Bob Ostin’s Clip

Recently, Bob Ostin’s venerable swit­ching device recei­ved an update and was revam­ped by a pro­mi­nent magic fac­tory. I am a big fan of Bob’s gim­mick and have been using it for a few deca­des now, swit­ching in and out various items, from bil­lets to bills to folded cards. An excel­lent gimmick.

My con­tri­bu­tion here is to offer some food for thought con­cer­ning the actual switch. The main pro­blem is that there must be a reason to have the folded bil­let (or card or wha­te­ver) in this clip. Just remo­ving the clip with the bil­let inside from the pocket and put­ting it onto the table doesn’t make too much sense to me. Why would I not sim­ply place the folded bil­let onto the table?

I do have some ‘work-arounds’ to that pro­blem, which I want to share with you here. Keep in mind that these work only when they are incor­po­ra­ted into a well con­s­truc­ted routine.

The first con­cept which takes some heat off the actual switch is to intro­duce addi­tio­nal objects (along with the dummy bil­let) into the clip. The clip the­r­e­fore ser­ves the pur­pose of hol­ding tog­e­ther various artic­les (folded cards, bills, busi­ness cards, the dummy, etc.) and is jus­ti­fied. The pic­ture shows such a set-up.

The second con­cept is that the pur­pose of the clip is to hold the object (in that case the bil­let) in a posi­tion, which couldn’t be achie­ved by any other means. Some cle­ver minds alre­ady thought of the notion of atta­ching the clip to a piece of string, which in turn is fas­tened to the inside of the lid of a glass jar. So the pre­dic­tion bil­let could be dis­played com­ple­tely iso­la­ted, hin­ging inside the glass jar. This is a clas­si­cal set-up for Bob Ostin’s clip and makes for a con­vin­cing and attrac­tive dis­play in men­ta­lism, where opti­cal assets usually are rare.

Once I took a big­ger clip, pre­pared it the Ostin way and fixed it to a clip­board. This makes some sense and doesn’t ham­per the func­tion­a­lity of the swit­ching gim­mick. In that case, I had some other objects clip­ped into the clip, the dummy being the top one. The whole thing loo­ked as if all the artic­les I nee­ded were merely held tog­e­ther by a simple clipboard.

I am sure you know that ple­xi­glass board with the four bull­dog clips atta­ched. This is used to accom­plish the one-ahead-prin­ci­ple by tur­ning the board and ther­eby chan­ging the posi­ti­ons the clips. One (or more) Ostin clips could be fas­tened to it. I have never star­ted expe­ri­men­ting with this con­cept so far, but I can ima­gine there should be some possibilities.

In my upco­ming book ‘NOTAS’ I will explain a neat hand­ling for the switch. The whole bunch of objects is remo­ved from the clip and laid onto the table in one swee­ping move­ment. This way, the heat is com­ple­tely taken off the clip and focus is shifted in a natu­ral way towards the actual objects.

It is important to remem­ber that the other objects must have some importance in the rou­tine as well. So there could be a pre­dic­tion in form of a folded play­ing card, there could be writ­ten some­thing on the bills, or even the bill’s serial number(s) could play an active role in the routine.

Ano­ther idea would be to appar­ently intro­duce the folded bil­let into the clip in front of the audi­ence. This would hap­pen before the rou­tine starts. To accom­plish this, I crea­ted a low-tech solu­tion. There is a cat­gut loop fixed to the dummy bil­let. This could also be a thin, bla­cke­ned wire. When the dummy is inside the clip, the loop can be easily grab­bed and the dummy pul­led into position.

So you show ano­ther dummy onto which you have writ­ten the pre­dic­tion and pre­tend to place it into the clip, put­ting the dummy into posi­tion. You are ready to go. Obviously, depen­ding on the strength and visi­bi­lity of the cat­gut loop, this is only for stage shows and not for close-up. This is a nice way to con­s­truct a rou­tine using three bil­lets and working on the one-ahead-prin­ci­ple, mimi­cking the Hen Fetch ‘Men­tal Epic Slate’. In that case, colo­red bil­lets could be a fine and subtle addition.

Work out a rou­tine for yourself.

Pass it on!