During last night’s hour-long How To Win the Lottery broadcast, Brown who always says he gets his results using a combination of “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” took the chance to show other illusions inferring they had a bearing on the lottery trick.
But in the end all Brown revealed was that Wednesday’s illusion was just that -- a trick -- leaving viewers who felt shortchanged to complain bitterly on message boards.
“He insults our intelligence with this nonsense,” was one response.
“So what was the point of the hour of TV? To mock his audience?” was another. It added further fuel to the theory that Brown’s feat was the result of mere camera trick -- with split screen technology one of the most likely explanations put forward.
On the show he said he was partly inspired by a traditional “country fair” technique to accurately predict the result and suggested he had simply worked out the correct numbers by asking a group of 24 people to guess them.
He said he told the group to free their thoughts of winning and asked them to write down numbers for each of the six balls. He then added up all the numbers of the balls and divided the figures by 24 -- taking his inspiration from the Wisdom of Crowds Theory which argues that decisions made by many are better than those by individuals.
But some believe this, as well as the show, was just more Brown misdirection.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article