After catching a re-run on ITV1 +1 of Penn & Teller: Fool Us, it got me around to thinking about fooling magicians.

Magician fooling isn’t all that difficult. In many ways it is pretty similar to fooling regular people. The nature of fooling people relies on using their own assumptions against them. When fooling regular people we know how their minds work and we know, more importantly, what they don’t know. We know ways of doing things that they don’t.

When fooling magicians it’s a little different. Magicians know how magic works. If you show a magician any magic trick, they will be thinking in their minds of ways to do it. And they’ll usually come up with a few. The easiest way to fool magicians is, therefore, to use that against them. Lead them down the garden path.

But would it be the same for Penn & Teller? Two of the best known and most accomplished magicians in the world are bound to have a wide knowledge of magic and performance techniques. And yet there are many other less famous magicians who have just as much knowledge but not the famous names or the millions of pounds. So yes, I would suggest that fooling Penn & Teller would be no different than fooling any other magician.

So decide upon your effect and decide upon the way every magician would assume you would perform that trick. Now, don’t do the trick that way. But throw in a couple of moves or gestures to make it look during performance like you are doing it the way you are not going to do it.

Can’t think of more than one way to do your trick? Hey, I never said it was going to be easy. I just suggested a method of fooling magicians by misdirecting them with their own knowledge.