Fortune Sticks

[JohnM]

I looked at Fortune Sticks and came up with some short comings.
1. It is very hard to see the gimmick even in a lit room. Angles are important, but in a entirely different way.
2. The symbol are not cohesive. What does an egg, tree, fire, heart, bird, night sky, goblet and eye have in common? Nothing.
3. Two of the symbols (night sky and egg) can easily be held in the wrong direction which will have you make a wrong prediction.
4. The fire symbol can be improperly identified as red.
5. The symbols were painted on the trick and since the audience member is supposed to rub them together, eventually the symbols would wear off.

Of course the method and the mnemonic device that Toru Suzuki created is amazing, but the trick was just not completed as well as it could have been IMO.

When Jenzo Harmonics posted his beautiful Fortune Sticks it inspired me to work on my own set.

I decided to use drinks as my subject matter and call the trick Think A Drink Sticks. Think A Drink is a famous magic routine from the 50's and I loved that connection.

I spent 5 hours creating the perfect icons. They are a balanced and matched set of icons with three hard drinks, three soft drinks and coffee and milk.

The same color combinations are applied and they are even easier to remember and more fitting.

I decided that I would have the icons laser etched (like Jenzo did) into transparent acrylic colored bars. The raw material exists but I was having a hard time finding it in small amounts.

Then last night I was on the phone with John B. and he said the same thing can be done with cards. He is a very smart man and he understood how the trick worked mathematically and explained it to me. It was over my head and I went to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and started working on the cards. They are done and perfect in my eyes. Since paper is my material of choice I can start making these immediately. I will still try and have the actual sticks made as well.

I will make these available to Tenyo Magic Forum members very soon at a very special price but you need to make sure you are compliant with your Display Name (see the post on Joining the Tenyo Magic Forum) and you have posted a profile of yourself as well.

[John B.]

John M. and I were discussing Fortune Sticks, and he thought it may be interesting for me to post a little on the theory or why Fortune Sticks works. Fortune sticks combines two really neat principles, and is a mystifying and brilliant effect! The first is a binary coding system that can code up to 8 objects through the use of 3 sticks. The second is the very clever mnemonic system that enables the magician to remember the code.

As a binary system, it works something like this- you have sticks that can be displayed in one of two upright orientations. A particular symbol can be either up or down on a stick. Let's call one orientation of a stick 0 and when you turn it upside down 1. You have the following possibilities for sticks A, B, C (red, yellow, blue):

(A, B, C)
000
001
010
011
100
101
110
111

There are 8 possibilities, and 8 objects in Fortune Sticks. You can also think of this as 2*2*2 = 8 because each stick has one of two choices, either upright or upside down in the spectator's hand. In designing a trick, 2 sticks could code for 4 objects, and 4 sticks would code for 16 objects.

As John and I were discussing this, we started to think about the possibility of using other objects, cards, coins, tokens, etc. John had the creative idea of using drinks as objects and adapted the mnemonic system for the different drinks. Although this card trick was inspired by fortune sticks, it also solves the problem of seeing the sticks in low light, and uses drink symbols whose orientation is non-ambiguous as John M. mentioned above. John also includes a Key card that can be displayed along with the other cards that eliminates the need to memorize anything and simplifies the performance. The cards look beautiful! Excellent work John M.!

[David DeTenyo]

Great ideas. I'm copying this from the old forum as it might be of some interest to some.

Jenzo (SimonC) has created wooden fortune sticks and I asked him how he made the gimmick more visible. This was his answer:

The idea is that by using wood, the sticks create their own gimmick, and are therefore perfectly examinable. It's not as straightforward as remembering the colours, but once you 'get to know' your sticks it's very natural. I've created my own aide memoire for remembering the planets and there is a basic rule for which end is which so to speak.
I've now incorporated the planet guide into the case so it's all self contained.

I'm sure SimonC will post more info and repost his photo's soon (sorry if they are already in another thread and I missed it!).