For the first year of serious performing, I opened every set with my best effect.
It made perfect sense to me. I was a strategy consultant. I had given hundreds of presentations. And every presentation framework I had ever studied said the same thing: lead with your strongest point. Hook them immediately. Grab their attention in the first thirty seconds or lose them forever.
So I took my most visually stunning piece — a transformation that produced an audible gasp from almost everyone who saw it — and I put it right at the top of the set. First thing. Boom. Immediate impact.
The audience loved it. They were hooked. They were mine from the first minute.
And then, slowly, over the remaining twenty-five minutes, I watched that energy leak away like water through a cracked glass.
The Descent Problem
Here is what happens when you open with your best material: everything that follows is a step down. The audience does not know it consciously. They are not sitting there thinking, “That first one was better.” But their emotional experience tells a different story. They peaked early. The highest point of their journey was the very first moment, and now every subsequent moment is subtly, slightly less impressive than the one that came before.
It is like starting a meal with dessert. The chocolate cake is extraordinary. But now the soup arrives, and it is just soup. The salad is just salad. The main course is fine but you have already had the most exciting thing on the menu. By the time the waiter asks if you would like another dessert, you are full — not of food, but of anticipation that was already spent.
I did not understand this until I read Scott Alexander’s approach to sequencing in his lecture notes on building a stand-up act. His framework is simple and devastating: your second-strongest piece opens the show, and your strongest piece closes it. Everything in between builds from good to better to best.
When I first encountered that idea, my consultant brain rebelled. Second-strongest as the opener? That means you are holding back your best material for twenty minutes while the audience waits? What if they tune out before you get there?
But that is the entire point. They will not tune out, because the show is escalating. Every piece is slightly more impressive, slightly more impossible, slightly more emotionally charged than the one before it. The audience does not need to be grabbed by the throat in the first thirty seconds. They need to be led on a journey that gets more compelling with every step.
The Index Card Exercise
The way I actually fixed my sequencing problem was embarrassingly low-tech.
I was in a hotel room in Linz, the night before a corporate event. I had been performing the same set for several months, and something was not working. The audience was always engaged at the beginning and politely appreciative at the end, but the energy curve was wrong. It started high and ended medium. I wanted it to start medium and end through the roof.
So I took a stack of index cards from my bag — I always carry them for consulting work — and I wrote the name of each effect in my set on a separate card. Seven effects. Seven cards.
Then I added two ratings to each card. On a scale of one to ten, how impossible does this effect appear to the audience? And on a separate scale of one to ten, how strong is the emotional impact — the laugh, the gasp, the connection?
The impossibility rating was about perception, not method. I was not rating the cleverness of the technique. I was rating how impossible the effect looked from the audience’s perspective. A card appearing in an impossible location might be a seven. A detailed prediction of a free choice might be a nine. A purely visual transformation might be an eight.
The emotional impact rating was about the visceral response. Some effects produce intellectual admiration — “That was clever.” Others produce a physical reaction — the gasp, the hand over the mouth, the involuntary step backward. The emotional rating captured that distinction.
Once I had both numbers on each card, I laid all seven cards on the hotel room desk and tried to arrange them in ascending order. Lowest combined score first, highest last.
The Revelation on the Desk
What I saw on that desk was humbling. My current running order had my highest-rated effect (impossibility: 9, emotional impact: 9) in the first position and my second-highest (impossibility: 8, emotional impact: 8) in the fourth position. The closing piece was a six and a seven. I was literally descending from a mountaintop to a valley over the course of my set.
When I rearranged the cards into ascending order, the new sequence looked almost nothing like my current one. The piece I had been opening with moved to the closing position. The piece I had been closing with — a pleasant but not spectacular routine — moved to the second position. And the middle filled in with a smooth escalation from solid to strong to devastating.
But here was the thing that surprised me most: the new order also told a better story. The ascending impossibility created a natural narrative arc. The first couple of pieces established that I was competent and engaging. The middle pieces raised the stakes — “Wait, that is actually impressive.” And the closer produced the reaction I had been chasing all along — “How is that even possible?”
The effects themselves did not change. Not one word of patter was different. Not one method was altered. The only thing that changed was the order. And the order changed everything.
The Dinner Course Analogy
I keep coming back to the meal analogy because it maps so perfectly onto show structure.
A great dinner has a specific progression. The appetizer is light and interesting — it whets the appetite without filling you up. It says, “Something good is coming.” The soup or salad course is a step up — more substance, more flavor, but still building toward the main event. The main course is the centerpiece — the dish the entire meal has been leading toward. And dessert is the final indulgence, the sweet note that sends you home satisfied.
No chef serves the courses in random order. No chef brings out the filet mignon first and the breadsticks last. The progression exists because the human experience of eating — like the human experience of being entertained — is shaped by escalation. Each course is more satisfying than the last, and the satisfaction of the main course is intensified by the courses that preceded it.
My old set was dessert, appetizer, main course, soup, breadsticks. No wonder the audience was confused about when to be most impressed.
