Ever since I first ran across Leo Boudreau's books, I've been a big fan of his innovative use of binary principles in magic. In fact, my first mention of his work on this blog was in my 2nd post!

Over at the Magic Cafe, Leo has recently posted some more of his incredible work, and for free! Well, they're free assuming you're a member of the Magic Cafe, and have written 50 relevant posts, as determined by their standards.

The first routine really should have been included in my original Free tricks from Leo Boudreau post, but was unfortunately overlooked. It's called Total Audience Participation and, appropriately for our first Boudreau effect, it's an opener for a mentalism show.

You introduce a box, sealed with rubber bands, and propose a test of the entire audience's intuition. You have everyone in the audience stand up, and ask everyone to think of an object. Gradually, you describe which qualities the item in the box lacks, and ask people who are thinking of things with those qualities to sit down. After these various qualities are eliminated, there will still probably be several people standing. You take a quick poll of the items of which they're thinking, and walk up to one of the people, asking them their name and finding why they chose the particular object they did. They are asked to open the box, where they find not only the thought-of object, but a slip of paper with their name on it, as well!

Routines that involve the whole audience, especially openers, can prove very powerful, as performers who use Lior's Mobile Opener can attest. Nobody feels left out, and you can easily set your theme and a your standards of audience control immediately.

Moving up to more recent work, we find the routine Intuition: My Favorite Card Trick. In this routine, a spectator cuts and shuffles a deck of cards. They are then asked to name any card in the deck as the focus of an experiment of intuition. Groups of cards are eliminated in various random ways (no equivoque!), and then individual cards, as the deck gets smaller. Finally, one card remains, and it proves to be the very same card named earlier by the spectator!

My favorite of the new effects, however, I've saved for last. As it happens, it intersects perfectly with the recent uptick in the number of poetry-related posts here on Grey Matters. The post itself is titled The Raven & The Beatle Decoded, but I've nicknamed it Poems II, relating it to his earlier poem-related routine.

In the new routine, you have 4 spectator each choose consecutive words from a poem or song lyric. You then walk them through mentally spelling their chosen words. The spelling is done mentally, so that they don't communicate how many letters their chosen word has. Once they're done mentally spelling their chosen words, you can immediately name all 4 chosen words!

This is a very clean mentalism routine, as the only prop required is a business card with the line from the poem or song lyric on it. This trick employs unaltered poems or unaltered song lyrics, similar to the way Max Maven's Autome uses unaltered books. Also like Autome, there's some work employed in finding pieces with the particular required qualities, but the result of the effort will definitely be worth it when you receive your audience reaction.

Because so many people find Leo Boudreau's tricks via my Free tricks from Leo Boudreau post, I will be updating that post each time I find new routines of his. You'll probably want to keep that post bookmarked for future reference. If you're able to access these posts, I hope you enjoy these amazing routines!