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!