Yes, the methods of mental feats are very important step in mastering them, which is why I spend so much time on them.

However, once you have the method down, how you bring that ability to an audience in an entertaining way? In today's post, we'll show you a few performers who take these feats to that all-important next level.

Our first performer is Gerry McCambridge, doing the Knight's Tour in his TV show, The Mentalist. Note the importance he pays not only to the feat itself, but with making sure that everyone understands the challenge and the difficulty.



With chess, people already have a preconceived notion of intelligence and difficulty being involved. What about if you're doing a magic square, a feat which boils down to putting down numbers, then repeatedly adding them up? If you can make that entertaining, that's impressive. If you can bring an audience to a standing ovation with it, you know you've really got something!



We'll wrap this post up with a rare US TV appearance late Shakuntala Devi. She was a woman from India known for her mental calculation skills. In Ricky Jay's TV special, Learned Pigs And Fireproof Women, she does root extractions in an extraordinarily fast and impressive manner. For you poker fans, that young man on the computer is probably better known to you as Chris “Jesus” Ferguson.



The whole point of this post, of course, is not to get you to copy these performances directly, but to inspire you to think of what unique and different qualities you can bring to your own performances.