I have in the past been impressed with the ability of people like Derren Brown to present a losing ticket to a bookmaker and get a payout. A little while ago, I had an experience that gave be some insight into how this works. I was rushing to get a train at Charing Cross, and when I got there I discovered that the station was closed and that the train was starting from London Bridge instead. A sign said that tickets would be valid on the underground between the two stations, so I rushed to the tube station. When I got there, I tried by train ticket in the barrier and it didn’t work, and so I showed it, with some urgency, to the guard at the barrier, who looked strangely at the ticket. I said “don’t you know that the station is closed; I need to get through” and the guard opened the barrier for me. <\/p>\n
When I looked at the ticket a few second later it was an old ticket from Nottingham to Edinburgh.<\/p>\n
Somehow, my guileless confidence in the ticket had worked. I think the skill of someone like Derren Brown is to be able to fake this even when knowing that the ticket is irrelevant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have in the past been impressed with the ability of people like Derren Brown to present a losing ticket to a bookmaker and get a payout. A little while ago, I had an experience that gave be some insight into how this works. I was rushing to get a train at Charing Cross, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[42,48],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}