An improvised technique for the HEADS or TAILS plot, or else, as it can be done with any flat object, like an index card or a piece of paper for instance with a different information on each side (that can be different than HEADS or TAILS, and allow a more captivating story than a binary game or a bet).
Effect (as perceived by the audience):
- "Please take a coin, toss it, and watch secretly which side is up"...
- "There is no way anybody here can know if you lie or tell the truth"...
- "Now, if you want, you can turn the coin over. You can do it covertly, as many times as you
want."
When the spectator is satisfied, you ask only one innocent question, and you correctly guess which side is up at the end. This effect can be repeated identically, with different questions to make it more nonbacktrackable.
1st edition 2016, 11 pages.
word count: 3009 which is equivalent to 12 standard pages of text
Reviewed by Sarin Suriyakoon
★★★★★ Date Added: Sunday 22 January, 2017Ostrakinda is a great effect. If you want to never read about "Which Hand" or "Head or Tail" before, this is a great starting point. I read this ebook today. You will see in the ebook it was revised multiple times. That means you will get the best explanation, patter, presentation and also "additional ideas". After I practice the patters, I will definitely use it with my friends via facebook video call.
Reviewed by Gerard Zitta
★★★★★ Date Added: Friday 29 July, 2016Thanks for your review. What you are reviewing is the first effect ("OSTRA"). The last effect ("OSTRAKINDA") has nothing to do with TH. It is more similar to "CHEAT HAND".
Thanks for pointing this out to me. I have now added a summary of OSTRAKINDA and hopefully clearer explanations...
PS: I don't know how to rate my comment (-: so I am instead rating yours!
Reviewed by Christian Fisanick (confirmed purchase)
★★★★★ Date Added: Wednesday 27 July, 2016"Which hand" routines are popular these days. Even the great Derren Brown does a which-hand performance Probably the best known--at least best selling--version is Mark Elsdon's Tequila Hustler. One way of doing which hand is heavily process driven, and Elsdon seems to have come up with an excellent way of hiding the process so that it doesn't look like something that you'd easily suspect. Ostrakinda really is Elsdon's approach as applied to Max Maven's positive/negative. In other words, you use Elsdon's process to determine whether the coin is heads or tails.
Being sort of an afficiando of all these which hand and positive/negative routines, I knew almost immediately that this is basically nothing more than substituting some verbiage in Elsdon's routine. But admittedly, I didn't think of it first, and it works perfectly. Is it worth $12 instead of Tequila Huster? (It is indeed less expensive.) Probably not. I think this might have been better as a variant included at the end of the Tequila Hustler book. If you don't have Tequilla Hustler, buy that ebook because it has a lot of theory, variants, and performance tips for this type of process. If you do have Tequilla Hustler and want to apply it to positive/negative, then Ostrakinda will do the trick. But after you read it, you'll probably agree with me that this would have been better as a variant rather than a stand-alone effect.
