Three seconds.
That is how long the audience gives you. Three seconds from the moment you walk on stage to the moment they decide — consciously or not — whether you are worth watching. Whether this is going to be good. Whether they should put down their phones, stop whispering to their neighbor, and actually pay attention.
Three seconds. And in my first year of performing, I wasted those three seconds every single time.
The Seven-Minute Opener
I have already mentioned in the previous post that my original opener was a disaster. Let me tell you just how bad it was.
The effect itself was good. A mentalism piece that, when performed correctly, produced genuine astonishment. People would look at each other with that wide-eyed “Did you see that?” expression that every performer lives for. The problem was not the effect. The problem was its position.
I opened with it because it was my second-strongest piece. I had read somewhere — or maybe just assumed — that you open with your second-best and close with your best. That logic seems sound if you are thinking about effect strength in isolation. It is terrible if you are thinking about what the opener actually needs to accomplish.
Here is what my seven-minute opening mentalism piece required from the audience: they needed to listen carefully to my instructions. They needed to trust that I was not planting information. They needed to follow a sequence of decisions. They needed to concentrate. And they needed to do all of this before they had any reason to believe that the payoff would be worth their investment.
Imagine walking into a restaurant, sitting down, and the waiter immediately asking you to solve a puzzle before you can see the menu. You might do it if you trusted the restaurant. But you just walked in. You do not trust this place yet. You do not even know if the food is good.
That was my opener. A seven-minute puzzle for people who had no reason to care.
The Night It Fell Apart
The moment I truly understood the problem was a corporate event in Linz. About sixty people at an annual company party. Post-dinner. The energy was social — people had been drinking, chatting, relaxing. They were not primed for concentration.
I walked out, introduced myself, and launched into my mentalism opener. Within ninety seconds, I could feel the room slipping. Not hostility — worse. Indifference. Side conversations started back up. A few people checked their phones. The front row was polite but not engaged. They were giving me the courtesy of facing forward while their attention was somewhere else entirely.
I pushed through. I had rehearsed this opening dozens of times. The effect was reliable. If I could just get them to the payoff, they would be won over. I was certain of it.
And I was right, technically. When the reveal came — seven minutes in — the people who were still paying attention reacted strongly. The problem was that only about half the room was still paying attention. The other half had mentally checked out during the long setup and had not checked back in for the climax. They applauded politely because the people around them were applauding, not because they had experienced anything.
I had lost half the audience before my show even started. And spending the remaining twenty-three minutes trying to win them back was one of the most exhausting and demoralizing experiences of my performing life.
What the Opener Actually Does
When I read Scott Alexander’s description of the opener in Standing Up On Stage, the precision of his framework hit me like cold water.
The opener is short. Two to three minutes, maximum. It is visual. It is high energy. And its purpose is singular: establish credibility. That is all. The opener does not need to be your most impressive piece. It does not need to be your cleverest. It does not need to demonstrate the full range of your abilities. It needs to do one thing: tell the audience, in the fastest and most undeniable way possible, that you are the real deal. That their attention is in good hands. That whatever comes next will be worth watching.
Hit them between the eyes. That is the image. Not a gentle introduction. Not a slow handshake. A punch. Fast, clean, undeniable. And then move on.
This reframing changed everything for me because it changed what I was selecting for. I had been choosing my opener based on effect strength — which piece is second-most impressive? The correct criterion is efficiency — which piece establishes credibility in the least amount of time with the least audience investment?
Those are very different questions, and they produce very different answers.
The Three-Second Window
The three-second rule is not an exaggeration. Research on first impressions — and I have read enough of it in my consulting work to know this is well-documented — shows that people form durable judgments about credibility, competence, and likability within the first few seconds of an encounter. These judgments are not final, but they are sticky. They create a lens through which everything that follows is interpreted.
If the first three seconds say “this person is confident, energized, and in control,” the audience gives you the benefit of the doubt for the next thirty minutes. If those first seconds say “uncertain, apologetic, or underwhelming,” you are fighting uphill the entire time — spending energy on credibility that should be spent on connection.
This is why the opener needs to be visual and immediate. Words take time to land. Explanations require attention. But a visual hit — something the audience can see and process without needing to follow a complex procedure — that lands in three seconds. It bypasses the analytical brain and goes straight to the experiential one.
That response is the foundation everything else is built on.
Building the New Opener
After the Linz disaster, I went back to my material and looked at it through the lens of efficiency rather than impressiveness.
