I was sitting in a bar in Linz with a friend who does not do magic. He is a software engineer, sharp guy, good listener. We had been talking about work, about travel, the usual stuff that fills the first beer. Somewhere in the second beer, he asked me what I was working on — magic-wise — and I started describing an effect I had been rehearsing.
“Okay, so there is a deck of cards, and the spectator picks one, and then they put it back, and then I deal the cards into four piles, and each pile represents a different suit, and the spectator eliminates piles one at a time, and the last pile has their card on top — but also, the other three piles each have four of a kind, which proves that the deck was arranged in a specific way that should have made it impossible for their card to end up where it did, because…”
He held up his hand.
“I have no idea what you just said.”
I stared at him. I had been excited about this effect. I had been practicing it for weeks. The method was clever, the construction was elegant, and the payoff — if you understood all the conditions — was genuinely surprising. But listening to myself try to explain it to a normal person, I heard what he heard: a wall of procedural noise with no clear moment of impossibility.
Compare that to another effect I perform. A spectator thinks of a card. Just thinks of one. I name the card they are thinking of.
That is the entire description. One sentence. Complete clarity. Instant understanding of why it is impossible. No conditions, no qualifiers, no setup to explain.
My friend in Linz leaned forward when I described that one. “Wait. You can actually do that? How?” That was the reaction I had been looking for with the four-pile effect and never getting.
The Two-Sentence Filter
Darwin Ortiz articulates this principle in Strong Magic with characteristic bluntness: if you cannot describe the effect in one or two sentences, it is too complicated for a lay audience.
Not the method. The effect. What the audience actually sees.
This distinction matters enormously. Methods can be as complex as they need to be — the audience never sees them. But the effect, the thing the audience perceives and reacts to, must be instantly comprehensible. If it takes a paragraph to explain what happened, the audience will not understand what happened while it is happening. And an audience that does not understand what happened cannot be astonished by it.
When I first encountered this filter, I thought it was too strict. Surely some great effects are complex. Surely audiences can follow multi-phase routines with conditions and callbacks. Surely the art of magic is more sophisticated than “a card changes in their hand.”
I was wrong. Not about the existence of complex effects that work — those exist. But about why they work. The great complex routines succeed not because the audience tracks every condition, but because each individual phase is clear and simple. The complexity is in the structure, not in any single moment. At each point in the routine, what just happened is understandable in one sentence.
Testing My Repertoire
After reading that, I sat down in my hotel room in Graz — I was there for a three-day consulting engagement — and made a list of every effect in my working repertoire. Twelve pieces at the time. Next to each one, I wrote a one-or-two-sentence description of what the audience sees.
Some were easy:
“A spectator selects a card and it appears in an impossible location.”
“The performer predicts a word the spectator will choose from a book.”
“A coin vanishes from the performer’s hand and appears under a cup the spectator has been holding.”
Clear. Direct. One sentence each. Instant understanding of the impossibility.
Others were… not easy:
“The spectator picks a card, and then the performer deals the deck into groups, and the spectator makes choices that seem to eliminate their card, but at the end their card is the only one that survived the elimination process, and also the other cards form a pattern that…”
I stopped writing. I was already at two sentences and had not reached the payoff.
Another one: “The performer shows four cards, and the spectator picks one, and the other three change to match the selection, except the selection itself changes to a different card, which was predicted on a piece of paper that was in the spectator’s pocket…”
I could feel the confusion accumulating with every clause. Each individual step made sense, but the cumulative effect was noise. By the time I reached the climax, the audience would have long since stopped tracking the conditions that made the climax meaningful.
Of my twelve effects, seven passed the two-sentence filter cleanly. Three were borderline — complex but potentially salvageable with restructuring. Two were hopeless. No amount of presentation refinement could make them clear to a lay audience because the fundamental effect structure was too convoluted.
I cut the two hopeless effects immediately. Not because the methods were bad — the methods were fine. But because the effects they produced were unclear, and unclear effects produce unclear reactions. Which is to say, no reactions at all.
Why Complexity Creeps In
Here is the thing: no one sets out to create a confusing effect. Complexity creeps in gradually, and it creeps in for understandable reasons.
The first reason is method requirements. Some methods need conditions. They need the audience to make choices, or cards to be in certain positions, or specific procedures to be followed. The performer builds these requirements into the presentation because the method demands them. Each individual requirement seems small. “Just pick a pile.” “Now eliminate one.” “Remember which card was yours.” But they accumulate, and the audience’s cognitive load increases with each one.
