I agree with Kabbalah and I would say the same about the trick as a whole, coins or cards. I have never understood how or why this trick fools anyone. I just find it hard to believe it fooled Einstein, Churchill, Houdini or even Woody from Cheers. As a kid, I was a naive and clueless little idiot when it came to card tricks, and even I figured this one out. The "extra" number in the middle had me suspicious from the start ("I have as many as you, three extra, and enough left over to make your total...").

I mean no offense, of course, to anyone who uses this trick and likes it, despite my rather negative words above. I have always had an extremely negative view of any trick the dullard pre-teen me was able to figure out before I started doing tricks of my own, and the list of such tricks I was able to figure out amounts to all of two: this one and Poker Player's Picnic (although with PPP, to be fair, I figured it out thanks to clumsy handling on the part of the person who performed it - instead of keeping the top 4-5 cards in place, he played it really safe and kept the top 12-15 in place, I remember it like it was last week and still shudder when I think about it).

Apparently Milton Berle loved this trick, BTW, or at least that's what John Scarne said. I did it once, and obviously not well, because even though I recited the line the way Scarne said, the person I did it for said "What's with all this cryptic stuff? Just tell me how many I have." I'd have liked to see Berle do the trick.

Now that I've spat my negative opinion all over an old classic (hoping I didn't offend or annoy anyone along the way), do any of you use this trick, and has it worked for you? I never gave it much thought until this thread, but now that I'm on the topic, in your experience does this really fool people? (Yes, I know that it must fool people if it's been around so long, I'm wondering about YOUR experience.) Doesn't the phrasing make people suspicious right away, or did I just get lucky as a kid? Or perhaps I should attack this from a different angle - how many times, in your experience, has someone figured it out?

They never figured it out when I did it....but even if I know this fools people as it is I am always looking to try to make it better.

Please understand that my comment was referring to the lame video of some prepubescent trying to explain the trick. I didn't mean to imply that the trick is horrible.

See my enthusiasm, in my first post, for Bannon's latest version in Destination Zero.

Also, I have used the aforementioned Racherbaumer coin version, Correct Change, for well over thirty years, and, it always impresses.

Scam School? .....ugh

Welcome to the Internet. 🎣

Scam school is atrocious.

Some pretty *** good magicians use this trick and fool people. Figuring out the the touches/psychology that make a trick like this entertain and fool, which will probably require multiple performances and multiple failures, will help in learning how improve any routine, even those based on more subtle principles or sleights. I think this is the kind of routine you perform after you've already established yourself with an audience. Often self-working tricks can be really effective after an effect that clearly wasn't self-working.

Sorry if my post led anyone to believe otherwise. Yes, I agreed with Kabbalah, but what I wrote after that was all me.

I wasn't able to watch the videos.

I am reviving this thread because I recently learned a version of this effect that uses coins, as featured in the first volume (pp. !57-`162) of Pete McCabe's fine Scripting Magic project. The effect is well taught, and Paul Green's script for the effect moves it into a minor-miracle experience for people.

George