Mat Franco

Snowman Trick

Revealed

In this trick, which was performed in season 9 of America's Got Talent, Mat Franco amazes everyone with a mind-blowing prediction.

First, he presents a gift box, which is located at the center of the stage. He doesn't reveal what is inside – that comes later.

He then tells the judges they are going to build a snowman. He presents a pad with many different snowmen drawings. The pad can be manipulated to construct many different snowmen with different hats, faces, arms, legs clothes etc.

He then lets the judges construct a unique snowman. Heidi chooses the bottom part of the snowman, Mel B picks the middle section, and Howie selects the head. This produces a unique snowman, one of the countless different combinations which could be constructed with the help of Mat's pad.

He then invites Simon on the stage and asks him to open the box with the present. When Simon opens the box he is shocked to find a real snowman, with exactly the same characteristics they just selected!

But that is not all. He then asks the entire audience to reach under their seats. Everyone in the audience has a Christmas card under their chair. And what is on the Christmas card? You guessed it – it's the same snowman!

How does he do it? Watch the trick first and then read the explanation below.

 

Explanation:

So, how did he do it? Our reader Jeffery Winkler sent us an explanation of this trick:

"The way this trick is done is that first he showed them a pad of paper where each picture of a snowman was different. Then he switched it with a different second pad of paper, where the top picture was the same as the top picture on the first pad, but aside from that, every other picture of every single page was the exact same pictures of the exact same snowman.

Notice that when he's flipping through it, asking the judge to pick a page, he is careful to only show the lower left hand corner so you could not see the pictures. Since every page had the exact same picture of the same snowman, it did not matter which page the judges selected. Therefore, he knew ahead of time which snowman they would choose, so he could simply arrange ahead of time to put representations of that same snowman anywhere he wanted."