The second reason is the desire to be impressive. A single transformation feels like a small effect. So you add a phase. Then another. Then a kicker ending. Each addition seems to make the effect stronger because each addition makes the method more complex and the result more technically impressive. But technical impressiveness is a magician metric. The audience does not score for complexity. The audience scores for clarity of impossibility.
The third reason is the most insidious: we confuse our own excitement about the method with the audience’s potential excitement about the effect. I loved that four-pile dealing effect because the method was mathematically beautiful. Every time I worked through it, I marveled at the construction. But my marvel was directed at something the audience would never see. I was marveling at the architecture of a building while the audience was just looking at the facade. And the facade was a mess.
The Translation Problem
Here is a useful way to think about it. Every effect involves a translation from the performer’s experience to the audience’s experience. The performer knows the method, the setup, the conditions, the secret moves, the mathematical principles, all of it. The audience sees the effect: the visible result of all that invisible work.
The two-sentence filter is really a translation quality test. If the effect translates cleanly into one or two sentences, the audience will receive it cleanly. The translation is faithful. What you intended them to experience is what they actually experience.
If the effect requires a paragraph to describe, the translation is lossy. Information is being lost or garbled in the transfer. The audience receives a degraded version of what you intended. They get some of it, maybe, but the full picture is muddied.
In my consulting work, I deal with this exact problem constantly. Companies with brilliant strategies that cannot be explained simply. Products with genuine advantages that take ten minutes to articulate. In business, we call this a “messaging problem,” and the solution is always the same: if you cannot say it simply, you have not thought about it clearly enough.
The same applies to magic. If you cannot describe the effect simply, the effect is not clear enough. That is not a presentation problem. That is a design problem.
What “Simple” Does Not Mean
I want to be precise here, because there is a common misunderstanding. Simple does not mean easy. Simple does not mean childish. Simple does not mean the effect lacks depth or sophistication.
A spectator thinks of any card in the deck. The performer names it. That effect is simple — one sentence — but it is not easy to achieve, and it is not childish. It is, in many ways, one of the most powerful effects in all of mentalism. The simplicity of the description is what gives it power. Everyone instantly understands what happened. Everyone instantly recognizes why it should be impossible. No one needs to think about conditions or track procedures.
Conversely, an effect where the spectator picks a card, and then four aces appear, and then the aces transform into the four cards surrounding the selection, and then the deck is shown to be in new deck order except for the selection which is now signed — that is complex. And it might be technically brilliant. And other magicians might love it. But a layperson, watching this for the first time, is likely to be more confused than astonished.
The best magic looks simple from the outside and is complex on the inside. The worst magic looks complex from the outside regardless of what is happening on the inside.
How I Use the Filter Now
These days, the two-sentence test is the first filter I apply to any new effect I am considering. Before I think about method, before I think about presentation, before I think about how it fits into my set, I ask: can I describe what the audience sees in one or two sentences?
If yes, the effect passes the first gate. It might still fail other tests — is it emotionally engaging? Does it fit my character? Can I perform it in my typical settings? — but at least it clears the baseline of clarity.
If no, I either simplify the effect until it passes, or I drop it entirely. There is no amount of presentation skill that can rescue a fundamentally unclear effect. You cannot polish confusion into clarity. You can only restructure it.
I have also started using this filter retroactively. Every few months, I go through my repertoire and re-describe each effect. If the description is getting longer — if I am adding qualifiers I do not remember from last time — that is a warning sign. It means I have been adding complexity during performance, trying to solve audience confusion with more explanation rather than less. The fix is always the same: strip it back. Get back to one or two sentences.
The Linz Principle
I think of this as the Linz Principle, after that conversation with my friend. If you cannot describe the effect to someone over a beer and have them immediately understand what happened and why it is amazing, the effect is too complicated.
Not too complicated for you. Too complicated for them.
And “them” is who the performance is for.
My friend in Linz could not follow the four-pile dealing effect even as a description over drinks, in a relaxed setting, with no time pressure. Imagine a corporate audience, slightly distracted, drinks in hand, conversations competing for their attention, seeing that effect performed live with no opportunity to rewind or ask clarifying questions. They would have no chance.
But name the card someone is thinking of? He understood that instantly. He reacted to the description alone. Before I even performed it. Because the impossibility was self-evident.
That is what clarity buys you. It buys a reaction that does not require the audience to work for it. It buys immediate comprehension of the impossible. It buys the gasp before the analysis, the astonishment before the confusion.
I still love complex methods. I still admire elegant constructions and mathematical principles and clever procedural sequences. I still study them, learn them, and appreciate them as a student of the art. But I no longer confuse my appreciation of the architecture with the audience’s experience of the building.
The audience sees the facade. Make it one sentence. Two at most. That is enough. That is everything.