On Wednesday night Derren Brown predicted all 6 of the UK Lotto numbers live on TV in the show Derren Brown’s How To Win The Lottery.
He got all 6 correct.
Or did he…
Derren is a brilliant entertainer, and worth seeing live on stage if ever you get the chance.
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Derren Brown – How To Win The Lottery?
A very clever trick absolutely, but it’s important to note that he DIDN’T PREDICT THE NUMBERS. In order to do that, he would need to show his numbers before the draw. He did not. His ‘prediction group’ were not allowed to see either the numbers that they wrote, nor the ‘averaged’ numbers, so they could easily have been switched. They were also relegated to a separate room for the trick. I really couldn’t see the point of tonight’s (Friday’s) show as it was all obviously a load of rubbish. I don’t know how he did it, I’m leaning towards a camera trick as he didn’t do it in front of a live audience.
I wonder how many ‘prediction groups’ are being set up across the country as I write???
Derren brown is an illusionist. Therefore he is giving the impression that he can predict the lottery, not that he can do it.
FIRSTLY:
If you know the numbers that are going to come out on the lottery, you definitely buy a ticket. even with all the money Brown will get paid for televising this stunt, it will not compare with the millions upon millions he will receive for winning the lotto jackpot. Why on earth would Channel 4 ban him from buying a ticket? he is using explanations that are initially feasible to trick the audience.
SECONDLY:
“Predictability in randomness”. Say this to yourself and it is clear it makes no sense. If something is random it is not predictable. By making the woman scared of the mouse in his first trick, he is making her more suggestible sub-consciously to steer her away from picking the 4.
THIRDLY:
The coin game. If you read up on basic mathematics, then you will know that your odds of getting HHH on 3 flips of a coin is 1/2×1/2×1/2=1/8. Your odds of getting this combination are exactly the same as that of HTH and of equal likelihood. So why did the red and blue team thing work? because if you look on the “coin page” of this site itself, it mentions that it will “work if you repeat it enough times.”. so this game was obviously played till red team won 9-1, and this section of the game was aired. or just repeated with different groups of people. remember we are dealing with a man who spent 11 hours flipping a coin in “the system” to get 10 heads in a row.
FOURTHLY:
“Wisdom of the crowds”. Just have a look at this and listen to how ridiculous it sounds. So if everybody guesses the weight of a bull, and we get an average, we’ll get its exact weight. not at all. Maybe something coincidentally close in 1906 when people generally knew how much a bull would roughly weigh, because FARMING WAS PREDOMINANT, even if that story is true.
FIFTHLY:
The 24 people. Remember what he said at the end of the 9.00pm show? That if he had “rigged the machine”, then THE 24 PEOPLE WOULD HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY USELESS. Ever seen the episode where he makes the students guess how many sweets are in the jar using an average? This stunt is but an expansion, and he knows the results of each draw before the crowd, but gets them to come to similar conclusions, similar to “The Gathering”, where 2 digits of “Charlies” phone number was “correctly predicted”.
THE ‘LIVE’ PREDICTION FIASCO:
Camera tricks and the rest of it. WHY ELSE WOULD HE BE HOLDING A SNOWFLAKE!!!????
FINALLY:
The End point. What is the point in having a 3rd option, where he explains how he “riggs the machine”. where he mentions a possibility of the 24 people being COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS and how the whole thing would have been a trick? He certainly does tell us how he did it in the program. But not directly.
Bring on the next event.
I figured the snow flake might have significance, but what significance ? What does that have to do with camera tricks ?
I figured it might have something to do with the belief that no two snow flakes are similar, but I’m not sure how….
Because snowflakes connotate freezing. Like you can freeze cameras. I figured that might be a possibility.
The whole 24 person group is simply a misdirection with the number calculator guy as a plant.
The two possibilities are either a camera trick or if that would be cheating then a simple mechanical switch. This could be achieved by directing the correct numbered balls through a tube using air pressure to the plinth in a similar way to how the lottery balls themselves are moved. These balls could arrive underneath the holder of the original balls and this holder then be rotated so that the new ones are now on top.
Another possible mechanical method could be to thermally print the numbers on the balls at the plinth from underneath.
The key answer is that Toby Mason was correct in response 3: a robot camera (using DykstraFlex technology) jiggled slightly (only panning, notice, in an empty studio with no witnesses – the SteadiCam operator would deserve a medal otherwise) to give the illusion of a hand-held camera being used while someone (hidden electronically) put the balls in the rack while we were watching. Think back, too, to when the group of 24 individuals that got four balls right in the right order had just one man come out to do the calculations “because he wasn’t very good at automatic writing”. On that occasion, the calculations were done after the results were known… he was an accomplice who just wrote down the answer needed for TV purposes! So the two deceptions perpetrated were (1) the calculating man was an accomplice (2) the fake “hand-held” camera convinced us no camera tricks were used (which they were).
It’s not that hard when you remember that Derren Brown’s job is an “illusionist”.
1. First, Derren didn’t predict the lottery numbers. He revealed the numbers AFTER the lottery numbers had been announced. If he could predict the numbers then why not announce them immediately BEFORE they are drawn? He essentially executed a now bog-standard magicians trick.
2. Second, the mathematical methods he described are utter nonsense. Yes, wisdom of crowds is useful for accurately predicting a bull’s weight, but lottery numbers are random -and they have no mathematical connection with the bull analogy whatsoever.
3. What the heck is ‘deep maths’? Maths is maths and if something isn’t maths then it isn’t maths. Actually, do you know what we call ‘deep maths’ that actually works? We call it ‘maths’. Misdirection or just blatently selling himself out to the gullable half of viewers? Me thinks the latter.
The Wednesday live Lotto draw was genuine and the 1sec delay was real, as I watched channel4 and BBC1 simultaneously with picture in picture feAture of my Sony Bravia TV.
The trick was definately a camera trick with the image vertically split and the left half frozen so the correct balls could be put in position.
Their are two ways the could have emulated the shaky live cameraman actions. Either as above with mechanical programmed jig or electronically as the image was processed and aired, thus 1 sec delay caused by digital encoding.
Simples x
I think I know how this trick was done. Firstly, you never saw Darren Brown’s numbered balls as he put them into the tube.
Then Darren rushed to the studio, unaccompanied by a TV crew. Then the next time you saw him he was in front of a TV, saying the National Lottery will be picked in a few moments. The balls for his selections were already on show and facing away.
In fact the lottery draw had already taken place before the camera went on him, in a supposed TV studio. Then all Darren had to do is to convince everyone he was predicting the winning lottery numbers.
If you watch a TV programme called Magic’s Greatest Secrets Finally Revealed, they show you something very similar, and tell you that the TV crews are always in on the trick.
Digger, the flaw in your conclusion is the fact that the draw WAS live and genuine as carried out by Camelot on BBC1. This is not in any doubt. I know foreign posters outside the UK might doubt this as they didn’t witness the actual timing but I can assure you the draw was a real live mid-week Lotto draw.