The Second-Strongest Opener
Alexander’s specific recommendation — that the opener should be your second-strongest piece — deserves its own discussion, because it is counterintuitive but brilliant.
The opener has a specific job. It needs to establish credibility immediately. The audience is sizing you up in those first two minutes. They are deciding whether you are worth their attention. The opener needs to answer that question definitively: yes, this person is the real deal. Pay attention.
Your second-strongest piece is perfect for this job precisely because it is strong enough to command respect but not so strong that it overshadows everything that follows. It says, “I can do this,” without saying, “This is the best I can do.”
Think about it from the audience’s perspective. If the opener is amazing, they think, “Wow, great start.” But if the second piece is slightly less amazing, they start to wonder whether the show is declining. If the opener is very good but not the best, and the second piece is slightly better, and the third piece is better still — now the audience is on a rising trajectory. They are thinking, “This keeps getting better. How good is it going to get?”
That question — “How good is it going to get?” — is the most powerful thought an audience can have during your show. It means they are leaning forward. It means they are anticipating. It means the reservoir is filling.
What I Got Wrong About Hooks
My business background had drilled into me the importance of the hook. Grab them in the first thirty seconds. Lead with your value proposition. Do not bury the lede.
And that advice is correct — for presentations. When you are pitching a client or delivering a quarterly review, you are competing with email, with phones, with a hundred other demands on attention. You need to justify the audience’s time investment immediately.
But a magic show is not a business presentation. The audience at a magic show has already committed. They are in the room. They have cleared their schedule. They are ready to be entertained. You do not need to convince them to pay attention — you need to reward their attention with an experience that builds and builds and builds until the payoff is extraordinary.
The hook mentality leads performers to front-load their sets with spectacle. “If I don’t blow their minds in the first minute, I’ve lost them.” But this is almost never true. What you lose an audience to is not a slow start — it is a declining trajectory. A show that starts at an eight and ends at a six will lose the room. A show that starts at a six and ends at a ten will have them on their feet.
I had to unlearn one of the deepest habits of my professional life to understand this. The consultant in me wanted to lead with the best. The performer in me had to learn to save the best for last.
The Resequenced Set in Action
The morning after the index card exercise in Linz, I performed the resequenced set for the first time. I was nervous. The opener was a piece I had never opened with — a solid effect, engaging, but not my showstopper. Part of me was terrified that the audience would think I was ordinary.
They did not think I was ordinary. They thought I was interesting. Which, it turns out, is a much better starting position than impressive. Interesting makes people lean forward. Impressive makes people lean back and evaluate.
The second piece was stronger, and I could feel the room shift. People looked at each other. The energy ticked up. By the third piece, there was a palpable sense of escalation in the room — this unspoken awareness that the show was building toward something.
The middle section was smooth, each piece a half-step up from the last. Not a dramatic leap — just a steady, almost imperceptible climb. The audience was not aware they were on a ramp. They just felt increasingly engaged, increasingly invested, increasingly curious about what was coming next.
And then the closer hit.
The closer was the same effect I had been opening with for a year. The same words, the same method, the same reveal. But placed at the end of an ascending sequence — after twenty-five minutes of escalating impossibility and emotional investment — the reaction was almost unrecognizable. The audience had been building toward this moment without knowing it. Every preceding piece had raised their expectations by a fraction, and now those expectations converged on this single point. The reveal was not just a strong effect. It was the culmination of a journey.
The applause was different. Not polite, not appreciative. Explosive. The kind that comes from an audience that has been building pressure for half an hour and finally has permission to release it.
Same effects. Same performer. Different order. Completely different show.
The Ongoing Calibration
I still use the index card method, though now it lives in a spreadsheet on my laptop. Every time I add a new piece to my repertoire or retire an old one, I re-rate and re-sequence. The ratings themselves evolve — what felt like a nine when I first developed it might settle into a seven as I add stronger material to the set.
The key insight is that sequencing is not a one-time exercise. It is an ongoing calibration. As your material changes, as your performance of each piece improves or plateaus, as you learn what audiences respond to most strongly, the optimal sequence shifts. What was the right order six months ago may not be the right order today.
And sometimes the resequencing reveals that a piece no longer belongs in the set at all. If everything else has improved and one effect still sits at a five, it is dragging the trajectory down. Better to remove it entirely and tighten the ascent than to keep it for sentimental reasons and create a dip in the escalation.
This is ruthless thinking. It is the kind of thinking that comes naturally in consulting — cut what is not performing, double down on what is. But it took me years to apply it to my magic, because the emotional attachment to material is so much stronger than the emotional attachment to a PowerPoint slide.
The Universal Principle
Every communicator sequences. Every presenter, every teacher, every comedian, every writer decides what comes first and what comes last and what goes in the middle. Most make these decisions by habit or instinct. Few make them with the deliberate understanding that sequence determines emotional trajectory, and emotional trajectory determines impact.
Start good. Get better. End with the best you have. Let each moment build on the last. Let the audience feel the escalation even when they cannot name it.
And save your best for last. Always last. Because the final moment is what they carry out the door, and what they carry out the door is the only thing that matters.