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!