each slip has a different number printed on it.

One by one, he goes to each judge and asks him or her to reach into the box and pull out a slip at random. He tells the judges that they can look at their slips, but they should not show it to anyone else. He tells the judges to hold onto the slips. We're going to use them later.

He returns to the stage. There is a board with envelopes lettered A through O. One by one, he asks each judge to pick an envelope. They can change their selection as much as they like.

Each envelope contains a color. There's a display with football helmets, one for each color in the envelopes, next to the lockers.

After he opens the envelope to reveal the color that the judge chose, he asks Terry Crews to put the corresponding helmet on top of the judge's locker.

Simon chose blue. Sofia yellow. Heidi red. Howie purple.

Now he asks the judges to reveal the numbers that they chose.

Howie picked 22. Dorenbos opens Howie's locker to reveal a purple jersey with Mandel 22 on it.

Heidi picked 20. He opens her locker to reveal a red jersey with Klum 20 on it.

Sofia picked 17. He opens her locker to reveal a yellow jersey with Vergara 17 on it.

Simon picked 8. He opens his locker to reveal a blue jersey with Cowell 8 on it.

With all the lockers open, Dorenbos points out that the numbers are 8-17-20-22 and today is 8/17/2022.

He closes all of the locker doors. He says how much it means to him to be part of the AGT family. He knocks on the side of the lockers. The doors open and four girls step out, each wearing the jersey that was hanging in the locker.

Each judge chose a number and a color at random and a jersey of the judge's color with the judge's number appeared in the judge's locker.

That's the way it was supposed to go. That's not what happened.

When it was time for the judge's to reveal their numbers, Howie had a 22 and Dorenbos opened Howie's locker to show the purple Mandel 22 jersey.

Heidi said that she picked an 8. (Uh oh!) Howie makes a joke about how she is holding it upside down and Dorenbos goes, "Hmm. We'll come back to you."

Sofia went according to plan. She picked a 17 and Dorenbos opened her locker to show the yellow Vergara 17 jersey.

Simon's turn. He said, "I don't know how this happened but I've got number 8."

"There were two 8s?" asked Dorenbos.

"Yeah," said Simon.

Dorenbos said, "I don't know how that happened" -- I do! -- "but we've got a royal blue jersey with number 8 for you. Must've been a misprint."

"We got close," Dorenbos continued. "I was fired up to be here tonight. You all had free choices of numbers tonight and guess what?" He opens the lockers one by one. "It is August 17. I thought you were going to pick 20, 22. I still got the red jersey for you Heidi. There is today's date, August 17, 2022."

Did they really have free choices? Not when Heidi was supposed to pick 20.

How was the magician going to force each judge to pick a particular number? If you watch closely, Dorenbos puts his hand into the box before each judge makes his or her pick. Even though the box has no lid, he never shows us the inside of the box.

The box actually contains five sets of slips: the all-numbers slips to "prove" to us that all the slips are different, a set with only 8, a set with only 17, a set with only 20, and a set with only 22.

The box also has some sort of gimmick in it to let Dorenbos control which set of slips are available when a judge draws one. He puts his hand in the box before each judge to control which set is available.

How did Heidi get an 8 instead of a 20?

We have to rewind to Simon's pick. After he picked and Sofia has her hand in the box, Simon interrupted and said that he had two slips. Dorenbos tells him to hold onto one and he took the other one back. He couldn't let Simon keep the second slip because Simon might look at both slips and see that they were both 8s.

Dorenbos took the slip in his right hand, which then goes out of shot. It looks like he was going to put the slip in his pocket. When we switch to a shot from a different angle, he sill has the slip and we see him put the slip into the box.

I suppose he was trying to get the extra slip into one of the sets that had already been used, but somehow it ended up in Heidi's set.

Out of a set of I-don't-know how many slips marked 20 and only one with an 8, she picked the interloper with the 8.

This trick illustrates two techniques used in magic tricks.

First, a force. The judges think they picked a number at random, but Dorenbos and his magic box actually forced them to pick the numbers he wanted -- well, all but Heidi.

The second technique is multiple outs. The magician has something prepared for each way a trick could go.

Let's say I invite you into my home office and ask you to pick a number from 1 to 5. You pick 3. I tell you to pick up the stapler. There's a number 3 taped to the bottom.

If you had picked 1, I would have told you to look at the bottom of the keyboard. For 2, it's the mouse. There's a 4 on the bottom of the phone and a 5 on the bottom of my chair. I had all bases covered. I had an out for any choice you made.

I think the judges did have a free choice on the colors. We never see behind the lockers. If you look closely during the jersey reveal, you can see a black panel split vertically in the middle behind each jersey. The lockers don't have a back. Behind the lockers are the four girls and a jersey of each color with the judges' name and the number they were supposed to pick.

After the judge picks a color, the girls reach through the panels and hang the appropriate jersey in the locker. After Dorenbos closes the locker doors, they put on the jerseys and go through the panel to wait for his knock and burst out of the locker.

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