I needed something visual. Something that did not require audience participation or complex setup. Something that created an undeniable moment of impossibility in under three minutes. Something that worked in the first three seconds — not the effect itself, but my entrance, my energy, the way I took the stage.
What I found was a piece I had been using as a throwaway — a quick visual effect I sometimes did in close-up situations to break the ice. It was not my strongest material by any measure. But it was fast, it was visual, it was clean, and it produced a clear, immediate audience response. People gasped. People smiled. People leaned in.
I restructured it for stage. Added a bit of theatrical framing. Adjusted the timing. Made it the first thing the audience saw after I walked out.
The difference was immediate and dramatic. At my next corporate show — a technology conference in Vienna, about a hundred people — I opened with the new piece. Two minutes. Purely visual. No audience participation required. The room locked in. Not because the effect was my best work, but because it answered the audience’s unconscious question — “Is this person worth my attention?” — with an immediate and definitive yes.
And here is the critical insight: once that question was answered, everything after it worked better. My personality piece, which followed the opener, landed with more warmth because the audience was already receptive. My middle section, which included audience participation, got more willing volunteers because the audience trusted me. Even my closer — the same closer that had landed as merely “really good” in those early shows — hit with full force because the audience had been with me from the first moment.
The opener did not just start the show. It set the conditions for the entire show.
The Second-Strongest Piece Myth
I want to address something that confused me for a long time: the idea that the opener should be your second-strongest piece.
This advice circulates widely in magic, and it is not wrong exactly, but it is misleading. Most performers — myself included, for too long — interpret “strength” as “how impressive the effect is in absolute terms.” But strength in the context of an opener means something different. A strong opener is the most efficient credibility-builder. An elaborate, deeply impossible mentalism routine might be your most impressive effect overall, but if it requires seven minutes and focused cooperation, it is a terrible opener.
It is like the difference between a strong chess opening and a strong endgame. A strong opening move is not the most powerful piece on the board — it is the move that establishes the best position for everything that follows. Sometimes that means advancing a pawn, not launching your queen.
My new opener is not my most impressive piece. But it is the piece that most efficiently answers the audience’s opening question, and that makes it the strongest possible choice for the opening slot.
What My Current Opener Feels Like
I will not describe the effect itself — that crosses a line I am committed to respecting. But I can describe the experience from the audience’s side, because that is what matters.
Here is what happens: I walk out. The audience sees someone who is energized, confident, comfortable. Within the first fifteen seconds, something visual happens. Something that should not be possible. There is no long setup, no explanation, no “I need a volunteer” — just an immediate, visible impossibility.
The audience reacts. A collective intake of breath. Some laughter. A few people turning to the person next to them with that look. And within that reaction, something shifts in the room. The social energy that existed before I walked on — the chatting, the phone-checking, the mild skepticism of “here comes the entertainment” — transforms into attention. Real attention. The kind where people put their drinks down and face forward.
That shift takes about thirty seconds. The rest of the opener builds on it — one more visual moment, a quick line that gets a laugh, and then a clean transition into the personality piece. Two and a half minutes total. By the time I move into the second section, the audience is mine. Not because I have shown them my best work, but because I have shown them that my best work is worth waiting for.
The Opener as Promise
The deepest lesson I have learned about openers is that they are not demonstrations. They are promises. The opener says: “This is the caliber of what you are going to experience. And it gets better from here.”
That promise is why the opener should not be your strongest piece. If you open with your absolute best, the implicit promise is: “This is as good as it gets. Everything else will be less than this.” That is a terrible promise. The audience spends the rest of the show waiting for something that never comes, because it already happened.
But if you open with something strong, fast, and undeniable — something that clearly represents skill and authority but is not your peak — the implicit promise becomes: “This is just the beginning. Imagine what is coming.” And the audience spends the rest of the show anticipating, leaning forward, curious about what comes next.
The opener is the first click-click-click of the roller coaster. It does not need to be the drop. It needs to start the climb.
One Last Thing
There is a practical benefit to having a short, efficient opener that I did not appreciate until I had been using one for a while: it is forgiving. If the room is cold, if the energy is low, if the audience is distracted — a two-minute opener gives you very little time to lose them. You are in and out before the room has time to decide they are not interested. By the time their analytical brain catches up to what just happened, you are already into the personality piece, and the analytical brain has to contend with the fact that it just saw something impossible.
A seven-minute opener gives a cold room seven minutes to stay cold. A two-minute opener gives a cold room two minutes, and by then it is warm.
Efficiency is not just good showmanship. It is good risk management. And risk management is something this consultant turned magician understands in his bones.